Decreasing performance throughout long flights since SU5

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1

Anyone else seeing this?

Every time I try a flight of more than an hour or three, I experience continuing decrease of GFX performance throughout the flight. At the start, everything is smooth and nice, but as the flight goes on I see the cockpit panning becoming more and more jerky. Happens in both planes I fly - TBM 930 and FlyByWire A32NX. Same thing if I take an external view of the plane.

All the smoothness gradually disappears, leaving the sim unpleasant and jerky to fly. As I pan the view around (cockpit or external) the animation goes VERY jerky with frame rates dropping to 12fps or so, but it’s not just the frame rate - it becomes very staccato, and the audio crackles.

If I don’t pan the view, the framerate is as expected and smooth.

This continues to get worse and worse throughout long flights.

This even happens if I am flying over very unpopulated desert areas with only terrain scenery below and clear skies, with none to few trees or buildings.

I also notice at the start of a flight, TaskMan shows all cores being used about evenly (thanks to SU5), but as the jerky/crackly problem increases, the CPU gets more busy, with the last core getting more busy than the other cores.

This is entirely repeatable.

I’ve tested it with an empty Community folder and no Marketplace addons except the Asobo World Updates.

Hoping this gets fixed on 24th in WU6 as it is ruining the experience for me currently.

20 Likes
2

Yeah, its probably the live traffic bug. Turn off Real Time traffic, then back on and your FPS will come good.

5 Likes
3

Yeah, I was aware of that bug, so all these tests have been done with Live Traffic off.

Maybe I’ll try turning it ON then OFF again next time I see the problem, and see if that helps.

1 Like
4

Yes I beleive it happens in either configuration. With live traffic off you’ll need to turn it on, then off or depending what setting you want to play with.

5

Ok cool. Thanks for that info.

I’m on a long flight just now, and 1 hour in it’s still perfect. So if the problem reoccurs (as it has 100% of the flights recently) then I will definitely try this! :+1:

6

I’ve noticed the same performance drop after long flights (5+hrs)
Did the traffic trick work for you?

7

Exactly the issue I’m seeing too.

8

For me, the problems start after 2-3 hours of continuous flight, and get slowly worse thereafter.

It’s important to note that the overall FPS of the sim stays fine. That is until I pan the view around. As I wear a head tracker, there is a lot of panning. The panning kills the FPS down from my V-Sync locked reliable 30fps down to more like 10 FPS while panning, with the audio crackling too.

If I lock the head tracker (disable it) so the view direction is constant, then the FPS of the sim is still a smooth 30 FPS on V-Sync.

It’s always the panning which kills the performance. And throughout the flight, this just gets worse as worse over the following hours, until eventually it is almost unflyable while using the head tracker.

Now that it has started doing it again this evening during this long flight, I just tried enabling/disabling online traffic again, but this didn’t appear to help the situation in my case. So I just diabled ALL online data in settings, and then re-enabled them, and this did seem to improve the panning somewhat, but still not as good as it was at the start of the flight.

I’ll try that again later in the flight after the symptoms have become really bad, and let you know if it helps again.

2 Likes
9

To the letter exactly what it’s doing to me.
I had a flight going during my last post and I just completed it… ~3 hr flight into NOLA from Cancun via FL coast and when I touch down at Lakefront airport it gets really bad, dropping to single digit fps while panning with trackIR or the HAT switch. Not moving the camera, 35-40
While I was at Cancun it was 45-50 fps and during the whole flight at altitude was 60+
So I tried turning off traffic AI and multiplayer, applied and turning back on nothing changed.

Like you say, the significant event is while moving the view (panning around) That’s when its almost a slide show.

3 Likes
10

My experiences:

Take off and fly with an FPS of 60 (VSYNC set to 30 and monitor at 120 Hz). GPU usage in the high 80 to 100% and GPU clock speeds fluctuate normally. In about 2 hrs, the FPS will go down to 12 - 20 FPS and GPU usage is around 38% and GPU clock will be locked at less than 1000. Even manually changing the GPU clock doesn’t work. I use a RTX3070. CPU usage doesn’t seem to be affected.

