I have done a lot of experimenting with my AMD system and game settings to get better performance from the simulator, and I’ve settled on some settings that seem to work pretty well. Before, I was getting a lot of freezing from the simulator and not so great graphics. I want to describe what I’ve done to get better performance.
First, let me tell you about my system, and then I’ll get into the settings I have.
I have a system build by CyberPowerPC. It is a 64-bit computer running Windows 10 Home version 1909, build number 18363.1082. It has an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 Six-core CPU overclocked at 3.85 GHz. Overclocking was one of my changes, but I’m not sure it made much difference. I just installed an additional 16 GB of memory, but the changes I made had it running well with only 8 GB of memory. The extra memory is to reduce the need for paging and to allow other programs to run in the background.
It sports a Radeon RX 580 GPU with driver version 20.9.2 with 4 GB of VRAM.
The settings for the GPU are as follows:
Under Graphics
Radeon Anti-lag - Enabled
Radeon Chill - Disabled
Radeon Boost - Disabled
Radeon Image Sharpening - Enabled
Sharpness - 80%
Radeon Enhanced Sync - Disabled
Wait for Vertical Refresh - Off, unless application specifies
Under Display
(First, set display on which simulator runs.)
Virtual Super Resolution - Disabled
GPU Scaling - Disabled
Integer Scaling - Not supported
AMD Eyefinity - Not used
Under General
Instant Replay - Disabled
Instant GIF - Disabled
In-Game Replay - Disabled
Record Desktop - Disabled
Show Metrics Overlay - As desired
Game Streaming - Disabled
StreamVR - Disabled
Every system is different owing to monitor types and other differences, so you may need to play with the GPU settings to get the most from the simulator. These are the settings that make the least demand on the GPU and thus more GPU power to the program.
Now let’s take a look at Microsoft Flight Simulator settings.
On the main menu, click on Options and then select General, and then click the Graphics button.
I have my display mode set to Full Screen, and my full-screen resolution set to 1600X900. Setting the resolution so low was the hardest change for me to make. The monitor I am using has a maximum resolution of 1920X1080, so I started with that and resisted lowering the resolution. But this is likely the most important change I’ve made to the setup. It gives the GPU less work to do and allows it to run with fewer resource bottlenecks.
I thought this setting would use only part of the screen, but that isn’t what happened. Instead, the whole screen was used by scaling the pixels to make the screen image fit the screen size. Some text on the screen looked pixelated at first, but another change fixed that.
That change involved going into the Display settings from Control Panel and setting the display to 1600X900. Again, I thought that would cause the image to take up only part of the screen, but it didn’t happen then either. Apparently, the graphics card scales the image itself to take up the whole screen. This time the text on the screen looked fine.
Other changes on the Graphics tab were basically set by setting the global rendering quality to Medium, and then changing a few other settings as follows:
Anti-aliasing - TAA (This really is important. Other settings are noticeably inferior.)
Anisotropic filtering - 4X
Texture supersampling - 2X2
Water Waves - Low
Shadow Maps - 1024
Terrain Shadows - 256
Depth of field - off
Lens correction - off
AI traffic and multiplayer generic models - both On
Glass cockpit refresh rate - Low
On the Traffic tab
Aircraft traffic type - off (until some things are fixed in the sim)
On the Data tab
Multiplayer - off ( until some things are fixed in the sim)
That’s it. With these settings, I have had a much better experience in the simulator. It seems that many of the issues I was having before, not only the stuttering described above, have gone away, or at least have diminished. I have experienced no CTDs since getting things set up like this, and no strange AP issues.
Of course, there are still a few known bugs present, but I can live with those until they are resolved.
