General question about updates and CPU bound issues

User Support Hub Hardware & Peripherals
1

This is more of a “maybe someone can fill me in” post than a complaint.

I took a break from MSFS since probably around Xmas of 2022, and just came back. When I was flying before (again, Xmas 2022 and prior) I was able to use the dev FPS monitor and MSI afterburner, and was able to “tweak” my graphics to run the sim very nicely in “the green” on CPU and GPU at 60 FPS. I cap my FPS using Nvidia Control Panel, it’s just what I do with flight sims as that’s a good fps for flying, and capping that frame rate lets the GPU not run wild and allows utilizing the extra headroom to add eyecandy. Lets just say I do this in DCS also, and it works. Anyways, before, I was able to adjust things to get the CPU nice and in the green, and adjust graphics a little here, a little there, pushing the GPU useage up to about 90% and leaving a little headroom for loading complex scenes.

Anyways, the issue I’m asking about, is it now seems no matter WHAT graphics settings I use, I get the “CPU bound” message, and I cannot get FPS above 40 no matter what I do. I mean I have tried everything, and having been on MSFS since day 1, I pretty much know the settings in and out. Even with the overall settings on “low”, same thing. It just will never even achieve 50 fps, and seems that “CPU bound” is the issue everytime.

However, even with what I consider “restricted” FPS, the game is still pretty smooth, with no continual stutters or microstutters, but an occasional single stutter here and there. I was initially irritated because below 60 FPS, and TrackIR was not playing well at all, stuttering. Fixed that by adjusting my speed in TrackIR, so now real worries there now. So it runs pretty smooth, and is playable, even when I set everything to “Ultra” settings.

So my question is, I think I remember they were working to get the CPU “bound” working more smoothly, and I think they’ve done a good job as far as it seems that even with limited FPS, the seem seems smooth. So what has occurred / what did they do to sort of “nerf” the ability to obtain higher FPS by tweaking graphics settings? As stated, I know pretty much what settings are more “CPU intensive” and what affects the GPU, I’m just confounded as to why I am no longer able to tweak the settings to get 60 FPS with CPU in the green, because I could do it before.

There may be some switch or setting somewhere that I am missing. Again, very familiar with other things like how to use Nvidia Control Panel settings, make sure Game Mode is off in windows, all those things.

So is it just me? Are others able to tweak (like I used to) and edge the FPS settings up to obtain 50-60 FPS? It just seems like in order to gain the “smoothness” even when CPU bound, they have done something that affects the ability to tweak the FPS up. Almost as if when it’s “CPU bound” (which it seems like it always is now, no matter the settings) that other settings have no affect whatsover.

System:
Windows 10, I-9900K, 64G Ram, RTX 3080 Ti, running on SSD with 27" single AOC 144hz 1440 monitor (have 3, but not running trips at this time)

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Are you using NVIDIAs DLSS mode for Anti-Aliasing…?

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I’ve tried every combination there is. Same results. When using DLSS mode the dev mode does show that’s it’s “downscaling” and the res it’s downscaling to but it’s upscaling back up to my monitor resolution.

It’s like anything I do has no effect. I’ve seen reports that the dev FPS thing at times is not reporting correctly, especially in DX12, but it reads the same whether in 11 or 12.

And I also run MSI Afterburner, and it’s verifying that the FPS is the same as the dev output scale.

It just seems like it wants to be CPU bound no matter what settings are in there. and even with everything set to “low” it still will not push above 40 FPS. It’s really baffling.

4

Well, it doesn’t want to be CPU bound but becomes CPU bound for some reason. I am able to get 60 fps or near it depending on the aircraft and airport. For example in inibuilds klax, kjfk, no matter what plane I use, I don’t get 60fps, but on light airports I can easily get 60fps even with a plane like fenix a320 and fsltl on top of that, but I am never GPU bound with a 4090. And I have a 5800x3d which is pretty great when if comes to MSFS just behind the latest 7800x3d. But I can imaging the 9900k being quite a few gen older will have some perf disadvantage in that regard.

But what baffles me is that you say that reducing settings to even low has no change in situation or fps. That really indicates towards some other issue in your installation. It may be because of corrupted config, some outdated shader cache which did not got rebuilt for some reason etc. I would suggest resetting all MSFS settings first and checking again. If that doesn’t help, may be clean up the shader caches or clean install your GPU driver. Also check if you have some background process taking away some CPU cycles. Also verify that you are not running out of VRAM for some reason. If nothing works, not sure what else you can try… may be as a nuclear option either reinstalling the whole sim or windows itself if you can afford to do that. Also try this steps without any third-party add-ons first.

