What kinds of planes are you loading?
It is common after an update for 3rd party planes to have to, for lack of a better term, unpack again. This is also common the first time you load a new 3rd party plane.
Once loaded the first time after an update, you should not need to wait like that again… until the next update, or until that specific plane is patched.
I’ve always been a gamer on the consoles and the very reason I bought a Series X was FS. Haven’t had my hands on it since I tried it the first time back in 2002 so I was very excited when I heard it was coming on console.
And the next thing you know. The stuttering, the crashes etc. Extremely low FPS especially when moving the camera around. I get way below 20 maybe even 10.
The preparation for my flights happens in stress and worry that it might shut down any second. And if I do make it to my destination almost certainly it crashes not too long after I pull up to the gate.
What is this seriously?
The experience on Xbox Series X is not much better than what OP desscribed. I don’t even want to think about Series S…
Using real world weather, and online players stutters and CTDs on dense areas are inevitable. Flying around London for example it’s guaranteed to result in a crash if you fly for long enough, or arrive there after a 45m/1h flight.
I’ve been staying away from airline flying for now, as I can’t bring myself to use the stock A320 when on PC the A32NX and CRJ exist, so I’ve been focusing on military sorties using the MB339 and F-14, so that usually means avoid densely populated areas, and I found that the sim is a lot more stable, and overall a much better experience.
I think turning off live weather and traffic increases the “chances of survival” but it takes away a lot of the fun in my opinion.
At least the loading times are more acceptable. Usually a few minutes is enough, and we don’t have to do anything with the xbox app, and updates and such are usually reasonably smooth.
I started having a lot of CTDs after SU8 and had very few before that. I did a complete sim reinstall (yes, all 180GB) and it stopped the CTDs for me….maybe it was a coincidence, not sure, but it was worth the 4 hours of download and few minutes to reset graphics. And load times for a flight are maybe 1 minute from world map to runway (with live traffic and live weather on). With you having 15 min to 30 minute load times, I might try to put a fresh install of the sim on a new SSD (or perhaps see how full the existing SSD is as they get very slow and can have problems when they are 80% or more full). I truly hope you can get this sorted as your specs are very strong on hardware. Can you let us know if you have tried a full sim reinstall and/or checked the health of the SSD. I presume yes given the experience you have for so many years with sims and PCs but thought it worth mentioning. Best of luck and sorry to hear of the problems, I read a lot of forum posts and can’t recall seeing someone have flights take 15-30 minutes to load so it could be a problem with the drive or a bugged file deep inside windows 10/11 or MSFS and maybe worth a last ditch reinstall of windows, the sim and a new SSD.
To the OP and others with similar issues. My experience using sims and current rig are very similar to yours. I’m positive you have something else going on with your rig settings or sim settings, and that your issues aren’t the sim itself. I get solid performance with similar CPU/GPU rates as yours. I have my rig locked at 45fps and have zero stutters/ctds etc. Do some research, not only here but throughout any sources such as YouTube, Google, etc. The answer is out there and I wish you luck finding it.
Ps. I’d suggest searching for Nvidia settings for your card for msfs first and go from there.
this is why consoles appeal to so many - people don’t have to know how to mesh hardware and drivers and operating systems and optimize and debug and understand routers and security software and then learn how to optimize sim programs to then run on their PC’s
This is also why MSFS ended up (or was rather intended from the start) as an Xbox title. Flight sims are complex - PC’s are complex - the average Joe is not. This is why the tone of this forum concerns me.
If the PC users continue to be explosively impatient with this product (especially when the problem is on their end) it will accelerate the eventual move to console only development, saving the developers time - money - and especially aggravation.
I’ve done this. But thank you for suggesting. I’ve also installed FS on 2 other PCs for friends. Both have issues. One moreso than me.
And as for the person who said that the diversity of pc configs may lead to instability, then we should see pristine stability and performance on the standardized Xbox. Which we are not. Clearly there is something wrong.
