I read the same thing and decided to try everything.
After installing the patch, resetting the cache, activating my add-ons, and restarting the sim, I performed my usual test flight (1 hour gate-to-gate on two regional airports addons).
32GB cache, multiplayer off, everything else is on; quality and quantity are medium except fauna is off.
ATC and the EFB
I completed a full IFR flight with all communications. I even activated ATC assistance with the FO. Except for the bug where it didn’t respond to the approach frequency change, it worked flawlessly. And even received the descent and approach instructions about 10 nm before reaching the ToD.
Regarding the EFB, in addition to loading the flight plan and consulting the charts throughout the flight (without any issues or stuttering), I tried loading passengers and baggage.
After asking “Start with boarding passengers,” they simply appeared seated in the cabin; there was no animation of passengers walking through the gate. (I’m going to try this on other flights, because it worked before.)
I must say I didn’t see a single stutter during the entire flight. Not even during descent, approach or landing.
Of course, the trade-off was a heavy downgrade on objects draw distance. They clearly reduced the LOD again.
OK, I tried the same exact flight again. Zurich to Heathrow in the 777. This time I had ATC off and did not do any planning or charts in the EFB.
No real improvement. Nice and smooth on the ground at Zurich, with a slight micro stutter on takeoff. Cruise was smooth, no issues.
Descent is where things start to go wrong. At 7000 feet the stutters begin every few seconds. At 5000 feet the pauses every 12 seconds kick in. These pauses last between 1-3 seconds and ground textures seem to reload.
The 12 second interval pauses do not go away until you leave the flight and make landing near impossible.
Traffic is still a mess. Aircraft at Zurich were not taking off, they just trundle around the airport. There were three aircraft sat in a field at RW16 when I left. In the air, there is hardly anything. If you look at the map in the EFP you can see traffic around you, but only about 5-10% of those aircraft are getting rendered in the game.
I wonder if the lack of air traffic is tied to the Xbox traffic Quantity setting being maxed out at Medium. Asobo, I would gladly have everything at ground level at LOW if it meant we could have properly populated skies. Could that setting be made to go any higher, if it is causing this?
Maybe travelling to and fro the lesser known airports helps. I find if I choose a lesser known departure , even though the 787 just about fits on the runway😁 and l choose a destination with a runway just about big enough to land it then I find performance is greatly improved
Oh for sure. Im choosing bigger airports and the 777 to try and stress test the beta. Smaller airports and GA have generally been OK for me for a while
It’s not so much picking the bare minimum length runways but I try to to depart and land at lesser known runways say in the middle of Uganda, India, Greece, lesser known ones here in the UK, USA.
I think the problem might be that the simulator runs out of memory, or CPU cache, or something, so it freezes, dumps the scenery textures from memory, continues running and tries to redownload the same textures. They then fill the memory/whatever and another freeze occurs. That’s why the freezes return at exact intervals and we see ground textures revert to blurry versions after every freeze.
In order to stress test the system, it’s recommended to use large aircraft and large airports. Going to “lesser known” airports to avoid freezes doesn’t make the simulator better. This is a beta test so testers should focus on the worst case scenarios. That’s the only way to reproduce and pinpoint these issues.
It’s disheartening that despite all the optimizations shown in the developer stream (if they apply to Xbox at all), the simulator still suffers from the same extent of performance issues as in SU3.
That would actually make a lot of sense. And it’s nothing new as it happens on 2020 as well. It’s just that on 2020 you lose time instead of actually seeing a stutter while the sim tried to stay locked to real time
Completely agree that we need to be pushing it by flying large airliners out of large airports. It’s not good enough if it works to fly a 747 out of a grass strip in the middle of nowhere
Difficult for the devs to know if they’re heading in the right direction if all we can tell them is a complex a/c at a non-optimized or resource hungry airport doesn’t work in any beta release.
Surely better to provide a range of a/c and airports. Personally my stress test is helicopters over KLAX or EGLL. Both of these will usually produce audio break-up and stutters. 1.6.15.0 though is performing very well over those airports. No audio break-up, minimal stuttering and many live trifgic AI getting in each other’s way. So I can report a definite improvement with this beta.
Xbox X 4K @ 60Hz, live Wx and traffic set to medium. Parked a/c low.
