Hoping folks might be able to help with a strange issue I’ve recently started having.
I’ve noticed when doing long flights, after an hour or so my FPS starts to drop drastically.
When I open Radeon Software it shows my GPU fluctuating between 0% up to 80% constantly. It’ll drop to 0-10% for a few seconds and then shoot back up for a second or two before dropping again. This isn’t happening in other games where it stays solidly at 97% plus, so don’t think it’s the card.
Specs Ryzen 7 2700x, 16gb 3200MHz DDR4, Radeon 5700XT- MSFS is installed on an SSD. Running the game on the high-preset with a few ultra settings. Before this issue I was getting roughly 30-40 FPS pretty constantly.
When it happened this evening, I’d just taken off from JFK where I’d suprisingly had decent (>30) FPS.
Got know idea what’s going on and haven’t been able to find similar searching the forum- seen some other people seem to just have constantly low GPU usage.
Sounds like you’re encountering stuttering / CPU usage spikes on the main thread. This can happen as it loads up a bunch of new data when you reach a new area, and has to also de-allocate old data from areas you’ve passed.
When the CPU main thread slows down, this prevents the rendering from using the GPU to render more frames, because the CPU hasn’t prepared data for a new frame yet. Thus your GPU usage will go down.
Once the CPU works itself out and gets back to more reasonable times per frame, the GPU is able to be utilised more consistently.
If you turn on Developer Mode and enable the ‘display fps’ option you’ll see a graph & display of the current frame rate and how long in milliseconds it takes to render a frame on the CPU (main thread, render thread, manipulators thread, and maybe another thread also I forget) and the GPU. I expect if you leave this up during an affected flight you’ll see the main thread times go up to a much higher than usual amount, while render times stay about the same.