The CPU and GPU still get hammered after hitting ESC to pause the game. There is no need to be consuming potentially hundreds of watts of power when in the pause menu.
Work around: Hit ESC and select the option to load a flight, and then select the option to load a flight from the PC. This will open explorer and stop the game from rendering. Giving the CPU and GPU a break. Just cancel when ready to fly again.
I know this might seem minor. But we are living through a climate crisis and it seems like itâs important for all of us to think about energy efficiency. Iâm sure itâs common for many of us to pause a flight (for dinner, kids, whatever) and we might be away from the computer for quite a while at times. It all adds up.
All that said, this is a great sim and I look forward to future updates!
I do if i know I will be gone a while. And for shorter pauses I listed a work around in my original post.
But if this is programmed into the game then it no longer puts the onus on the end user, and Asobo, with a bit of code, can probably save a lot of energy being consumed, and thus emissions, over the life of the product.
Donât think it has to be either turn your computer off or donât bother saving power at all.
Also if itâs a shortish break then you havenât factored in the power needed to start the PC, load up the OS, load the game etc⌠probably little value in doing that if your popping out the room or something
I started a similar thread for Xbox, after all, think about it if youâve implemented a power save the global impact of each MSFS-running PCs and Xbox combines yo be potentially huge.
With all the long haulers leaving the sim running for several hours unattended while they are sleeping, shopping, doing the dishes and a ton of other stuff except looking at the costly rendered sim (something I will never understand, btw), there might even be room for a blackout mode that simply calculates the aircraft systems and the progression of the course without rendering any graphics as long as no one is looking at them. Imagine how much power and hardware wear & tear that could save.
In the Nvidia control panel is a setting for background apps. You can set this to 20fps so when you want to pause hit you windows key and youâll save a little power there.
I think that the issue may be that the game is a âlivingâ online, multiplayer environment which continues to breathe even if youâre away from the computer. If youâre running in offline mode then I guess the game could go into a sleep mode. But if youâre running MP, online AI and live weather, the game needs to remain active even if somebody does leave to PC to take a bathroom break, or whatever.
Windows Key + R > resmon.exe > right click âFlightSimulator.exeâ and hit suspend process. Resume it the same way once you want it to run again.
Donât get your hopes up though, the amount of energy this will save would be hard to see on a power bill, and it will do a hairs width away from literally nothing to help the climate. Even if every single flight sim user did this whenever they stepped away from the PC, it would barely change anything in the grand scheme of things.
With that proposed blackout mode the aircraft position and even flap settings etc would still be transmitted like normal and can be seen by other players. Everything would still be simulated in the background. It would just suspend the graphical rendering via a hot key. But Iâm sure thatâs much easier said than implemented.
After hitting escape select more, load/save and âload from this pcâ this will stop the rendering. To resume press cancel. If you have been away a while MSFS will be disconnected from the internet but this will soon fix itself.
Folks - please do take a moment to consider your responses in light of the Code of Conduct. There are posts here that do not meet the Code in terms of tone and content. Letâs be relevant, respectful, timely, accurate and above all - constructive. Recall this is primarily about the sim, and not other issues as raised and marked off-topic.
The title was edited to be more on-point. Any posts that clearly fell out of the Code were actioned. This topic is being reopened provisionally.
I love this idea! We know you can change most of the gfx settings on the fly, so at the very least they could implement a âlow gfx modeâ hotkey that renders the bare minimum even if itâs not entirely a blackout.
Yup. That has been there for a long time and is what Ive always used. You can even continue using the Drone Camera even though the sim isnt the active window
There is a proper pause. The sim has three pause modes. Active Pause, the Pause menu and a proper pause that you can bind via the control options. For some unknown reason that I canât wrap my head around itâs not a toggle, though. You need to bind another key or key combination to unpause.
What climate crisis? I have never noticed one it´s hot in summer and cold and snowy in winter just like the previous 39 years.
And every game just pauses the scene when it get´s paused while the computer is still rendering that scene.
To stop overheating the graphics card by the sim there is a trick: You must set it to windowed mode with ALT + Enter, and minimize it afterwards to have it down in the taskbar.
I always use this trick when making new textures in Photoshop but have Flight Sim 20 running at the same time to have more CPU performance in Photoshop and check the textures after every change in the hangar
