Haven’t played since the end of 2020, had GTX 1080 at the time. Now I finally bought RTX 3080TI and decided to try MSFS again. Downloaded 90 GB of updates, no community mods, everything went fine. I can start the game, menus are working, marketplace is working etc. But whenever I try to fly any plane in any scenario or free flight, it gets stuck at infinite loading. The progress bar goes all the way but nothing ever happens, even after waiting couple of hours.
Windows are updated all the way, drivers too etc etc. Even the lightbulbs in the fridge and microwave work fine (checked it), so that’s not causing the problem either. Removed the rolling cache, created new one, same problem.
This is an issue I have experienced. Start it and leave it. It can take up to 45 minutes but ultimately it will start. Once it does, immediately delete and disable rolling cache and manual cache. Then load a flight. Once the flight is loaded fully and settled, then you can exit the sim or fly as you wish.
However, once you exit the sim you must restart the PC. Then whenever you like or can, start the sim again. The problem should have resolved itself. Now you can fly again, but do not enable caching.
Once you exit the sim this second time and start it up again (whenever that is), then you can enable the caching feature.
This has happened to me multiple times and this is the solution that works. I believe, though I have no way to prove, it has to do with the cache file being corrupted. It can happen if you suddenly exit the programme through task manager or the taskbar, or if you encounter a CTD while loading a flight.
No, offline doesn’t help me. This is the only thing that works when my sim takes long to load. It’s very frustrating. Usually I have only about an hour to fly each time and for weeks it took up to 30 minutes to load, until I figured this out. Others have also suggested to me to increase the page file size, which helped. Other recommendations include having OS, Cache and Sim on separate physical drives.
But your mentioned long loading time sound realy not normal and not same as OP reported ( he wait already “hours” ). Of course it depends on your system and with less amount of RAM your pagefile setting may be manual optimized/forced. But a pagefile creates again high load at your hard disc and in case you own not an SSD | NVME drive, it makes sense to seperate installations. Network traffic is also a point…
Thank you so much for this wonderful, clear and articulate explanation. It has opened my eyes. I was one of those who would actually disable page file.
na that you should of course never do … never ever disable pagefile completly…
I have 64 GB of DDR4-3600 RAM, pagefile was set to automatic and was using about 9 GB. Now I set it manually to 32 GB, rebooted and that made things even worse, now “Checking for updates” takes much longer, about two minutes. Same problem with the next loading screen. Overall, getting to the menu takes much longer than before when pagefile was set to automatic. Something weird is happening here and it seems to be related to the pagefile.
Trying to start a flight again and… nothing, still loading forever. Progress bar goes all the way and nothing happens.
BTW, also using Samsung EVO 970 Plus 1 TB as @EzarVIII (I’m actually using two of those in RAID0). Internet speed is 100/100 Mbps (optical fiber), all 100 Mbps are available to MSFS (no other devices are significantly using it).
I’ve been getting this recently as well. My PC is a 5900X, 3080, and 32 GB RAM @ 3600. The sim is on a Samsung M.2 and my Internet speed is around 200 GB. The PC is only about a month old and this behavior just started this week.
Yesterday, I had to re-start the sim 4 times to do one flight. The loading and re-loading (and re-loading) took longer than the flight!
Removed the rolling cache, created new one, same problem.
… never ever disable pagefile completly…
