Not picking on you Scandi. Your post just happened to be the one that motivated my post. I could have grabbed a quote from any of a few dozen posts recently, all saying the same thing.
Wanted to add a little perspective to why this may be.
There are thousands of posts that say that they have been flying for months with no CTDs until INSERT UPDATE HERE was released. They always follow that opening statement with, “Nothing has changed”.
In my experience through all the previous incarnations of flight simulator, the one thing we all do is try to squeeze the most performance we can out of our systems. While tweaking settings we often overlook the basic principles of a clean, stable baseline. That does NOT mean a wipe and reinstall of Windows and MSFS. That step is WAY overused and often improperly done, creating new demons. Not to mention it is a monumental waste of time is is unlikely to solve anything. You can read here how to get that baseline.
My point is that in the pursuit of that last 1fps increase we put our system at the hairy edge of stability. Now any feature addition or maybe a graphics change introduced as in SU3 the settings we so carefully balanced, become unbalanced. Maybe we dip into the unassigned memory pool and now something breaks. Often times, when that happens, the answer is to start dialing back some of our tweaks. Find the stable baseline again and slowly push the limits back up again.
To say that nothing changed, or that the update caused the CTD is merely our way of passing the blame. “I had my system running perfectly and now the sim crashes”. Why? Because the developers added something or changed something that pushed your finely tuned system ‘out of tune’. If we had left a margin of error in the tuning then we would not have gone over that hairy edge.
The act of pushing technology to its limits is inherently unstable. We can overclock until the system gets unstable, dial it back a smidge and call it good, but when the load increases, we need to dial back to find the new stable limit. It is part of this hobby. Technology will never “catch up” with the flight sim world. We will always be out on the edge. If you build in a wide margin, (eg: I can get to 65fps but 50fps looks pretty good), then you will reduce the surprises.
“Keeping up with the neighbors” is going to either break the bank or break the relationship you have with MSFS. If your maximum performance is 28fps at 1080, then dial back your settings a titch and be happy with it until you can upgrade the hardware. Just because a user here says they have a similar system and they get 75fps does not mean you should melt down your GPU to try to get there. Either they are lying about the frame rates or they are lying about the specs. Find YOUR stable spot and ignore everyone else’s.
This post rambled WAY past my initial thought, but suffice that, If it crashes now and it didn’t before, something HAS changed.. It may well be a bug. More likely it is an increase or change in the load on your overstressed system. Get back to baseline and tweak away.