And happy to hear you’ve solved your problem with a reinstall. But one of my friends did it too and it solved their issues somewhere at su5 or 6. But the issues we’re back after the next update. And. Reinstalling 180gb every month is not sustainable. Especially for this of us who have data caps. I have fibre at 150mbps but only 250gb each month. Haha. So, it’ll be very expensive and troublesome to reinstall continuously. But I’ve tried
If there’s an issue with file corruption during updates maybe they can create a file checker tool like windows SFC or DISM tool to run diagnostics and repair. That would be totally workable for a while even.
Anyway thank you.
I realize that MSFS is a very complex program. It is unquestionably the most complex one I’ve ever had on my laptop. With that complexity, I would expect some glitches and problems learning to use it. That said, this Christmas I got the new MS game, Halo Infinite. It must be close to 50 GB and runs on both XBox and PCs. It is the second largest program I have even loaded on my PC. It took weeks for me to play through and I only encountered one minor glitch toward the end of the game. I had to do no tweaking of settings, no searching for work-arounds, no controller or mouse problems, no CDTs, no stuttering, no loss of control of the movement of the character and vehicles, no asking forums for glitch help, etc. I just starting to use this new MSFS release so my experience with it is only an hour or so. I’m really just “wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’…” all will work now. (reference Dusty Springfield)
Interesting post.
Love the new Halo!
Worth noting 343 had around twice the number of people working on it as Asobo did for MSFS, and it was held back from release for a year. It would have launched with MSFS on PC had it met its date. Something had to meet the holiday release schedule for Microsoft. COVID had hit. The new console was dropping. And everything else was getting pushed back.
Also, Halo is not exactly a groundbreaking game on the technical end, not like say, streaming live data to flesh out the world around you as you play. But you acknowledged as much in your post.
It is why I say over and over, it comes down to manpower. Asobo is doing AAA things with a team that is rather AA in size, and it tends to show around the edges when we have to wait for fixes and whatnot. They’re breaking major new ground in gaming right now so things take longer. They don’t have other examples to guide them and learn from. This is the first world simulator with real time, photorealistic graphics, and real time weather, in a living online world shared between XBOX and PC.
You’d think a team of thousands worked on it, but it is more like 1,000 counting contractors and whatnot. So that’s like every person with a name that has been paid for their work on MSFS. The folks who would show up in the credits. Folks at Bing and XBOX Games Studios. Voice actors. Anyone who ever touched the game and was paid.
Asobo core staff is around 210-225, and a third of them (at least) are working on the next Plague’s Tale game. Everyone else is divided between world and system updates, working with Microsoft and third parties, working on expansion content… etc. it really is a surprisingly small team and you could eventually learn to call everyone by their first name.
And I just don’t think that’s going to change over at Asobo. Not unless they start working on yet another game and need more staff. XBOX Games Studios produced this so they likely budgeted for a team this size and MSFS has released on both PC and consoles already. A game’s popularity is front loaded so it has already brought them the majority of its money. It makes little sense to spend more on this project at this point by significantly increasing the size of the team. These staffers now support the software and keep it alive and well, like a MMORPG.
So, we get a sense of how fast things move with this team. And they, for their size, get things done at a logical pace.
And just for scale, Rockstar had around 1,000 on staff working on RDR2 by the time it released.
Manpower fixes bugs quickly. Manpower releases stable and bug free. Asobo doesn’t have the manpower to compete with the likes of 343 or Rockstar while working on a game of similar or larger scale and scope.
I would love a team of thousands working on MSFS and sometimes it is worth remembering Asobo already IS the largest team to ever work on a commercial flight sim. They swung for the fences. The sim is already groundbreaking. They still have their work cut out. They know it. Microsoft knows it. That’s why they hired a team so large to keep working on it for so long after release.
OMG! I get so much of what you are saying there! Windows Phone 8 was the best phone OS ever, but MS wrecked it so hard, omg. They kind of had to, it was like Beta vs VHS. They made a better way, but it required developers to adopt and the market share just wasn’t there. WP8 did things I still wish Android and Apple could do. 
I have some episodes where it takes me an hour to get the sim running. But I think MSFS will do better than Windows Phone.
We could also add in the Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback Joystick to another amazing Microsoft product that was killed off too soon.
