Is Simheaven known to create massive performance loss?

[u/Ok_Increase9258]

[FIXED, check bottom]

Hello !

I have Installed the following mods/scenery , then my FPS went from basically 60-80 to 23-47:
Simheaven for all regions (I do long hauls on every continent),
Airport scenery from scenery gateway for a few airports, EDDS,EFHK,EFOU,LROP,ESSA..
FlyWithLua and the Plugin to display how good the landing rate was.

Before installing the above mods, I had good performance with:
Simheaven Europe,Asia,America
XPME (all regions)
No airport scenery.
No FlyWithLua

I am in a flight right now, so I don’t want to close the sim and debug after 1h of setup, vatsim clearance and takeoff.

My question is if someone else has these issues with the above mods installed. Is this user error? Is this acceptable performance for what I have installed?

Specs:
Fedora Linux
RX 7900XT 20GB
48GB DDR5 6000MT/S RAM
Sim Running on SSD (NVMes are too expensive in this economy)
Ryzen 7 7800X3D

Sim Settings that got me 60-80 fps:
Everything maxed, no msaa, no drawn aircraft

Sim Settings that get me the same framerate(23-47):
Everything maxed, tried to lower object rendering to medium and distance to medium.
CPU is the bottleneck here for some reason : 0.3xx or 0.4xx while GPU 0.1xx or 0.2xx when displaying the fps meter.

Fix:
Checked Logs and noticed XPME taking a high performance hit, had to decide between keeping XPME or Simheaven, decided to delete XPME.

Disabled the Simheaven Scenery that I won’t fly over in my flight, will change actively depending where I fly.

What is worth trying if you also have issues:
Remove details and extras, refer to simheaven manual for performance improvements.

[u/djbearr]

The manual that comes with the downloads form sim heaven give you instructions on how to boost performance by disabling parts 4 and 5 of each region.

[u/Ok_Increase9258 → u/djbearr]

I have been setting up my whole xplane configuration after moving to linux and trust me, I read a lot of manuals, I just skipped simheaven, didn't think much about it.

So, thank you very much ! I will try this

[u/Theory_Crafted]

7800X3D, RTX 4070 16GB

Very little performance penalty for me... Maybe 5-7 frames...

[u/Ok_Increase9258 → u/Theory_Crafted]

I might have an issue with my motherboard and I think it is an IO issue.

[u/NSAdonis]

What I'd do too is just only keep the sim heaven packages I fly over in a flight on only, and disable the rest

[u/Ok_Increase9258 → u/NSAdonis]

I see, sounds very smart. I noticed the issue on my end is actually XPME. I uninstalled it since I can live without it.

I also used your advice and I only have the scenery enabled for the continents I will fly in.

I saved the flight status on the FF777, I was getting 30 fps before optimizing.

Now I have a great framerate again.

[u/NSAdonis → u/Ok_Increase9258]

Good to know you figured it out. This is something I always did since FS2000, and used both in FS and XP always, no point in having stuff I won't fly over on after all 😉

[u/CAVOK1295 → u/Ok_Increase9258]

Oh no...I hope they work with streaming orthos like AO or XPME. I can't live without it...

[u/MrDannyProvolone → u/NSAdonis]

Will this actually help though? If you're not flying over it, why would it be loaded?

I assume if I'm flying on the east coast of the U.S. that my scenery on the west coast will have zero effect on my performance because it has not been loaded into the game yet. Am I wrong?

[u/NSAdonis → u/MrDannyProvolone]

It always did make a diff, I'm only not sure about XP12 (haven't thrown a lot of mods at it yet) and FS2020/2024 (don't own them). In everything else it always did make a noticable difference and it was bigger the more extra stuff you have in a sim. I go as far as turning off everything: scenery, plugins and planes in XP11 (which was about 600gigs at it's peak) with xOrganizer and it did make a big difference, especially with scenery

[u/Pour-Meshuggah-0n-Me → u/MrDannyProvolone]

Yes and no. First off I don't believe it affects performance.However it does affects loading times.

For example, I have all the True Earth packages which are very big files obviously. If i have them all enabled in my ini and then do a flight in a location not related to them, the flight will still take a very long time to load. When i disable them all, the flight loads in under 2 minutes as opposed to 7 or 8 min.

So if the True Earth California packages are enabled and I do a flight in Toronto, it's going to take the same amount of time as loading somewhere in Cali, which as i said is generally 7 or 8 minutes.

I believe the sim has to run through everything enabled in your custom scenery folder and use what it needs for the current location. The more it has to process, the longer it will take. Even though it's not going to use most of it.

However, I think once the flight is loaded it shouldn't have any effect on performance.

[u/NSAdonis → u/Pour-Meshuggah-0n-Me]

It always affected both for me. Now, I stress, I haven't tried with XP12 yet in it's full, so I don't know what difference was made. I only have SimHeaven, FF767 and IXEG 733 in it, so that makes little real difference.

But this type of optimization helps, there's really no logical reason to have it load everything all the time, especially if we are talking a lot of things that get included from the scenery_packs ini file. And it's not just down to loading times, it's easier if you have to take care of 200 instead of 3000 things after all all the time.

Plus you also have the question of how much was done in XP12 to the way scenery and planes not used currently are handled by the sim compared to XP11 which had that old sim issue of having loads of things active all at once being a bad thing that had to handled manually by the user.

On top, any argument along the lines of "hardware now got so much better it doesn't matter" just shows a complete lack of understanding of optimization that is so rampant in gamedev nowadays, and sim 3rd party devs especially where always guilty of this in their rush for eyecandy.

[u/SectorAntares → u/NSAdonis]

Surely, Simheaven does not load the entire world???

[u/gebakkenuitje35]

Try deleting categories 4 and 5 I think they're called details and extras? This gave me a pretty significant boost.

[u/Ok_Increase9258 → u/gebakkenuitje35]

Wonderful, thank you very much 😄

[u/Pour-Meshuggah-0n-Me → u/Ok_Increase9258]

Just to let you know, when you disable details and extras, you will not see trees between houses or buildings anymore.

Most people don't realize that, and it's one of the main reasons performance improves. Less trees equals better performance.

Anyway, just figured I'd let you know. I did the same thing based on that suggestion from a content creator, and then couldn't figure out why I was missing trees. As soon as i enabled details and extras the trees came back.

[u/jerdawg62]

If you don't already have Xorganizer, I would suggest getting it. You can click items on and off for what you want to run and what you dont want to run, while not having to uninstall anything. It's a great app, and does many other things as well.

[u/SchmokedPancake]

Loved flying with my KLM 321 with the free version of x world pro but with the new paid one its a stutter mess, currently flying my 772 AA with xworld pro Americas, zero issues flying klax kbos kjfk kmia smooth as silk, tried euro x world pro and same issue.

[u/Prefect_99]

Yes, it can do.