Yeah. LOD affects CPU render latency. It has almost nothing to do with the GPU. You increase LOD, your CPU render latency increases. FPS drops. These are facts.
All the speculation and misinformation people are throwing around this forum is ridiculous.
The developers have stated over and over again that they optimized this sim for 30 fps at 4k on current hardware.
There is not a CPU available that can run this sim at 60fps under all conditions.
It is not that difficult to tune your settings in this game for a smooth, high detailed experience.
Trying to base your settings and performance output on percentage of utilization in task manager doesn’t work. Render latency is the only metric you should be using to set your sliders.
Open the dev mode window, turn on your fps counter, and pay attention to your main thread and GPU latencies.
Set vsync to 30, increase GPU-bound settings (basically every slider EXCEPT LOD) so that your render latency is as high as possible, but stays below 32ms under your highest-load situations (I use Central Park, NY for tuning). You may have to increase your render scaling if all of your GPU bound settings are maxed out.
Once your GPU settings are set, reduce your LOD sliders until the main thread stays below 32 ms under your highest load situations. If you start seeing “main thread limited”, and your GPU render latency is at or slightly below 32, you need to reduce LOD some more.
Once these settings are made, you can turn off vsync again to chase whatever magical FPS number helps you sleep at night, but you will start seeing microstutters again, because once again, your CPU will be struggling to keep up.
In my case, I have to run my 3060ti at 4k through DSR, reduce in-game render scaling to 75%, and run all other sliders and settings maxed out (again EXCEPT LOD BECAUSE THAT IS NOT A GPU FUNCTION) to ensure that I don’t get into mainthread limited conditions. I also had to REDUCE LOD from 200 each to 190 each to adjust for the developer changes in SU6, and thats on a 10700k at 5.1 all-core. My vsync in-game says on at 30fps.
It’s not rocket science, and having the biggest, baddest GPU on the market will not increase your FPS in MSFS. Period.