Chasing the ultimate graphics experience (and failing)

User Support Hub Hardware & Peripherals
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I put my hand up and say I have been guilty of chasing the ultimate graphic experience at the expense of smooth gameplay.

I’ve been tweaking MFS ever since the first closed Alpha back in April 2020. Here are a few things that I learnt along the way over the past two years- and things I wish I knew earlier

TLOD

Ever since reading an article on this forum stating you could manually config the TLOD setting in the UserCfg.opt file, I have been constantly messing and tweaking these values trying to push the LOD to the brink of what my system would allow - and failing miserably!!

I used to run an 8700k with a 1080ti but upgraded this year to a 12900k and 3090 (not purely for MFS). I made the fatal and foolish mistake of thinking my 12900k could be pushed much further than it really could in reality. I would manually edit the TLOD in UserCfg.opt to values of 7, 8, or 9 with building LOD at 5 hoping that this would result in further draw distance of terrain. It ended in a stuttering mess, with buildings not loading correct, and pop-ins galour. I have since tweaked back the TLOD to 5.0 and my experience is so much smoother on the whole, with little to no stuttering.

Locking FPS

I run a 144hz monitor and Vsync confused the hell out of me for a long, long time. MFS does not particularly do well running at 144hz. Running my monitor at 60hz and applying Vsync @ 30 has resulted in a much smoother experience. I recently decided to try limiting my frames to max 30 through Nvidia control panel, and this combined with Vsync has resulted in the smoothest experience I have encountered to date, with minimal stutters. Ensuring your monitor hz plays nicely with Vsync is important

Clouds

Clouds in SU9 have never looked better (errrr except for maybe pre SU5) but they are taking a heavy toll on the CPU. I’ve turned mine down from Ultra to High and they still look fantastic IMO. A small tweak but a big impact on FPS and stability.

Configure MFS for the heaviest workload

This is a biggy. I fly mainly GA aircraft but occasionally hop in an airliner. The workload on the CPU between a GA aircraft with steam dials and an airliner with complex systems is hugely different. Don’t run into the trap of configuring your graphics for a GA aircraft in clear skies, and then find you are struggling in an airliner in cloudy conditions. It’s far better to configure for the worst case scenario you are likely to encouner i.e. a cloudy day in an airliner at a busy airport. That way you will always be guranteed a smooth experience :smiley:

Power Management

Ensure your power plan is cofigured correctly through windows 10/11 power settings for maximum perfomance. Set NVidia power management mode to “prefer maximum performance”

Undervolt GPU

I found that my GPU was regularly hitting the max TDP value and this would cause random throttling and the card to run extremely hot. Manually undervolting the card has massively reduced wattage used, and it runs cooler and more efficiencly with less spikes. Probably more relevent for 30 series Nvidia owners…

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But how is “smooth gameplay” defined? :wink:

Fortnite players yell “it is stuttering below 144 FPS!!! This and that other graphics card only has UNPLAYABLE 100FPS! And is therefore worthless.”

Graphics conaisseurs are pleased with ultra-settings only and don´t care if it´s 30FPS.

Casuals download the newest Fling Elden Ring cheat program and say “ah it is well running with 28 FPS but the visuals are so awesome I am not reducing the drawing distance and the other settings.”

And it often depends on the game itself how fluid it feels. A few days ago I have tried Final Fantasy XV and was absolute disappointed how stuttering slow and unpleasent it is running on a Vega 11 graphics chip without graphics card - even with stable 22 FPS. (Other games feel absolute fluent with 24-30 FPS.)

Meanwhile Doom 2016 with Vulcan is running absolute fluent with 41 FPS.

Limiting the FPS on a graphics card is one of the most important aspects because some games tend to overheat graphics cards when menues or static screens are rendering with 999999999999999 PFS. For limiting the power-draw having the graphics card limited to 60FPS is always a good idea.

Yes 3 - 5 are the best values mid-range graphics card like the RX5700 can render without significant performance issues.

But never give up trying to go for the best visuals possible. This (and modding) is the way to go when owning a PC.

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Yup TLOD is the main CPU mainthread resource eater, along with clouds, and traffic (of all kinds, including airport workers etc)

Exactly. I run FS exactly like this 60Hz/30FPS locked(VSync). Makes for a buttery smooth experience. Refresh rate (RR) matters. Vsync in game is weirdly titled though as the 20, 30 and 60 FPS figures only apply to a refresh rate of 60Hz. They should really be labelled 1/3RR, 1/2RR and 1xRR, so if you have for example a monitor with 75Hz RR then VSync 20 = 1/3 of 75 = 25 FPS locked. Vsync 30 = 1/2 of 75 =37.5FPS locked. VSync 60 = 1x75 = 75FPS.

This is interesting. I’m not on the beta, but good to get advanced warning, thanks. I’ve seen other comments alluding to higher mainthread with SU9 beta. I’ve always felt clouds looked fine on high though. Like I said before, clouds are one of the main CPU loaders along with TLOD and traffic.

