[N.Scaringella]

Dear friends,

I'm a member by many years and I play IL-2 Sturmovik since I was six; I definitely love it and I'm so grateful for yours work of keeping it up to date, adding fantastic new features and improving to the optimal the yet nicely implemented features.
I rarely wrote in these forums because I never get an issue, nor I didn't understand something from the new patches. By the way, there's always the first time and I'm going to ask you all if anyone is experiencing an issue I started to have since the 4.14.1 update.

To sum up, I used IL-2 Sturmovik 1946 with three gaming towers over the years and it always run at stable 60 FPS, even when I used some mods (but I mainly play vanilla patched to your last updates). I have the original DVD and I then apply the patches manually, never had problems with it.

Just some days ago I started playing again after some months of break (as you may imagine, this tragic situation around the world hit my work too), I also never tried the new patches as I last used the 4.13.4. Immediately I noticed a very drastic FPS drop (2-3 FPS) when launching the 5000 Kg bomb with the Pe-8 bomber... Never happened before!
I started bombing with many other bombers and bombs and noticed FPS drops last more time when bombs are more powerful and hit more objects (houses, trees).
Last thing, which points specifically towards the black smoke effect, I followed an enemy Japanese plane during the RAF campaign in Singapore and set its engine afire. I was very close and the smoke that went out hit my cockpit; the FPS drop happened in this occasion too.

I'm very worried since I have no idea hot to deal with this problem: the only thing I changed is the graphic card because my ASUS GTX 780Ti Reference stopped working (after years of hard work) and I replaced it with a a more powerful MSI GTX 980Ti Reference (of course I made a clean re-installation of drivers and other things). I also installed a water cooling system for my Intel i7 4790K.
Sturmovik always run vertical synced (60 FPS) using max graphic settings with OpenGL, plus driver forced anti-aliasing at 8x both for normal and transparency objects. I always forced too the anisotropic Filtering to 16x..
As said, I never ever had any FPS drop, not even with my old ATI Radeon HD6600, and I always played the simulator with the above mentioned same settings.

Please, if any of you may have some suspects about this problem's cause, do not hesitate to tell me!

Many thanks in advance for yours patience and, specifically to the developers, again great thanks for the legendary work!