AC Mazda MX5 Cup @ Zandvoort - Monday 13 Jan 2020

[Craig Dunkley]

Thanks for the great racing guys and thanks to Craig for organising.

Sorry about your disconnect Denis, also sorry that I never said much, I was in a battle at the time

 

[RobertR1]

Thanks @Craig Dunkley for hosting another great.

Both races were a bit of a loner event so went into hot lap mindset to keep things exciting for myself. In race 1, Had a 54 on deck going into the last turn so went for it and threw it away.

2nd race, I held off doing that until fuel was low. Did a couple of 55.4’s back to back to get into the zone. Was up .2 and threw it away. Then I sat in pits and watched the top 3 battle for 1.5 laps which was quite exciting!

 

[Reik Major]

Thanks @Craig Dunkley for hosting another great.

Both races were a bit of a loner event so went into hot lap mindset to keep things exciting for myself. In race 1, Had a 54 on deck going into the last turn so went for it and threw it away.

2nd race, I held off doing that until fuel was low. Did a couple of 55.4’s back to back to get into the zone. Was up .2 and threw it away. Then I sat in pits and watched the top 3 battle for 1.5 laps which was quite exciting!

Yeah, yor pace was just too good, so the win of race 2 doesn't feel too rewarding to me. But the fights I had to defend it, where great. thx to @Axel Moebius for his careful fighting.

 

[Kek700]

@640er
That’s quite difficult to quantify, I have noticed loss of performance, but is it tyres
going off, sometimes I get damage and it appears not to effect the car at all, sometimes quite noticeable.
Last week Craig said that he had engine damage, you gearbox, never had anything that obvious.
Trouble when you loose 2 or 3 tenths a lap in a competitive environment it can completely ruin your race.
Hope some knowledgeable person can add more than my input. I have always pondered this question.
Supposed to be limited to 10%.

 

[RobertR1]

@Reik Major the way you defended for 25mins was amazing man so well deserved! I watched the last couple of laps and it was really fun! I might load up the replay and watch the whole thing lol

@Kek700 damage physics were a bit meh so inconsistency is par for course. I don’t think there is anything repeatable there to form consensus with. Sometimes everything is fine other times you lose time per lap which kills the race.

 

[Erik Axelsson]

I got a good start in the first race and ended up behind @RobertR1. Damn, you are fast! I managed to stay close for a few laps until a small mistake and I lost contact. Rest of the race was a hotlapping session also for me but I managed to find two tenths of my PB.

Starting from 5th in the second race I first had a great battle with @Stefan1507 for quite some time. Later I caught up with @Axel Moebius. We were side to side a few times but due to excellent defense I never manged to pass. You must have had a lot to think about, attack and defend at the same time. Best race I've had in a long time!

Thanks @Craig Dunkley for organizing!

 

[Craig Dunkley]

@640er
That’s quite difficult to quantify, I have noticed loss of performance, but is it tyres
going off, sometimes I get damage and it appears not to effect the car at all, sometimes quite noticeable.
Last week Craig said that he had engine damage, you gearbox, never had anything that obvious.
Trouble when you loose 2 or 3 tenths a lap in a competitive environment it can completely ruin your race.
Hope some knowledgeable person can add more than my input. I have always pondered this question.
Supposed to be limited to 10%.

Yes been at 10% damage, way before I was ever here. But it is funny that you should raise this topic....I have moved it from 10% to 20%

 

[Lesley Buurlage]

I may truly was the slowest out on track (at least in qually, how on earth people do 55s is beyond me xD) but had great starts in both races which gained me some places. Race 1 just didn't seem to want to end and i've never defended so hard in my life but it was still fun. 2nd race i was more able to keep up with the midfield and mistakes from others eventually gave me 8th. I love the mazda (oj certain tracks), i love zandvoort, (in certain cars) but apparently the 2 combined isn't my best cup of tea as i drove my fastest lap in the last lap of the 2nd race

 

[Kek700]

20% is going to make you think twice.

 

[RasmusP]

Craig, I'm sorry to bail out of tonights race but my framerate kept dropping down in to the 20s & 30s - not ideal with the Oculus Rift.

I've now reset windows 10, flashed my bios, replaced all my drivers, swapped out pc parts that might cause latency etc., & I'm now at a complete loss of what to do next. If anybody has any ideas it would be much appreciated.

View attachment 343632

The screen capture was taken a few days ago, but it sums up the problem. I capped the fps @ 92 in AC (1440p monitor -uncapped the frames are in excess of 200+) and took a screen shot of the MX5 sat in the pits @ Zandvoort. Two of the threads on the Ryzen 5 3600X are maxed out which seems excessive. In contrast, the AC render stats app - MAIN_T @ 37.6% - appears fairly low, or at least until others start to join the server.

