I’m becoming more and more frustrated with GSX. Last 5 flights, it crashed when I went to select the destination airport details, nothing but the spinning progress wheel. Then on the last flight, I couldn’t even start the program sitting at the gate prior to take off, just the dreaded “spinning wheel”. I’ve rebooted between flights, nothing seems to work. The one time it worked in the last 10 days, after completing all the pre-check activities, I selected a pushback that turns me nose right. The pushback tug just kept going straight, pushing me through a concrete wall. End of flight, what a waste of 30 minutes of my life. For me, this thing is nothing more than expensive, buggy AF, bloatware.
It can be quirky and temperamental but most time a reboot of coutal and restart of GSX menu from the nav bar fixes most things, you don’t ever need a sim restart. Are you using GSX profiles for your airports and aircraft? It helps a lot. I like it a lot despite the quirks.
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Since October last year GSX is almost fully integrated with PMDG 737. It can adjust payload and fuel quantity imported from simbrief and do a few other things automatically. Is there any other addon integrated with GSX or PMDG is the only one at the moment?
FlyByWire A32NX is integrated.
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And I think Fenix A320 too with some 3rd party mod. I don’t use that with Fenix though.
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Fenix2GSX freeware is the best integration for any plane. It automates the loading and unloading to make it more realistic, if you’re using Fenix and GSX it’s definitely worth using.
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I’ve noticed quite a big hit in performance especially when boarding, a loss around 5 fps
the hit is taken by the cpu while the gpu is pretty much the same as before activating gsx
recorded this behavior both in dx11 and dx12
is there a way or a workaround to mitigate this? on larger airports it’s not a little hit to take
thanks!
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I’ve noticed this recently as well
And why do you care? Why does 5fps matter when you are sitting at the gate?
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Awesome tool. Seems like GSX should/could do more out of the box.
Wish they would create the same for PMDG!!!
if you’re sitting on 30/34 fps a 5 fps is drop is a huge drop, especially visible when panning around, even if you’re sitting at the gate.
Also, being a hit on cpu and not on gpu is quite surprising
Hence the post above
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Considering how much stuff is happening during boarding, that is dozen of passengers visible at the same time, all animated, with bags being pushed on, I think losing only 5 fps, in a moment where fps doesn’t matter as much as when you are landing, it’s an exceptional result, and a showcase how much GSX objects are optimized, with each vehicle and each passenger usually having at least 5-6 LODs, with up to 8-9 in some cases.
How many fps do you gain by turning AI traffic OFF?
It’s not surprising. It’s an indication of how the objects are carefully modeled for performances, which is why they are not hitting much on GPU, even if they are A LOT of objects with MANY textures.
However, it’s the animations that hit harder on the CPU and, the hit is still very low (again, 5 fps it’s nothing), because the complete GSX LOGIC runs entirely outside the sim, so the only thing that hit the CPU is the management of the animations which happens in the XML behaviors, and you can see it listed as “manipulators” in the fps Debug window.
If GSX ran entirely inside the sim, for example as a WASM module, its impact would be MUCH worse, because all WASM modules runs on the Main Thread, while we are running in a separate .EXE, so it’s Windows itself that will automatically assign the CPU core that is less used so, no matter how complex any logic in GSX would ever be, it will always run in its own separate thread, with no chance to slow down the sim because of its logic.
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Losing 5 FPS with a baseline of 20 is 25% (e.g. massive), with a baseline of 100FPS, it is only 5% (absolutely minor). I wonder why people always talk about absolute numbers instead of relative ones, like this, the statments are totally useless…
Other than that, I fully agree, never had any performance issue with GSX compared to what is going on.
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I think, to be fair, if people have just 20fps then perhaps Flight Sim is beyond their PC’s capabilities. It’s certainly unwise for them to be running additions to the sim that add complexity 
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Any animations in this sim load CPU mainthread. GSX only loads CPU while boarding. You can try either lower the setting for speed of passengers (maybe spreading load a bit) or max the speed of passengers eg. to ‘insane’ which may tax your CPU much more but will load passengers faster so you get the CPU cycles back quicker. You really don’t need extra CPU cycles while sat at the gate, and they generally all free up after GSX boarding is complete so not really sure what the issue is.
