Frame Rate Drops - Probably My Fault

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I wonder if anyone could give me any advice on graphics, please.

First thing, I’ll be up-front and say I’m running FS on a spec that doesn’t meet the minimums, so of course I appreciate the answer may well be “upgrade or live with it”. Upgrading, unfortunately, is “economically non-viable” at present - I spent what I could to get my PC so it would run FS at all and, for much of the time, if I’m doing quite short flights, the frame rate is acceptable to me. It very occasionally nudges 30 fps, mostly hanging around somewhere between about 22-26. Intolerable for many people, I’ve no doubt, but like I say it’s fine for me.

The bottleneck, I think, is an old GFX card - I’m running a GTX 960 which has limited onboard memory and I think this is what’s causing the problem. Obviously the card’s running maxed out pretty much all the time, but it works okay. Periodically the fps will drop to around 12-15, sometimes lower, for a handful of seconds, before going back up to 25-ish. I can live with that. But, on a longer flight (I did ~ 95 naut. miles in the G1000 172 today), those periods seem to get longer and more frequent - by the end of my flight today I was rarely seeing above 15 fps.

So like I say, appreciating the obvious answer is “you get what you pay for”, and further assuming that it’s something to do with the GPU memory (since when it’s running fine it, well, runs fine), are there any settings that I can tweak (since the actual graphics settings don’t seem to make much difference) that might reduce the load on the memory, if that is indeed the problem?

Or, if it clearly isn’t the problem and I just have no idea how PCs work (I don’t - they might as well be running on goblin magic, for all I know), do you have any thoughts on what else, if anything, might help?

Thank you.

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First thing I would advise is to enable developer mode, that will tell you whether you are CPU (main thread) or GPU limited.
If you are GPU limited it could be as you suspect the amount of VRAM, My pc originally had an R9 2GB VRAM GPU in it, and for £100 I upgraded to an AMD Saphire Nitro plus RX570 with 8GB of VRAM, which I have overclocked, and I have 16GB of RAM. Really made a huge difference to FSX, and that now enables me to run MSFS at high settings at 30fps.

For what it’s worth, I’m usually using up to 7GB VRAM and 11GB RAM in game.

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Thank you. I do mean to upgrade when I can - I’m conscious there’s only so much that can be done to optimise on sub-standard kit - but it’s not possible just now. But I will have a look at developer mode and see what it tells me. Thanks for the tip. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I can share your pain.

I run MSFS on a lenovo ideapad 330 laptop (i7-8750, 20gb of ram and a GeForce GTX1050 4gb). Definately choked by the graphics card. Am getting around 22FPS consistently but I also drop after a longer flight. I find 22FPS ok.

The last flight I had was LA to Boeing Field in the Bonanza as part of my Round World flight; on approach was down to 9FPS - I can definately say that 9fps is unflyable! Got the plane down and there were tears on the runway which I think were related to my low frames, hit one, crashed! Gutted!

These are my settings if it helps.

settings1
settings11920×1080 289 KB
settings2
settings21920×1080 302 KB

This is also a good post explaining how to optimise settings…

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Hi

As well as the advice already given - check what your settings for other air traffic are and try turning all off. It has been reported that over time tracking AI traffic seems to build up and bog down your system eventually leading to quite drastic FPL loss. And it’s not graphics related…

Good explanation by N6722C below. I have experienced this too, but didn’t figure out what was going on.

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That’s great - thank you very much. On an initial glance through your settings look pretty similar to mine but I’ll do a proper comparison later when I get a sec. I appreciate the link - I’ll have a read through.

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That’s interesting - I’d never thought about that. I think I have some AI traffic on - I know I did try it briefly with the real-world traffic setting which was a cool idea; but I think I flicked it back to generated. I’ll make sure it’s all off. It’s not really important to my experience - just more stuff to run into. :grin:

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Yep same exactly! I have a pretty high end rig and usually good FPS. Was baffled by the drop off over a long flight (… I don’t do that many). This was exactly the problem I ran into. Good luck sorting it out!

Great work by N6722C

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So I’ve been running developer mode - interesting feature; it’s not something I’d ever thought to touch before because I have a habit of breaking stuff. But it looks like my suspicion was right: there’s 1,600-1,700Mb memory on my GPU and during a short flight up in the Lake District in the UK the sim was trying to shove around 2,500 Mb in there and everything was very red. That certainly seems to be where the bottleneck is: the CPU memory isn’t even running at half (CPU memory? I presume that’s the RAM I have installed as it’s showing ~16Gb).

That said, I did also try the GeForce Experience app (clicking through the message that said, “Your computer’s terrible; you’re going to have all on trying to run this” :laughing:). Between that and a couple of tweaks in dev mode I actually had it running at 30+, and it even broke 40 fps a few times. I did try disabling Volumetric Atmospheric Effects from the dev menu which unfortunately took the clouds away completely (probably obviously - kind of in the name there); but they can at least be switched on and off quite easily if you want to take pictures, etc. And, to be honest, whatever else I’ve done seems to have it running reasonably okay just now. I’ll try it on a longer flight tomorrow and see if there’s any gradual degradation.

In the meantime, thank you for your replies and suggestions, I really appreciate it. :slightly_smiling_face:

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