Ran Updater Patch Beta 26 to 27 after running Beta 25 to 26 when I got back home off vacation....all went w\o a hitch.
Beta 26 and Beta 27 Dx9 and Dx11 versions opened and exited just fine both offline and online.
Beta 26 and 27 Dx11 versions still show the same reported low FPS issues since patching up from Beta 21 to 22 forward ( low FPS in tower and the same low FPS issues during flight w\ the same double loping graphics motion w\ an occasional uptick in FPS back to normal FPS and smooth graphics motion).
I went and updated my AMD Crimson drivers from 16.5.3 to the latest 16.6.1 drivers and still getting the same FPS results.
But I may have finally figured out what the issue may be stemming from.
I believe the issue is coming from a conflict between a feature of the AMD Crimson drivers and Dx11 as used by the Beta software.
Since Crimson 16.3.2 driver series AMD has a Power Efficiency feature available (specifically for Hawaii and Fiji GPU's) in the Global driver that a user can use to either enable\disable the hardware level power optimizations available in the GPU (PowerTune 2.0). The default setting in the Crimson Global driver for Power Efficiency is enabled. This setting is not made available in any Crimson driver created game profile so a user can set this per game to either be enabled\disabled (I have Beta Dx9 and Dx11 versions set up as separate game profiles in Radeon Settings so that I can have the ability to make separate driver level setting changes if desired but currently both are set up identically as per Beta testing requirements).
It finally crossed my mind to go into Radeon Settings and disable this feature in the Global driver to test this then go into the Beta 27 Dx11 version and voila, all straightened out. In tower FPS came back up to the normal 68-72 as I've noted seeing in the Dx9 version and in flight FPS came back to the 79-80 w\ smooth graphics motion as I have noted seeing in the Dx9 version so now I know that something has changed w\ the Beta software using Dx11 since Beta 21 that is triggering the AMD Crimson Global driver PowerEfficiency feature to severely downclock GPU clock speeds both in tower and under game load to cause the FPS issues I have reported.
Beta software using Dx9 isn't affected at all by this feature, only all Beta software using Dx11 since Beta 21.
So going forward I will play using the Dx9 version of the Beta but will check the Dx11 version occasionally to see if this has been fixed since this feature is enabled in the AMD Crimson driver by default and will report back on what I find.
Yeah I know I can just turn this feature off but I think that this is something that Hitech and Co would like to know about.
