OK, I’m joining the club. Finally updated everything and tested the new system and I hardly see any improvement: KJFK in “few clouds” - constant “rubberband” microstutters, flying around Manhattan - FPS often dip to ~22 for a bit, though generally are around 30 and I’ve seen them go higher on occasion.
The experience was really not smooth at all, though in between microstutters It was, just like before. I was expecting a drastic reduction in microstutters but I don’t see them. In general, with a completely new system, RAM that’s twice as fast and CPU that’s 50% faster and has 3D cache, I really was expecting a significant improvement in smoothness. I’m disappointed.
I use medium-high settings, DLSS Balanced, 160% OXR resolution, MR at 1/2, FFR preset quality/wide in OpenXR Toolkit. GPU is the best there is: 4090. With “prefer quality” cores all tasks go to CCD1, and I set MSFS affinity to CCD0 so it has the whole 3D cache for itself.
I will continue tweaking and go through all the settings again, but this is not encouraging.
The devmode frame counter is only able to see what is being sent by the MSFS code, FG frames are done outside the MSFS code on the nVidia side. That’s why you see the discrepency between MSFS and Steam frame counters, and then they both go to 60 when you make another window the focus because FG will stop at that point.
Yeah I get that but doesn’t explain some of the behaviour I have seen.
If it can manage 60 all green and very low ‘graph bar’ when NOT in focus, why does it drop to 58 (red background) when IN focus (and with a higher more spiky graph)? That means it is not matching up to the screen refresh as well as it could it if could remain on exactly 60 (= 120 with FG for 120Hz screen, would be “better”?).
Also - can’t remember the exact settings I had when this happened now, but with FG off the devmode counter was showing 24 and with FG on it was 48… or the other way around… (I believe this was when I capped to 48 in NVCP, which I am still not clear if that means CAP INCLUDING FG FRAMES so I should have made it 96?). If dev counter doesn’t take the FG into account, what was causing that?
OK, I did a lot of tweaking, and it’s a lot better now. Stutters can’t be completely eliminated, but at least they are very rare now, and mostly the experience is butter-smooth. I tried different combinations of OXR resolution and DLSS but it seems that the best visuals/performance settings for me are the following:
TAA100, settings mostly High, some Ultra, some Medium, clouds High, Contact Shadows low, Ambient Occlusion Low.
OpenXR Tools: 140% resolution, MR 1/2, Prefer frames over latency checked (uncheck before exiting VR! Otherwise it freezes, sometimes permanently).
OpenXR Toolkit: no scaling, Sharpening CAS 100%, FFR Quality/Wide preset. Mask disabled.
BIOS cores setting: “Prefer Frequency”. Curve Optimizer manually tuned per core, PBO off (or core setting doesn’t work on ASRock boards!). That dumps all processes to faster CCD1 with 7950X3D.
Process Lasso: flightsimulator.exe has CPU Set to cores 0,2,4,6,8,10,12,14. This effectively disables SMT for MSFS and forces it to CCD0 which it has entirely to itself. Some stubborn system processes and all accompanying software, including all WMR software, additionally have CPU Set to cores 16-31 (CCD1).
Secondary monitors disabled.
Primary 4K monitor set to 1920x1080 in MSFS, and hard-forced to 60Hz refresh. Sync off.
To my surprise, it seems that DX12 runs smoother and has less stutters with my setup with CRU.
HAGS On, Game mode Off.
Bitsum Highest Performance power plan, USB devices have Power Saving disabled both in Power Plan settings and in Device Manager.
Low latency and Nvidia reflex off.
RTSS limiter at 45.
HPET disabled via Device Manager.
Deleted Rolling cache in MSFS.
Deleted DXCache and Shader Cache in all available folders.
Cleaned Environment Data for WMR.
I don’t know what settings or combination of settings helped the most, and with MSFS it’s always hard to tell, and tomorrow my performance may go south again, who knows. I will keep testing. But these settings are worth testing for anyone running 4090 + 7950X3D. I just wish MSFS could run 100% smoothly, but an occasional stutter here and there, when loading scenery etc. seems to be unavoidable.
Overall, now it’s clear that there is a considerable boost of quality and performance with a 7950X3D CPU. It’s still not ideal, but as close as it can be, looks like. There are some MR artifacts visible, but they are tolerable and not very pronounced with the new runtime.
It also turned out that while I changed command-line CPU affinity parameters in my custom .BAT file, but I forgot a bunch of affinity commands that go after a specific timer via another PowerShell command set, so my first try had a bunch of processes set to logical cores 7-11 (CCD0), probably interfering with MSFS process.
If you have the latest bios update from your motherboard manufacturer which addresses the cpu overheating issue then AMD is stating it’s ok to use EXPO.
Edit: actually changing memory parameters has no relationship with the OS and apps except for if they are set too aggressively it will crash the OS. You can always change it later no problem.
Being conservative initially to facilitate OS and app loading is an excellent strategy. Like I said previously, you can always change the memory bios settings later.
This release is based on a beta version of AGESA 1.0.0.7.
The final version of AGESA 1.0.0.7 is expected from AMD on May 6th and will likely result in new bios iterations in its wake.
Given this version of Agesa is said to be a rewrite, I would not jump on it
That’s something expected, you flash it and clear the cmos.
What you can do is go to profiles (Tool tab), scroll down a bit and search for “Load/Save Profile from/to USB Drive”.
There you can select your pendrive and press F2 to save your profile. If the file is saved you will immediately see it as “name.CMO” listed in your pendrive. If it’s not listed it is not saved.
After flashing your new bios version, go to the same place and now you will be able to select your “name.CMO” file and restore it.
Depending of the changes of the new bios version some things are not restored. For example PBO curves, so just keep them saved somewhere else. The rest of the settings will be restored (fans, expo, voltages, cpu/mb settings, etc)
I bought a 7950x3d and updated the bios, fresh windows installation and newest game bar and amd chipset drivers which should automatically assign msfs to ccd0 with the 3d cache. It seems its not working automatically.
Screenshot 1:
I manually set MSFS to core 0 to 15 via the task manager
Important Note - If you for instance limit your FPS via the Driver to 60 and have Framegeneration set to ON, you WILL NEVER SEE more then 30 FPS in the MSFS DEV MODE FPS Counter. You GPU is just limiting your sim to 30 FPS because the GPU is bringing the other 30 FPS by its own. Only If you tap out of the SIM Window your GPU does not do Frame Generation in the Background, so the SIM will not be limited to 30 FPS and brings the FPS it can until it hits the 60 FPS Cap of the driver setting.
So your output FPS with frame generation is always axactly 100% higher, then you see in the ingame fps counter. use afterburner or fraps to show your true output FPS and you will see it is double as high.
Important Note - If you for instance limit your FPS via the Driver to 60 and have Framegeneration set to ON, you WILL NEVER SEE more then 30 FPS in the MSFS DEV MODE FPS Counter. You GPU is just limiting your sim to 30 FPS because the GPU is bringing the other 30 FPS by its own. Only If you tap out of the SIM Window your GPU does not do Frame Generation in the Background, so the SIM will not be limited to 30 FPS and brings the FPS it can until it hits the 60 FPS Cap of the driver setting.
So your output FPS with frame generation is always axactly 100% higher, then you see in the ingame fps counter. use afterburner or fraps to show your true output FPS and you will see it is double as high.
This is very important, however, in my case I’m using the nvidia performance overlay and still only seeing low GPU utilization and poor fps.
Like I said previously, you can always change the memory bios settings later.