Also since SU5, my allocated VRAM never goes above 60% while dedicated VRAM never goes above ~50%. It must be doing something with the GPU on a low level or the GPU drivers.

Thanks Asobo.

11

Yup. And before anyone asks, I did completely close down the head tracking software to see if that was the culprit.

No difference.

12

Yes, I see this too. My CPU nad GPU are usually only at around 40-50% utilisation. The CPU spikes much higher when the panning problem is actually occuring, and settles down again as soon as I stop panning.

Makes no difference if I use the head tracker, the hat switch or my PS4 controller to do the panning. Same old low jerky frame rate and crackly audio throughout the panning.

13

Here is my CPU and GPU while not panning.

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image1022×600 43.5 KB

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image1023×632 26.9 KB

And here they are while panning.

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image1021×609 46.3 KB

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image1016×627 30 KB

As you can see, the system still isn’t overstressed, and the GPU is running at low utilisation, yet the pan is a jerky thing and the audio is crackling away.

In fact the GPU usage actually drops off significantly while panning - maybe this is a pointer to what is going wrong.

14

I’m having the exact same problem. For me on landing after a 2 hour flight, it was stuttering constantly and the audio was just constantly crackling without me looking around.

Was kinda embarrassing because my family watched me land for the first time on VATSIM, and the whole thing was at 5 fps with stuttering audio earrape making it kind of awkward for me.

Asobo really screwed the game up again. I had better performance after long flights and no audio stutters in su4. I’m losing patience fast. I just want my flight sim back.

6 Likes
15

There are currently 2 causes for this.

One is the live traffic. Simple solution as some have mentioned is to turn it off and on again.

The second cause occurs in very long flights around >4hrs which is likely a memory leak and is a well known bug even before SU5. Only solution is to restart the flight.

16

Well between the 4 of us there has to be a common denominator (other than the obvious… Asobo)

So I will try to list what I’m running during the game and addons. Although Ive turned these off and see no difference.
Background apps:
Little NavMap
Rex Weather force
LukeAir tool
TrackIR

Addons (Community Folder)
WT CJ4
CJ4 Cockpit Texture Mod
Toolbar Pushback
Airports Lights
Honeycomb Bravo - More Working Lights
JDs PMSGTN750 on Others Mod
PMS50 GTN750

I have no add on scenery (airports, Cities, Landmarks)

17

Restart doesn’t work either.
Restart MSFS does.

2 Likes
18

I, like others, are not seeing an improvement by turning traffic on/off/on. I have seen a degradation in FPS after a couple of hours flying across the pacific. Went from a solid 35fps to a stuttery 20fps or so. Interestingly, just checked again after the sun dipped below the horizon and I’m back to 50+ fps and smooth.

I was flying WT CJ4, using TrackIR, Toolbar Pushback, Airports Lights, JDs PMSGTN750 on Others Mod, PMS50 GTN750 and about 1500+ additional mods lol

19

None of what you say concurs with my experience here…

As I have already stated above, doing the Traffic ON/OFF doesn’t help at all here, although disabling/re-enabling ALL online services may have some effect, but isn’t a complete fix, also as pointed out above.

And I never had these problems before SU5. Not saying there wasn’t a problem - just that it wasn’t a problem here.

I’ve always done multi-hour flights, and only since SU5 have I had the performance problems after 2-3 hours.

2 Likes
20

Community Folder:
image

Game:
Real Time Live Traffic - ON
Weather Preset - Few Clouds
1440p, RS-110, Mostly HIGH with some Ultra

Background Apps:
Chrome Web Browser
MSI Afterburner & RTSS

System:
10700K, RTX3070, 64 GB 3200, Samsung NVME SSD-OS, WD NVME SSD-Game, 8GB RAM DISK (7 GB Rolling Cache)