My system:
Windows 10 Home (x64) Version 1903 (build 18362.535)
MSI B450 GAMING PLUS (MS-7B86)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
AMD Ryzen 5 3600X 6-Core/12 Thread (boost 4.4ghz)
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz (CAS 16-20-20-38)

30% is about the maximum load on a 12 thread CPU that can be used by Assetto corsa, which only really uses 2 threads.
So you're hitting the "single thread performance limit" there and the CPU is at its limit with Assetto.
Interesting and nice to see that your AMD knows about about this and provides 2 CPU threads on different cores only for this and boosts them the highest.
My i7 2600k (4c/8t) simply shows 60% load on all cores, which makes it look like my cpu would have a lot of headroom, while in fact I'm heavily cpu limited.


Aaaanyway: so your fps hit can have 2 reasons from what I see:
CPU limit, something is eating up your cpu! Maybe it's this win 10 gaming mode, maybe something else.. Do you see anything else than Assetto corsa having much cpu load in the task manager?

Second reason: your cpu is in fact looking to be at the limit but maybe this is misleading and the fps "in the background" would be fine, while something is just limiting the displayed frames (had this a few times with gsync issues).

Sadly I don't have vr and barely use my win 10 installation..
So I can't really help apart from interpreting this Screenshots. Good luck!

 

[pattikins]

30% is about the maximum load on a 12 thread CPU that can be used by Assetto corsa, which only really uses 2 threads.
So you're hitting the "single thread performance limit" there and the CPU is at its limit with Assetto.
Interesting and nice to see that your AMD knows about about this and provides 2 CPU threads on different cores only for this and boosts them the highest.
My i7 2600k (4c/8t) simply shows 60% load on all cores, which makes it look like my cpu would have a lot of headroom, while in fact I'm heavily cpu limited.


Aaaanyway: so your fps hit can have 2 reasons from what I see:
CPU limit, something is eating up your cpu! Maybe it's this win 10 gaming mode, maybe something else.. Do you see anything else than Assetto corsa having much cpu load in the task manager?

Second reason: your cpu is in fact looking to be at the limit but maybe this is misleading and the fps "in the background" would be fine, while something is just limiting the displayed frames (had this a few times with gsync issues).

Sadly I don't have vr and barely use my win 10 installation..
So I can't really help apart from interpreting this Screenshots. Good luck!

I found that Windows gaming mode was on, but when I turned it off it didn't have any impact on AC. I think, however, that I might've [hoping] found the culprit. I had a look @ ac.exe through process explorer and found that a dll file was using more cpu resources than AC.

Do you think the msvcr120.dll file could be the source of the problem?

 

[Neilski]

I found that Windows gaming mode was on, but when I turned it off it didn't have any impact on AC. I think, however, that I might've [hoping] found the culprit. I had a look @ ac.exe through process explorer and found that a dll file was using more cpu resources than AC.

Do you think the msvcr120.dll file could be the source of the problem?

I think that might be a transient thing, and that the thread in question (which looks like it was CPU-bound at the time) just happened to be in that DLL when that pic was taken. You could hit the stack button to see the whole call stack. I'd be kinda puzzled if it was in that DLL at every refresh of the info.

 

[pattikins]

I think that might be a transient thing, and that the thread in question (which looks like it was CPU-bound at the time) just happened to be in that DLL when that pic was taken. You could hit the stack button to see the whole call stack. I'd be kinda puzzled if it was in that DLL at every refresh of the info.

I was barking up the wrong tree. I asked a friend @Goldster69 to look @ AC with process explorer & he got the same result - the msvcr120.dll uses the cpu as much as mine. Apart from the gpu, we also both have similar specs but his system uses the most of the available cpu threads to run AC.

 

[RasmusP]

I found that Windows gaming mode was on, but when I turned it off it didn't have any impact on AC. I think, however, that I might've [hoping] found the culprit. I had a look @ ac.exe through process explorer and found that a dll file was using more cpu resources than AC.
View attachment 343802

Do you think the msvcr120.dll file could be the source of the problem?

No that looks absolutely normal. As I said ac has 2 big threads + a little one. And it looks exactly the same for me, always that DLL.
However that thread is in the CPU limit like your Taskmanager already showed.
The calculation goes like this:
100% divided by 12 threads = 8.33% per thread maximum.
Which is why ac with 8.3 + 7.9 + a little bit is maxing out your CPU although you're only at around 30% overall CPU load.

Anyway.. It seems like something in Assetto corsa is eating up your cpu. Did you install any ac overlay apps or new weather or whatever?

 

[RobertR1]

Do a hide all apps when driving. Then close ac after a few laps and go into content manager video settings. See if your sessions average FPS goes up.

