Welcome to the club.On my setup its virtually impossible to fly out of Paris LFPG or JFK.May be less of an issue on a faster cpu.What I have noticed when the fps drops at these airports my GPU is completely ignored.
LFPG takes the crown for performing the best PowerPoint presentation!!!I think I figured out the root cause of my issue. Iâm looking at my CPU clock speeds and every 10-12 seconds they go from 2.5 ghz + down to 0.79 gigahertz repeatedly. Itâs not my graphics card. If the CPU stayed at 2.5 ghz plus constantly then I wouldnât have these stuttering issues.
I looked up the resolutions on the forums and tried switching processor scheduling to background services but it didnât work. I have game mode on, flight simulator set to high performacne settings on windows. Feel like thereâs nothing I can do on my own to fix this until devs push an update, but they already pushed a cpu update already so Iâm kinda confusedâŠ
I would have to check on that but Iâm on a macbook pro 16 inch so not exactly pc gaming hardware. Nevertheless, this happened once before 2 months ago, then it stopped with an update, and now itâs gone back to doing it with the latest update. Also, it seems that when I upgrade versions of windows it goes back to having issues. Will try to get a cooling pad, maybe that will help.
Hey @Hester40MT also, I donât know if the CPU is throttling necessarily, because when it used to work, I wasnât really hitting more than 25% CPU usage overall, and on top of that I have a CPU that is pretty near the ideal specs and scores about 16000 on cpu mark, where the ideal CPU hits 18,000 or so. It is a laptop after all, but itâs an 8 core CPU and I donât think my laptop is getting a ton hotter than it should be. I play GTA 5 on decent settings and it works fine.
Okay thanks I will try that and see what happens youâre probably right. I plan to get an EGPU for this setup eventually once we can actually buy the new RTX 30 series cards instead of relying on the internal GPU. Hopefully once a lot of the work is shifted over to the external card it will shift a lot of the heat away from the main unit and I wonât have this issue anymore.
@Hester40MT you were correct, I just loaded grand theft auto v on same hardware and I am getting a very similar CPU throttle down to 0.79 gigahertz and I used intel power gadget to see what the CPU core temperatures were, and basically every time it starts rising towards 85 degrees centigrade it starts to throttle back. The stutters are not as noticeable in GTA V but they are there.
Iâm pretty new to gaming and was hoping to use my Macbook Pro with an EGPU to play flight simulator without having to get a dedicated gaming PC but itâs looking like if I really want to enjoy this fully I may have no option. I hope a cooling pad can push the temps down to the point where it wonât throttle but I donât really know how much it can do. At the same time though, I feel that another gaming laptopâs cooling system with a similar intel processor canât be that much better than a macbook proâs, so Iâm a little conflicted. I hope getting an EGPU can take some of the pressure off the internal system, and I see people hooking up Macbook pros with egpus and playing AAA games, but maybe FS is so much more demanding than anything else that you need a dedicated gaming PC. Lemme know what you think, appreciate all the tips!
Great thanks!
Hey @Hester40MT I actually have an interesting follow up on this after some further digging.
So initially I thought this was CPU related, but I downloaded a program called Throttlestop which allows me to disable turbo boost and keep the processor at an even 2.4 gigahertz instead of turbo boosting and thus overheating.
So I started the simulator with that setting on and everything seemed to be going well, and I started getting the stuttering again. So I looked over at task manager and saw that the processor was still at 2.4 gigahertz and did not throttle back to 800 megahertz (0.79 gigahertz), so in that moment I knew it wasnât the processor. So I opened up windows game bar and, I didnât notice this until now, but it turns out my dedicated AMD GPU in my macbook pro (that has 8GB VRAM - by laptop standards), is running at 100% at all times, at 1080P resolution, even on the main menu. So the throttling/overheating is not coming from the CPU, but rather the GPU.
In an earlier build of the simulator I was running game bar and remember the GPU hovering in the 50-75% range, which would explain why it stayed smoothe, since the processor was not throttling back either due to GPU overheating.
I have the biggest fan of this series since I was 7 years old, but I just really canât figure out why end users like myself have to jump through hoops and barrels to figure out which component of my PC is throttling to try and run the game in 1080P on medium settings with a pretty advanced laptop. Iâm almost positive the developers need to further optimize this title or fix whatever bugs are in the latest release, but if you or anyone else had any tips in the meantime theyâd be greatly appreciated. Otherwise, guess Iâll just wait till I get an eGPU and hopefully that solves everything.
Donât know what MacBook Pro you have, but have you checked out this video from LTT: Fixing Appleâs Engineering
Might help?
My last post was a general reply, rather than specific to your problem 
So had to repostâŠ
âŠand just noticed this was a MacBook Air, not Pro. So might not be related at all. SorryâŠ
Got my 3080 today, GPU usage is generally less than 50% and barely getting 30fps⊠(3440x1440, all ultra settings). The only way to make the GPU work harder to to play on a 4K.