January 26 Q&A session, Martial said (about 1:03:00 in the program) that load “time will be divided by two at least”. So long load times is being worked on.
I have no stutters, just flew 45 minutes, not one stutter, smooth study fps. Last Q&A (March 2) at 28:06: Sebastian talked about a new feature coming sometime that will read out more than the developers mode fps window does now. It will show resources load at many different subsystems of the simulation engine. So if someone has stutters or fps drops at a certain point then they can stop and take a screenshot while that resource window is showing. The user, or the MS team will know where the bottleneck is exactly.
I must really be lucky bc I’m running a pretty basic system and my sim runs just fine and always has on High settings and with no issues after any of the updates. I don’t know why so many people are having so many problems.
Could we, instead of venting our own frustrations, giving theories about why everything is so bad, and threatening to wipe the sim, try to help the op?
Don’t want to sound silly, but what have you tried already? Have you for example renamed your community folder? Are you up to date with all your drivers? Are you running many add ons or maybe a different scenery mod that may not be named? Have you looked into Nvidia experience center to see if you are automatically optimizing, which you should immediately de-activate? Did you check your graphics settings as SU8 seems to have reset these for some. Do you run dx12?
experience ie very good on the s , smooth flight everywhere, not have had any ctd’s..
i dont use 3rd party scenery, but i bought quite a few aircraft, all work ok.
so as usual experience differ enormously for this game.
To OP, In addition to what GhostlyFrend indicated try the following:
All versions - Loading issues - Checklist – Microsoft Flight Simulator Support (zendesk.com)
All versions - Long loading screens – Microsoft Flight Simulator Support (zendesk.com)
I agree. I have a similar, slightly less powerful system (5600X, 6800XT, 32 GB RAM, 100Mbs fibre to the home, 2 *1TB fast Nvme drives with MSFS on the separate D drive) and yet, in 2D at least, get stellar performance on all ultra and very few CTDs (VR is another matter, although VR CTDs aside, I get decent performance on a mix of high and lower settings with a G2 headset). My load times seem annoyingly long though despite both drives having plenty of space (indeed the D drive load is very light on start up as is CPU load) 5 minutes with an empty community folder and 6 1/2 minutes with my current list of scenery and aircraft. Nothing like half an hour though, I’ve never had that.
There definitely seems to be some underlying problem with the OP’s system that is causing him such grief, at least with MSFS. Perhaps a quick benchmark using something like User Benchmark may throw up an underperforming bottleneck in his system? Testing my rig just now, all my components were ranked as performing above expectations.
Totally agree and I would love Xbox to be perfectly compatible because I have enjoyed and benefited from the input they have put in. It obviously needs massive resource to make it the same but possibly less to make it work the same but in a different way. A complete start from scratch that MS and Asobo should have done may still be the best solution, I honestly dont know the way ahead but I hope someone finds it.
When I saw this sim was being resurrected I could not wait to get it and I am very glad I did, please don’t let it get buried again.
Ezar VIII, you speak my heart 100% with everything!!
And Asobo/MS should first repair everything, stabilize everything technically correctly and then only continue with WU !!
Not renamed community. Have run empty and with nods. Mods I use are FBWA32NX, Airport lights (because Msfs doesn’t have lights at non handcrafted airports), and pushback tool bar because there is no proper in sim pushback system, and about 3 liveries for the fbw aircraft. I rarely experience crashes in the a32nx it usually happens in a stock aircraft like the 747 and c172.
Don’t use geforce experience and will not do.
Graphics settings checked.
Nvidia control panel optimized vstnc on gsync on (gsync capable display) frame rate limited to 45fps, power set to maximum performance and threaded optimization on.
DX 11 used. DX12 was unstable for me in SU7 and since it’s beta I didn’t. But I could check this.
I restart the pc everytime I run Msfs so it’s fresh.
System is clean enough that I get zero percent CPU usage if left to idle.
Ram tested.
Plus, I have actually never had windows crash on me with this system which in its current configuration is over 1.2 years old. Which for me with my experience with windows is quite frankly amazing!
If you have any other suggestions please tell me. I am happy to try anything.
And thanks for taking the trouble to reply. Really appreciate it.