Dreadful performance

Bug Reporting Hub Resolved
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983

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%.

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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.

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Sydney on climb out - GPU 99%, overall CPU usuage 78%, 1 core at 100% and others 50% to 95%.

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So CPU utilisation is important in detailed airport areas, where the CPU’s 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.

3 Likes
984

Interesting, I pretty much get what you are getting but mine out of Paris (LFPG) - both CPU & GPU almost pegged. It’s the only airport that does this.

985

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.

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I think Asobo may have used different scenery construction methods at this airport.

2 Likes
986

Weird part is, one moment I can fly at 50-60 FPS, next ‘town’ 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.

987

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 hadn’t been looking for it I wouldn’t have noticed anything. I’m running MSFS on an SSD with both manual cache and rolling cache disabled in MSFS settings.

1 Like
988

A cpu with a very fast single core performance is better


989

It could be the airport, but it never recovers


I did a test. Low preset and some stuff turned of like bloom. Tested with slew mode.

Before - 108FPS

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On plain - 32FPS

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Slew back to departure (or even further back) - 35FPS

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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).

990

Did the completely offline with no AI or ATC test. Still drops to 35FPS.

I think this beacon could be the issue. Looks pretty high detail for the lowest settings.

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991

Making some progress. Deleting my rolling cache fixes the issue (still in offline mode).

So I delete the rolling cache and turned it off. Everything back to Ultra settings (this is more than I normally use). And now it does not happen, getting a solid 47FPS.

@ BilingualHarp7 thanks for tip about rolling cache. It does seem to be the cause of the problem.

Edit: My rolling cache is/was on a nvme ssd (Samsung 960 Pro).

Edit2: Not the issue. A bunch of slew panning over the plain caused the drop again :frowning:

992

Got rid of the rolling cache a long time ago because it increased the flight loading times.

993

I finally found the issue. Something is wrong with the Seagull model. Just after it loads, the FPS drops.

As a test, I just deleted the model from the game files. (asobo-simobjects-animals\SimObjects\Animals\Seagull\ directory)

And FPS drop is gone!

I have no idea what is wrong with the Seagull model, or even if it might be all the animals, but THAT is the problem.

PS: Should there even be Seagulls even 150nm inland???

Edit: I just deleted all the animals for now. Tested my homebase of FACT where I used to get under 30FPS, now getting 40FPS. It is next to the sea so I assume there will be seagulls. I am actually seeing myself hit other limits now, which is good :smiley:

Edit2: Posted as bug @ Seagull model causes massive FPS drop when loaded - #2 by CptLucky8

994

Absolutely it’s better. But if you are moving from an i7 to an i9 for instance, you will be paying a monstrous premium for a very disappointing lift in FPS. You will still see the large frame drops and be limited overall by the main thread.

If you must have the best that’s available now, then that’s all you can do. I think it’s just wiser to wait and see what more Asobo can do and also waiting to see what happens with the CPU landscape.

1 Like
995

I’m finally just disgusted with
as the post topic says
 Dreadful Performance. Stutters, lags micro freezes whatever you want to call them. Its terrible. I bought it day one and have never experienced such a miserable on line purchase experience. I never could get a download from the MS Store. After hours with tech support, I got a refund and then purchased from Steam. I would much rather have a direct download. I have been a flight simmer for 20 years. I am sensitive to even occasional stutters. I test for performance purposes primarily in the LA area, but it doesn’t matter where I fly or what settings I use in MSFS, if I am near an airport or buildings, I get stutters, lags and freeze ups combined with a few seconds or a few minutes of smooth flight in between, if Im lucky. I know
I need a new $5,000 pc and I will probably get one eventually. I am able to run with delight
 P3D v5, XP 11.5 and DCS on high graphics and medium/high object settings and they all are silky smooth with rarely a stutter. In fact I used to obsess about about the occasional blip on those platforms, but after this I have never appreciated them more. They also look better overall to me right now. With the right settings, high end aircraft and some scenery addons, or not, they look better and perform much better. It appears to me that MSFS is a game that’s a wanna be flight sim. It wants to look good and in some ways it does and other ways it doesn’t. I fly mostly high end military aircraft too, so I will be staying with P3D and XP
and DCS for a long time to come. After my bad MS store and purchase experiences and the updates so far including the latest, performance is still truly Dreadful for me. And it still doesn’t look that great. Sorry for the rant, but I finally had to say what I have been thinking now for weeks. I kept hoping, but I don’t see this situation changing. Thankfully this is not life and death. It was a $120 disappointment/experiment. Its a hobby and a game and I am grateful and thankful.
Water cooled i76950x OC’d 4.3gz,no HT- Water cooled GTX 1080 8gb- 32gb ram- 1T SSD- 4k display

4 Likes
996

When is DX12 coming to the game? My sim will freeze and sometimes take 30 seconds to come back. i can look at task-manager performance monitor and see that it says “Very High” in red and it does this all the time usually when I least want it to (short final)

997

DX12 also has its drawbacks but works well if done correctly.My main concern is the way it handles vram.Once your vram is full its known to cause a CTD as reported by some P3D V5 users.

998

They say, upon Xbox series one release (that is November 10th)
But i think the release of MSFS for Xbox will be later


999

There is my CPU usage.

i9-9900k (HT off)/32G/2080Ti
Resolution 1080p

A320neo @ Charles de Gaulle airport (gate park 24)

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1000

Make sure to tick the show kernel times. That will be stuff the OS usages and not applications. Your actual game usage is much less than 61%. Use something like Process Explorer to graph actual process CPU usage.

1001

Main problem is usage only one core 100%.
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1002

Thats the mainthread. Not much anyone can do about it till Asobo optimize it by offloading stuff to other threads. From what I see all AI run in the mainthread at the moment. That is kind of stupid