If your system is already heavily mainthread limited then perhaps you need to sort that situation out first before using GSX at all. eg. You can also turn down or reduce many other in sim animations of airport traffic, road traffic, worker, shipping densities (I have these all set at 10% or below) and turn down any AI traffic density which will free up considerable CPU resources. This may be more productive than complaining about the temporary (while sat at the gate doing nothing much) GSX perf hit.
Sadly, you don’t get something for nothing in this sim from a perf perspective, it’s all about trade-offs.
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good lord, I’m not complaining or being aggressive though it seems like i stabbed someone’s cat here
since im not a long time user of this product i was asking if this was a normal behavior and there was some kind of optimization/workaround
i quickly came to the solution (tailored for me) to use only pushback at heavy airports since 5 fps it’s a lot if I’m at 30/35; it became quite a pain to set the plane up if it stutters that much, so i had to stop using catering, boarding etc. Other traffic settings are set at 10 (road, ground vehicles and workers).
edit: since there’s also quite a bug thread about performance drop after su14 my doubts was also around historical performances of this addons and if something might have changed after latest SU
I’ve personally not seen any perf related issues with SU14 apart from the rolling cache which gives me issues (FPS drops & stutters) every time it fills up (I do change locations a lot), but this is usually more notable on takeoff or approach & can be fixed by deleting and recreating it every time you change location. (a bit of a pain).
While on the ground GSX is behaving as it always has perf wise for me, no change. AI aircraft (I use FSLTL) is a huge CPU loader that you need to make CPU cycles available for and dial back AI density too. Also TLOD is another huge CPU loader (if not the biggest). I have my TLOD set at 100 specifically for airliner use with AI traffic at big airports. If I fly GA I move it back to 200 or something more appropriate.
The 5FPS GSX loss should only be temporary while boarding passengers runs and perhaps a bit while baggage is loaded/unloaded too. The key thing is the FPS comes back after that is done ie before pushback. You can easily set up a flight in the cabin with 20-25FPS. If there are tears appearing try messing with VSYNC and locking FPS to fractions of refresh rate. That usually leads to some smoothness for me. I run most of the time at 120Hz RR and 33% VSYNC (target 40FPS), but other combinations are possible too.
If the baseline is 20 fps, it means a system is already so much stressed out (or the hardware is just not up to task), that if you want to add GSX to it, you should use whatever setting that could help reducing its impact, which are:
- Setting the Passengers Density to the lowest levels.
- If you are using a GSX airport profile with many VGDS, use the option to Disable Static models, which will create only the one for the gate you selected, not the inactive ones on the rest of the airport.
- Since all GSX vehicles have many LOD levels, using the “Scenery Objects LOD” slider in the MSFS settings can be highly effective.
- If you are on a default airport, Disabling the GSX replacement jetways might help.
Wait, there’s already a huge difference, depending on your settings and your hardware (your video card + monitor, basically), between 35 and 30 as your baseline.
If your monitor can’t do Variable refresh rate (GSync or Freesync), you should definitely lock your frame rate to 30 which means, if your baseline was 35, and GSX is taking 5 fps, you won’t see any difference, because you are locked at 30.
Of course, with GSync/Freesync, it’s quite different, because you might notice a 5 fps drop but, the simulation would stil be smooth, even if it might even drop slightly under 30 fps. HOWEVER, there’s a bit of a caveat here and, as they say, the devil is in the details:
The official VESA Adaptive Sync standard has a minimum refresh rate of 30 hz. Freesync and G-Sync “Compatible” monitors, which are all based on VESA Adaptive Sync, won’t go lower than this, which means the moment you drop below 30 fps, it will look very bad and stuttery.
It’s only the G-Sync/G-Sync Ultimate certified monitors that can go down up to 1Hz, and are usually more expensive, both because they must pay a license to NVidia, but mainly because they have extra hardware to do that. With this hardware, even a momentary drop to, let’s say, 28-29 fps, wouldn’t be noticeable.
This is another issue, which is also important: all GSX animations are driven by the sim, because they are synchronized to the actual frame rate, and MSFS will “call back” GSX through Simconnect at every frame, so GSX can run its animations, move its vehicles, etc.
So, MSFS itself, it’s like a “metronome” for GSX. If MSFS gets stuttery, which means it has a longer frame time (you are running 30 fps, but not ALL frames are spaced exactly 33.3msec apart), it will affect GSX as well, because it would be called later.
MS promised several performance improvements in SU15 so, if they work as expected, it should benefit all add-ons, since lots of them are synchronized to the Visual Frame rate for many things.
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