Yes, my own experience pretty much matches your own, in that I too remained stutter free through all the patches until the latest one.
Clearly [and not unreasonably] Asobo, in an effort to improve all our FPS, has tweaked the CPU code a little. And this, for me anyway, was the cause.
So, to ‘fix’ this, I had another ‘play around’ with my settings [both NVIDIA and 2020] until I eventually
found my new ‘sweet spot’.
Now, not only am I, once again, able to enjoy stutter free flying, but handily and to my surprise I find that Asobo’s latest patch has delivered up for me an additional 8 to 10 frames of rendering goodness!
Find your new settings ‘sweet spot’ guys [noun. Informal. Non gender specific]!
It’s likely in there somewhere!
Because there is such disparity between all of our machines and the components therein, sadly, I have nothing to offer by way of a panacea! Indeed, to do so would, in my opinion be straying into the territory of the salesmen of snake oil! And we have enough of those already!
But in rather more general terms:
Start with your GPU software. If it allows, limit your max frames to a sensible 60 [if nothing else this will stop your GPU eating itself when in the sim’s menus].
Set your monitor tech to: G- Sync compatible [if you have a G-Sync monitor].
Make sure your power management is set to Maximum performance.
Set your Pref refresh rate to Max available, and vertical sync to Application controlled.
Further, if you are unsure as to the pros and cons of these and all the other GPU settings, do a bit of research. There is a lot of GOOD info to be had on these forums and via our friend, Google!
Turning to MSFS 2020’s own settings. Beyond suggesting using the built in general presets as a starting datum and experimenting by changing ONE ITEM AT A TIME and testing for efficacy, I am [for the reasons already discussed] loathe to be any more specific.
For me [with my i9-9900K and 2080] I use the Ultra setting, no Vertical Sync, Anti Aliasing set to TAA and Anisotropic Filtering at 16X.
Again, I cannot stress enough the importance of a little research here!
One final point: I am now enjoying stutter free flying with an in air FPS of 45 [+/-]
and an on the ground [at med to large airports] FPS of 39 [+/-].
I’ll add my input too. Please note I’m on a laptop so these settings apply primarily to laptop users. This is bc laptops share a mostly fixed power output bw the CPU and GPU.
Pre 11/24 patch I was running bw 29 and 40 FPS on mostly High settings with Buildings and Clouds set to Ultra. 4K screen on 70% render scale.
What I found in my case was setting the Nvidia CP from “Maximum Performance” to “Optimal Power” gained me 10fps. No kidding. I did back to back tests several times. I had always use maximum performance and never changed it. Basically Nvidia CP is totally on defaults.
What I’ve learned is that for laptops, giving all the power to GPU means the CPU is more limited. Plus, running the GPU at a higher load constantly drives heat up.
Now my lowest FPS is 40 and hit 50 above 2000 AGL in small cities and rural areas.
Good info this!
The seemingly counter intuitive notion of setting the GPU’s PM to ‘Optimal’ rather than ‘Maximum’, and your subsequent reasoning as to why [re laptops] is particulary satisfying!
At this moment we should keep our ‘toolboxes’ right under our desks. After the latest update I also discovered a slight decrease in performance which was balanced out after some tweaking.
On the other hand I can fully imagine many of us just don’t have the patience or knowledge to fine-tune their systems. Turning the wrong screws can have major impact on performance especially if you copied settings from a forum member or other ‘specialists’.
I encourage everyone who is struggling with settings and performance to ask for advice in this forum but be aware every system has different needs and limitations.
Of course and thank you! I’m always reluctant to reply because it seems like every system is so different.
I will add one last thing. Last night I repasted my laptop CPU and GPU. Temps came WAY down (at least 5C) and my FPS are way more consistent now around 40. And my laptop is less than a year old. Something else to consider for laptop simmers.
