Have you looked in power managment? And selected high performance? I had mine high… but checked it after much frustration and it appears that MSFT update changed it to power savings. (a-holes). It’s been updated and there is a silly green leaf now that fills as you f’up your machine. I set miner to ultimate performance and noticed a high increase as it stopped throttling my 4090. I get around 89-112 fps in Fs2020 now. I don’t trust the FPS “dev” read out. It said I was getting 75 with my 3080ti and said like you around 25-35 with 4090. I could EASILY see it was smoother than the 75 with the 3080. So I don’t trust that read out. Also if you use frame gen was I do now with DX12 it will give FPS without the gen frame. Use another external app to see FPS with frame gen. MY 12700 never goes above 10% load. ??? I’d upgrade to 14900 but if the 12700 isn’t being utilized will a faster CPU help? I turned off the dev/fps since it’s NOT CORRECT. What says 25-35 is CLEARLY smoother than 75 from the 3080ti. No comparison. So I turned it off. STILL other than when loading… a flight my GPU is never over 40-50% on ultra. During city flights… during loading flight… and menu’s It can touch 99% briefly.
SOMETHING is not right, but it’s ultra smooth visually like the MSFT trailers I see online.
I think I have but will double check it. Thanks!
You seem to be ignoring the effect of Windows Updates to the equation (interesting none of you are talking about that), and none of you mention AV, or other junk running in the background.
This is on top of the fact that the later updates of MSFS are slower/worse than earlier builds (I noticed a significant drop around SU10 that has never been recovered).
None of my OS or drivers have been updated over the entire time I have been running MSFS, so the only change was MSFS.
Frame gen is a con, with the GPU creating fake frames that games have zero idea about. Sure, the GPU is kicking out 5000 FPS, but MSFS is still running at 20 FPS internally, including physics. All you did was add lag.
Stutters can rarely be fixed by hardware. They are software induced, so your only option is to remove it all and put it back one-by-one to find the culprit.
If re-installing Windows fixes your issue, you clearly had a bad driver/update that you were unaware of. The latest is not the greatest.
SMT is the AMD equivalent of HT on Intel processors, and can have significant negative impact on performance. As was mentioned further up, it divides physical cores into logical cores, so if you have 10 actual cores, SMT makes it 20 logical, and when a core goes idle for the remainder of its time slice, Windows will try to schedule something else into the free time at the end of the slice, but OFTEN gets this wrong, screws up, and whatever was assigned to the remaining time exceeds the time available, and delays the processing of the original task that is assigned to that core. Instead of making things faster, it slows things down, and causes more context switching than necessary which adds its own overhead. It’s a rubbish system in practice, and best disabled on every CPU whether AMD or Intel.
MSFS is also dependent on the internet, so don’t under-estimate what effect this can have on the smoothness of the sim. This is also down to your motherboard and bus design as to how much IO affects memory access, as cheaper motherboards lack buses/lanes/features for incresing performance. This manifests itself as stutters during disk IO, etc., and in completely unavoidable in some cases. The ONLY option is buy top-end motherboards and chipsets, and forget everything else.
Obsessing over CPU utilization is also pointless, as you don’t know precisely what the software is doing at any moment. If you think all cores should be maxed out at 100% for best performance (same for GPU) then you have zero idea about how modern computers work. MSFS is not some massively-parallel compute platform. It’s a game, with a game loop and a bunch of stuff that needs to be synchronized. That immediately requires something to be idle at some point while waiting on results from something else that can’t be calculated in parallel. This is also why no simulator can ever use “all teh cores!11!111!!” that people think it should, because it simply can’t be parallelized to do so.
More important than absolute FPS, is the 1% and 0.1% lows. This tells far more about a processor/bus architecture than max FPS. Here, Intel is better as it generally has higher lows vs. AMD in the same situation.
Where AMD excels is it has more cache per core, so less cache thrashing than Intel, and this is why for certain loads AMD is far better. The question is whether a program has been suitably optimized to maximize this cache usage. Software design has as much to do with this as amount of cache available. It matters not how much cache you have, if program data exceeds the cache size. This is what REAL optimization is about. This ignores specific instructions on AMD vs. Intel, and how well they perform at the instruction level relative to each other. This is why certain games/benchmarks prefer certain processors.
As you can see, performance is a whole lot more complex than simply whether 10% or 50% of a core is being used. None of this matters when the software is fundamentally broken in some way due to a junk update that broke something (we see this very often with Windows, where many patches are fixing the screw-ups of earlier patches).
I’m very annoyed today lol
Everything has been running pretty well for a few weeks now. Very good, no issues, even with a higher resolution in Quest 3 VR. Until today, mid-flight I started getting some NEW kind of stutter that I have never had before. And I can’t get rid of it. Tried everything.
It’s skipping some frames and the audio cuts out at same time. I am using VR but it’s the same on the monitor. And not just the GAME sounds, but voices on Discord too. So it’s some system-wide freeze. It tends to do one, then another 2 soon after, then it’s fine for a longer time (10 mins) until it does it again. Not seemingly anything to do with scenery complexity.
I tried SFC scan, rebooted router and cleared it’s cache. Tried with zero mods and other server. But I don’t even think it’s the SIM causing it (not sure, really).
Noticed the GameBar app kept coming up in Process Manager that I had not really noticed before. I looked if there was an update and it says it was “modified yesterday” whatever that means. I don’t think I have auto-updates for any official apps but maybe I do.
Anyway, I tried disabling GameBar and went back to the Bios and enabled the CoreFlex profile for X3D to let that deal with it instead (which I had run before, until one day I noticed it was not switching back to the v-cache cores when the game went into focus so decide to give GameBar a try/chance again).
I thought it was solved, but it still did it a few times just not but it is less ‘regular’ maybe.
It is like something has suddenly pushed my system more, or something in background is happening but I have not made any changes. It literally started during a flight this morning.
It is the same with NO mods, or in any light scenery. I tried disabling OpenXR Toolkit to have one less thing going on but it’s no different.
It does seem better now with the Motherboard Core Flex (prefer the X3D cache cores for games) setting but as I say, it still did it a few times (but only 1 freeze, not this pattern on once then 2 more times).
I don’t really know where else to look! Any ideas??
Any new Windows OS updates installed recently? Might want to check your update history.
No updates…
Well, I don’t dare to say it’s solved, but it might be solved.
Ended as mysteriously as it started. I didn’t really do anything I think.
Did 1 flight, in not heavy scenery, but a group flight, with all my mods enabled again with no problem at all. Then I went to New York on my own in the Bell 47G, again no problem. Very fluid and no freezing at all!
So then I threw it into the deep end with FlyTampa’s Las Vegas. That is my new benchmark scene. It really struggles in the middle of the strip there, in day and even worse at night with all those lights around. Still struggling (down to 10fps while it loads in new textures I think) but I would think IF it was going to freeze and break audio, it would have done there. But it didn’t. Everything else the same I think, although I did install the dlss 3.7 (did that after the first sign of this problem, and it was still doing it after) and I even went up to using DLAA anti-aliasing method, which looks amazing actually with the 3.7 improvements. So all looks back to normal and maybe even a bit better.
It’s lucky we love this sim so much coz oh boy does it test your patience at times!! Lucky I have a lot of patience too! 
I also had those audio cuts while flying from KELP to KAUS…
5800x3d, 7900xtx, Pico4