For what it’s worth, those who know me know I’ve not had the terrible performance that some have, but I’ve definitely seen some insane bugs and CTDs and most recently, started getting those annoying micro-stutters over the last couple of weeks. I’m in the SU9 Beta as well.
This past weekend, I decided to upgrade my already great PC (had an i9-9900k, 32gb DDR4, SSD installed, RTX 3080) to a beast of a machine with the i9-12900k, 32gb DDR5 ram, new SSD to use PCI 4.0 lanes and it is DAY AND NIGHT better than I’ve had in about a year (pre-SU5 levels of good).
Of course this doesn’t take care of the main bugs that are still annoying and the terrible lack of sophisticated airliners, not so great HDR optimizations, etc. but the performance has been so smooth.
I am running 4k ULTRA in HDR and getting 30 - 55 smooth fps. No more micro stutters or other massive FPS drops.
So my point – either the sim is so “next-gen” that most of our hardware (2+ years old or more) just isn’t up to the task OR the sim is so poorly optimized that you need an insane level of PC to appreciate OR a mixture of both – for those who game in 4k and use airliners primarily (which let’s face it, requires much more performance than some of the GAs).
It’s also worth noting, in my opinion, I’ve been an alpha user and never have done a fresh install of MSFS – after countless betas and tons of mods, etc – never have needed to install the entire software since I first started in the Alpha days… but this time I went with a fresh install of MSFS (since I had a new SSD drive and thought why not) and maybe that’s been a part of my great performance lately.
But wow, the performance on this new machine of mine is top-notch. It’s so butter smooth. I have no idea if it’s just because of my hardware upgrades, the fresh install, or both.