Yeah definitely makes sense to stress the beta with large airliners etc and I do often but sometimes is relaxing to just have a smooth stutter free flight. Oh and I’ve never flown a 747 out of a grass strip thank you
Indeed the only logical explanation would be inefficient memory management, since restarting xbox (and clearing cache) temporarily fixes performance issues. But after a while the stutters are back, which is typical memory leak behavior. But, with such a complex game there could be many more reasons or even a combination of these factors. My personal thought is they just created a game that is too demanding on current gen consoles. They’ve set the goal too high. Perhaps we’ll have to wait till 2027 for the new Xbox and PS6 and this will all be over. Time will tell.
Tried to do a flight from Stansted to Edinburgh in the default A321. Got the 12 second pauses right from the gate. Looks like Xbox users are going to have to wait for the next build and hope for the best.
We don’t actually know what ‘stresses’ the system though. If it was only complex planes with complex scenery than it would never happen in a C152 in the middle of nowhere but it does.
For example - me today – I download the update, delete the Reserved Space, Restart the X Box X, start the sim, Go into My Library to Disable gaya’s KSFO. I then entered Free Flight and chose default Victoria INTL CYYJ (I think) at a parking spot. Did the walkaround (half the spots wouldn’t ‘check’) and then got in the aircraft. At that point I remembered a bug I had seen in .13 so I went to settings, set a few things, and then came back to find ‘ground oddities’ as shown:
I waited for this to solve itself but it didn’t until I looked away at which time there was a large stutter.
The ground kept doing weird things so I shut down and restarted both X Box and sim and then just chose a runway departure. The flight still had stutters/pauses throughout as I flew south through the mountains and then over to Auburn (south of Seattle). Surprisingly, the landing was the least stuttery part of the whole flight.
While it is true that they’ve built code that appears to erase all scenery and then reload it when VRAM gets full, I don’t think that has much of anything to do with all of the random stutters and pauses. But thats just my guess – and I never fly anything “heavy” and I often have smoother flights at some of the bigger airports like Flightbeam’s KSFO or IniBuild’s Providence RI.
One time I was in the drone just sitting still over Washington DC (PG on) and while sitting there doing absolutely nothing the sim decided to do one of those redraws. I assume maybe some sound file pushed memory over the edge but I don’t know.
I think we should all just keep flying our own way and report our findings.
Similar behavior here. Even small planes and small default airports. Sometimes great and sometimes stutter and redraws in what are essentially the same flights with static weather and low or no dynamic scenery turned on. Of course I cannot reproduce every control input so no matter how much I try at some level each flight is different. I can’t diagnose the underlying cause. It feels like server side issues? Maybe exasperated by cache bugs? No way for me to know.
What i do know is that performance is highly variable in what (as a mere mortal user) feels like the same conditions. Sometimes fabulous.! Sometimes a stutter fest. Something somewhere is fundamentally still broken.
900+ Mbps wired internet, 32 GB cache, most dynamic settings off or low, C172, small default regional airports, Xbox X.
Just did a flight from Charles de Gaulle to Valencia in the 787, first flight in the new patch. Spawned on runway to just me and the co pilot sitting in mid air, not the best of starts but within ten seconds everything loaded in. Take off was pretty smooth and so was cruise. Reached under 10000 feet and began getting micro stutters all the way to approach and landing. Valencia was popping up but eventually settled to a nuclear disaster and pretty much stayed that way all the way to landing. I did use ATC and the efb a little so that may not have helped. I’m beginning to think like someone posted earlier that is the series x capable of running the sim and will we need to buy a PC to run it, though all the pc talk on here cruises over my head. Or wait till 2027 for the new console, though it has been mentioned it could be as early as 2026
Charles De Gaulle is a pretty heavy airport which doesn’t help - I tend to avoid it and hope that one day someone will make a better one for marketplace. I’ve often felt that the departure airport using up memory can affect the arrival airport performance
So I’m interested in some specifics. What’s your internet speed? Do you use wifi to the router or an ehternet cable? Photogrammetry? AI/live traffic? All that kind of thing. I like looking for patterns and sometimes it throws out interesting results. Though most of the time just confusing when my 70mb internet connection is fine and somebody else’s gigabit connection isn’t
It is fair to wonder if flying airliners on series X is something that won’t ever be all that great. But I also keep an eye on the pc performance survey threads and they are far from issue-free. Often different issues right enough but definitely not the solution to all of our problems like we think it might be
