FSDG Airports Dynamic Light Performance

[ProfessorMadman]

Hi FSDG Team,

I just completed a 48 hour marathon reinstalling my OS and doing a fresh P3D 4.4 installation. I have installed all of my sceneries and the performance in the sim is fantastic! However, I find that with FSDG sceneries the dynamic lighting is very intensive vs other high end developer 3rd party addon airports that employ dynamic lighting. So I've created some comparison screenshots with FPS metrics. I am running Windows 10 Pro on a 5820K with X99 chipset, 32GB DDR4 3000Mhz RAM and a Strix GTX 980Ti.

Using 2560 x 1440 resolution in full screen mode. I am using SSAA x2. I used the PMDG 77W as the aircraft and changed to various airports by switching to day and night for this test. I kept the same settings, viewing angle and panel states throughout.

You can find a gallery of the screenshots and my settings here: https://imgur.com/a/k1XluoP

Here are the results:

FMEE
Day: 106 FPS
Night: 18 FPS

FIMP:
Day: 118 FPS
Night 9 FPS

FSIA:
Day: 92 FPS
Night 70 FPS

FMCZ:
Day: 122 FPS
Night: 33 FPS

GOBD:
Day: 142 FPS
Night: 18 FPS

HESH:
Day: 118 FPS
Night: 30 FPS

T2G EDDM:
Day: 75 FPS
Night: 58 FPS

FT CYYZ:
Day: 55 FPS
Night: 39 FPS

T2G LFPG:
Day: 74 FPS
Night: 43 FPS

FB KSFO:
Day: 64 FPS
Night: 40 FPS

You can see that other developer sceneries have great frame rates at night with DL enabled. I used Taxi2Gate EDDM and LFPG, FlyTampa CYYZ and FlightBeam's KSFO to compare. Even in very taxing sceneries (FlyTampa CYYZ, for example) the FPS remains high (above 30FPS) at the gate with dynamic lighting enabled.

The worst culprits of the ones I tested are FMEE, FIMP and GOBD. FSIA has great performance compared to the rest of the FSDG sceneries I tested. At FIMP for example the difference between night and day is staggering, where I get 118 FPS at the gate in daytime and 9 FPS at night.

This is not a jab at you guys, I just want to point out that there is objectively a massive handicap with DL in your sceneries compared to other devs. I hope you guys can look into the low FPS with your dynamic light implementation and find some improvements.

Cheers
Daniel

[horst18519]

Thanks for the detailed feedback, Daniel. We're looking into this.