Agree 100%. I always say go sit static at gate in an airliner at a busy scenery dense airport like EGLL and tune your system. If you tune it there it will be optimal everywhere else in sim. If you just tune FS for performance in a C152 above the clouds, you will likely encounter stutters around dense scenery.

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You might also want to try in NVCP changing 3D Settings → texture quality from high quality → high performance too.

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Yes, this is extremely important!

Need to be on the ground at a large complex airport, using an aircraft that really hits hard.

Tune using worst case conditions.

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Frame time consistency - variance between frames times. It’s usually easiest to see in 0.1% and 1% low frame time statistics, that is the average of the worst 0.1% of frames. If they’re super low, the game will play with jarring stutters.You can also log and graph it to ascertain if you’re getting the odd very long frame time, or a more persistent frame time variance that’s breaking immersion.

I mean, Doom 2016 is an absolute masterclass in game optimisation and should be running high 100’s FPS on any current hardware. If it’s doing 41FPs something is badly broken (oh, 240)G and vega 11? Yeah, that’ll struggle). Meanwhile, plenty will tolerate a consistent 30FPS in flight sim because the world passes slowly across your screen (note it’s always when panning you’ll notice stutter). But Fast paced shooters like doom or Fortnite absolutely needs 100+ FPS to feel fluid, because they’re split second games where you can do a full spin in a fraction of a second and need the world to render without delay or stutter. People don’t complain about 144fps, they complain when their system hitches and they get a momentary doubled frame or judder.

It’s all about frame time consistency. Smoothness.

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@WeirdNeville I wish I could like this several times. Everything is on point.

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It’s certainly worst case stutter wise, especially during take off or landing if panning left or right as a scenic airport with static ot AI traffic whizzes by.
There is a sweet spot achievable with FS though which makes me wonder if it was designed to sit there, and that is at 60Hz/30FPS. It feels like more FPS tbh it is so smooth.
This sim definitely does not need high FPS except perhaps for some niche applications like head tracking. Too many people on here seem to equate higher FPS to better smoothness in the sim when the converse seems true in many cases. Refresh rates with this sim do seem to work best when in multiples of locked FPS. so 30FPS/60Hz, 37.5FPS/75Hz etc.

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Check the XBox specs and you’ll get your answer. :wink:

You absolutely get the smoothest experience with a Frame rate lock providing the system is capable of maintaining it, because it leads to zero frame time variance. And yes, a system with high FPS but hitches will feel much worse than a system with lower but completely consistent frame rates. The important thing is the headroom of the overall system, because that dictates how high frame rates can go whilst maintiaining a constant frame rate - or, more comonly for simmers, how high LOD and settings as well as sim and aircraft complexity can be pushed without tanking frame rates to unplayable levels.

Freesync/Gsync helps massively also, best of all worlds within the capability of the CPU.

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Agree 100%.

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I hope you don’t have any children because you may have to sacrifice your first born for this.

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One ? How does a system set to 60Hz/30FPS (VSync) work with VRR enabled? or does that lock override VRR. I haven’t managed to get my head around this.

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It over-rides, It will just refresh at the specified refresh rate - so it will double frames: 30 rendered frames, 60 update cycles, 60hz on the monitor (possibly 120Hz on the monitor with frames shown 4 times). Game Refresh rate dictates GPU refresh rate dictates monitor refresh rate.

I just run G-Sync and uncapped refresh rates because my system runs 60-110FPS generally,and my monitor Syncs to that range. And I’m used to it from other games (not that it looks in any way weird, frame times don’t swing wildly in FS2020 so long as you’re not bouncing off a CPU limit).

Oh yeah ,chasing settings… 1440p ultrawide, mostly ultra, LOD’s down a bit for consistent performance. (12700K+3080ti)

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For me in MFS smooth gameplay is all about immersion. Anything that breaks immersion will pull you out of the sim and back into reality pretty quickly, which is not ideal.

As someone has already stated the world in MFS moves pretty slowly, so 100fps is not important. What is important is how fluid and smooth the sim feels, and the key to that is removing stutters. Once stutters are removed you can almost fool yourself into thinking you are flying IRL and become fully immersed in the MFS environment

I’ve managed to achieve that by locking FPS to 30, limiting max framerate to 30 and choosing the right TLOD for my hardware

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will give that a go - thanks!

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Hi. I’m wondering, you said that you set vsync ingame and also set the FPS max in Nvidia CP.

What is the benefit having 2 fps caps (ingame and Nvidia CP)?

Why only setting the ingame vsync does not satisfy your need of smoothness?

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That’s a good question! I used to think it was only one or the other, but both seem to be the sweet spot for me - not sure if thats the case for everyone though?

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Thank you so much for your guidance. I have followed the FPS and the Clouds-High settings and find that everything is smooth and my GPU also runs cooler.

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Glad to hear that :slight_smile: Happy to have helped!

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Thank you for this informative post. I just want to make sure if I understood you currently regarding locking FPS. If in NVCP, I have refresh rate set to 60Hz and locked to 30 FPS, What should the in-game Vsync option be? Should I also set it to 30 FPS or turn it off?

Also, I am a noob to TLOD setting. For it to be set to values between 3 to 5, am I changing in the user.cfg file?

Thanks for your help.