My 7820X CPU is also underutilzed, around 20-25% usage in gameâŠ
Same issue 
@TylerD1975 I actually ended up getting this fixed! Weirdly enough I erased my boot camp partition on my macbook pro and then reinstalled windows and the game, updated my AMD boot camp graphics drivers to latest version, and weirdly enough this is all fixed! Maybe I had a corrupted download before or something. Everything is smoothe (plays very well on medium settings 1080P), and I havenât had one crash to desktop yet like I had prior!
Iâve been trying to warn people about spending money on GPU upgrades with hopes of better FPS in MSFS, you just wonât see much if any improvement. The sim is actually not very heavy on the GPU.
If you closely watch the core usage of your CPU, youâll see 1 core working very hard, and the rest of the cores only slightly loaded, thus the 20-25% overall utilization, but high utilization on 1 core.
That leads us to the root of the problem. The GPU is starved for frames to render because the CPU canât push frames to it fast enough, the sim is just not utilizing the CPU very well. Overloading a single core and probably too many blocking operations instead of async ones.
Donât rush out and upgrade your CPU! No CPU currently on the market (new CPUs about to release) really improves this by much. The 9900k is the best, but the small improvement doesnât justify the cost. Really we just need to wait for more improvements from Asobo that distribute the workload better across the CPU cores and donât block frames being fed to the GPU unnecessarily.
Not quite my experience. My GPU usuage sits at 95% to 100% most of the time, unless it is limited by CPU utilisation. I can limit GPU utilisation by limiting frame rates, but why throttle your hardware.
Looking at my CPU utilisation I see one CPU is at 100%, but the others are under load as well. This may be because I had read that MSFS favours 6 core processors.
European countryside - GPU 98%, Overall CPU utilisation at 74%, 1 core at 100% and the others 50% to 90%.
Sydney on takeoff- GPU 73%, overall CPU utilisation @ 85%, 1 core at 100% and the others 70% to 90%. So all cores working harder in an immediate airport area.
Sydney on climb out - GPU 99%, overall CPU usuage 78%, 1 core at 100% and others 50% to 95%.
So CPU utilisation is important in detailed airport areas, where the CPUâs limitation in effect limits GPU usage, as can be seen in the 2nd screen shot above. Outside detailed areas, CPU usage drops, while GPU usage increases, as it is no longer held back by higher CPU utilisation.
So upgrading my CPU should improve things providing my single core clock speed also increases. Am currently running an i5 9400F and my motherboard will allow up to a i7 9700K. So a CPU upgrade should make a small improvement as the single core clock will be increased from the 3.89gHz on the i5 to about 5gHz on the i7. But it is likely that the increase from 6 cores on the i5 to 8 cores on the i7 may have little benefit. And whether it worth the AUD $500 outlay is the real question.
So you are right to suggest that upgrades are not to be rushed into. It seems to be all about a balancing act between your CPU and your GPU. So I am happy to tune MSFS settings to give acceptable performance with my current PC.
One last thing, if you look at the screen shots you will notice MSI Afterburner is reporting lower CPU utilisation than Windows task manager. I think this may be because of the method each uses to calculate the average rate across 6 cores. I had nothing else running other than task manager, so am not sure why MSI favours lower CPU values.
Yep LFPG is a special case. That round terminal is a real performance killer. LFPG seems to buck my theory that more detailed airports impact your CPU more.
At LFPG my FPS drops to an unusable 16, but only the GPU was maxed out. All 6 CPU cores were showing similar performance, and none were at 100%. As soon as you pass the airport boundary everything returns to normal.
I think Asobo may have used different scenery construction methods at this airport.
Weird part is, one moment I can fly at 50-60 FPS, next âtownâ it suddenly drops to 20 FPS or less.
I noted this in the bush trip. Bodad airstrip 55FPS, then as I cross the plain, 20FPS.
The FP is CA11 -> O79 if anyone wants to verify. I will fly it again and play with settings to see what is causing the sudden drop.
Gave this a go and I may have found what has caused your problem. Just as you start across the plain, Nervina appears on your right if you have airport place markers enabled. FPS at about 54 at this point. Shortly after I noticed a drop in frame rates, but not by much. At the same time the animated loading circle appeared in the bottom right of the screen. I think MSFS is just loading some scenery at this point. Depending on your PC and MSFS graphic settings this may result in a FPS drop while it is doing this. On my system this resulted in only a small FPS drop of about 5-10 FPS so if I hadnât been looking for it I wouldnât have noticed anything. Iâm running MSFS on an SSD with both manual cache and rolling cache disabled in MSFS settings.
A cpu with a very fast single core performance is betterâŠ
It could be the airport, but it never recoversâŠ
I did a test. Low preset and some stuff turned of like bloom. Tested with slew mode.
Before - 108FPS
On plain - 32FPS
Slew back to departure (or even further back) - 35FPS
Basically it never recovers. Broken texture, 3d data?
Also only getting 30FPS at the lowest settings IS a bug.
But for fun, I will repeat the exercise completely offline and with no AI stuff (which I forgot to turn off).