 

[Stefan1507]

Hello, everybody,

First of all I would like to thank you for letting me come along
My races were very exciting in the beginning until I was on 5th place and then I did my laps alone

First race:
From 6th place on the grid I started the race because I could not confirm my time in the qualifying
At the start I got away well and was able to hold my position very well and had directly in front of me @Denis Betty in the first 2 laps I looked at his race line to see where I could best try to overtake and I saw relatively quickly that it could only be on the start and finish line as I came out of the penultimate corner a little better at the end of lap 3 it was as far as I could overtake him after that it was already over again I saw the cars but I didn't really get closer as the first four were just too fast for me

Second race:
Since I was able to start from pole as fifth from the first race into the second race it was a personal highlight for me I got away very well again and could defend the pole but I knew very fast that I could not hold it for long because @RobertR1 and the four others behind me were much faster than me at the end of the first lap @RobertR1 could already overtake me and in the next laps @Reik Major , @Axel Moebius and @Erik Axelsson followed him so that I was back on fifth place but then it was over again because I could hold on fifth place

For my first race I have to say I am very satisfied and even though my English is very bad I had a lot of fun at the race

With kind regards
Stefan

 

[pattikins]

No that looks absolutely normal. As I said ac has 2 big threads + a little one. And it looks exactly the same for me, always that DLL.
However that thread is in the CPU limit like your Taskmanager already showed.
The calculation goes like this:
100% divided by 12 threads = 8.33% per thread maximum.
Which is why ac with 8.3 + 7.9 + a little bit is maxing out your CPU although you're only at around 30% overall CPU load.

Anyway.. It seems like something in Assetto corsa is eating up your cpu. Did you install any ac overlay apps or new weather or whatever?

I reinstalled AC prior to Monday nights race and app wise I had helicorsa, tyres, fuel, performance delta & the track map installed.

 

[RasmusP]

I reinstalled AC prior to Monday nights race and app wise I had helicorsa, tyres, fuel, performance delta & the track map installed.

Ah okay so it's a fresh install.. Any custom weather?
Maybe you have different graphics settings compared to before?
Try to put reflections to static as a first try.
In fact this would also be a good test to see whether or not it really is a cpu limit or something else.
If your fps go up by quite a big step, it's cpu limit that needs further investigation.
If the fps stay the same with reflections at static, then the cpu got some headroom but something else is tanking the performance...

 

[RobertR1]

@pattikins that's how my video screen looks fyi if you want a reference. You can see the avg fps from the Zand race above. In game, I run ProTyres, car radar, realtime and laptime estimator one.

 

[pattikins]

Ah okay so it's a fresh install.. Any custom weather?
Maybe you have different graphics settings compared to before?
Try to put reflections to static as a first try.
In fact this would also be a good test to see whether or not it really is a cpu limit or something else.
If your fps go up by quite a big step, it's cpu limit that needs further investigation.
If the fps stay the same with reflections at static, then the cpu got some headroom but something else is tanking the performance...

It was my second fresh install within a week. I've been having stuttering/lag issues issues for a while - roughly after the last Windows update (ver. 1903), but nothing in comparison to the last few weeks. Generally when there has been more than a few people on the server my framerates would be bouncing around & as a consequence my times followed... In pure frustration, on Monday I did my second AC reinstall following a Windows system reset, with the bare minimum of apps installed, and no mods (weather, SOL, etc.,.). During the practice session for Monday's Zandvoort race my framerate kept diving down in to the 20s & 30s, esp. at T1. AC performance was getting worse, not better. Also, with the reinstalls I could no longer save or view replays. I don't know if it is connected with the lag/throttling issues.

In my normal set up the reflections option is already set to off and so is the PP. This is a typical benchmark from my normal setup:
AC VERSION: 1.16.3 (x64)
POINTS: 39180
FPS: AVG=267 MIN=5 MAX=445 VARIANCE=16 CPU=83%
LOADING TIME: 31s
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (2560x1440)
OS-Version: 6.2.9200 () 0x300-0x1
CPU CORES: 12
FULLSCREEN: ON
AA:2X AF:16X SHDW:1024 BLUR:0
WORLD DETAIL: 3 SMOKE:2
PP: QLT:5 HDR:0 FXAA:1 GLR:5 DOF:5 RAYS:1 HEAT:1

I was curious as to what would happen if I capped the fps @ 30 and turned every setting down to the bare minium (no apps), to see if it would reduce the throttling. Unfortunately it didn't.

I got similar results @ 1080p and even at 480p. Ironically when I maxed the AC settings, my gpu got up to 97%, a third thread was being fully utilised and a marginal improvement un cpu usage.

Benchmark with max settings:
AC VERSION: 1.16.3 (x64)
POINTS: 27348
FPS: AVG=186 MIN=54 MAX=270 VARIANCE=10 CPU=75%

LOADING TIME: 13s
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (2560x1440)
OS-Version: 6.2.9200 () 0x300-0x1
CPU CORES: 12
FULLSCREEN: ON
AA:4X AF:16X SHDW:4096 BLUR:0
WORLD DETAIL: 5 SMOKE:5
PP: QLT:5 HDR:1 FXAA:1 GLR:5 DOF:5 RAYS:1 HEAT:1

The improvement, however, is neglible and my performance would still tank. Going back to the msvcr120.dll file that I mentioned yesterday, I forgot to say that I'd noticed that I had a different version (12.00.21005.1 built by: REL) to @Goldster69 (12.00.40660.0 built by: VSULDR). Is it too risky swapping the files or should I try and update the MS C Runtime Library? Would going back to an earlier version of Windows 10 1803/1809 help? Or should I make an unannounced visit to @Goldster69 and grab the entire contents of his AC folder when he's not looking?