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There are over 3,500 combinations of graphics settings, not all of them equally important or impact. If you are changing your graphics settings and have the same results, then it appears there is nothing wrong with your graphics settings. There are many other things both inside and outside of MSFS that impact FPS. You might want to reset your graphics settings to what they were before and look at other things that might affect FPS.

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Thanks for the replies so far, at least you guys understand what I’m getting at. Like Abhish said, I was used to being able to get 50-60 with adjusted settings in what I consider “average” or “normal” areas, not NYC. Even with the 9900K cpu, my build is still rated pretty good and can handle just about everything I throw at it, heck, I can even get 60FPS with DCS with things turned way up now that they opened up MT on that.

So I took the Nuclear option last night, since I had never once uninstalled and reinstalled since I installed on release day. (I wonder if I’m the only one in the world who was still running their original install). I found out one thing, the uninstaller is garbage. Looks like it pretty much left everything in the original folders. So I made a copy of community folder (I only have a H145 helo addon on with the GPS that comes with it, and a small labels mod), and then went and manually deleted the folders in my “apps”, and the steam folder.

Did a clean up to clean up leftover registry entries, etc., and started a reinstall about 2 A.M. Got up at 8 A.M., still going, and finally got done about 9 A.M. I’m off work and just fired it up, and I can see already that using the same airport as last night it’s already 10 FPS higher, and of special note the CPU is down to about 17ms, last night couldn’t get it below 23ms. So I think things are looking up.

Going to spend this evening trying some different settings and aircraft, and looking as the windows “Resource monitor” I can see programs running on the CPU, going to look into what some of those are. Right now nothing glaring sticks out, as I pretty much keep this PC tuned for gaming, with startup items turned off with only the bare necessity loaded. As noted, while I’m certainly no expert, been in the PC gaming since at least the early 90’s, and I’m not terrible at finding how to tune a PC to run a game. Which I had done here previously, which is why this current state of affairs has me a little baffled, that I can’t get that CPU ms down to 13, even when I put everything on low and set the LOD down to 10 it was STILL showing the CPU at 23ms. Like you guys, I believe it may be a setting somewhere that I have wrong on the PC end, but I also believe that some of the tweaking they have done to reduce the lag and stutters everyone else was griping about has also stripped away somewhat the ability reduce the CPU load, made it more difficult. but just knowing you guys can do it tells me it can still be done.

So I’ll be researching and tweaking more this evening. Reinstall seems to have helped, as a 3 year old original installation probably had a lot of junk and bloat. I mean, I NEVER even felt the need to reinstall. I bet I could count the number of crashes on one hand. From the beginning I was pretty much able to tweak, get good FPS with good graphics and stability all the time.

Thanks for the advice so far, I’ll post again, and try to make a list of things I have “set” or “tweaked” on my PC, maybe someone can see something wrong there.

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So in the end, I gained about 10 FPS overall with the reinstall, and did find that I think there’s nothing wrong, when I dropped the LOD’s down to 10, at times I could squeek 60 FPS out of it, and more importantly, get the CPU ms down to 13 at points, getting a green on the CPU binding.

Again, though, along the way somewhere this year, they nerfed the ability to get those CPU ms down I think. However, overall, no matter how heavy I load it down, it does RUN smootthly for the most part, and I guess that’s what peoplel were looking for. I only found it intolerable when going full ultra and maxing the LOD’s out at 2560x1440. At that point the GPU gets saturated.

I can even run 3840x2160 if I wish. It seems that it will run in the 30’s pretty much no matter the resolution and how high I set things (except for maxing out the LOD).

I would rather have more flexibility and options to get that CPU ms down to 13 more easily, but over time I’ll keep tweaking when I’m bored, and I expect maybe at some point they’ll find a way to offload some of that work, maybe to the GPU. Overall, I have plenty of GPU headroom, because as I had mentioned before, my standard with all flight sims is to cap at 60 fps either in game settings or with the NVCP. Doing so gives a lot of GPU headroom, which can be used to get the graphics tuned up higher than I would be able to if I let it run with an uncapped frame rate.

On that subject, If you haven’t already, try capping your FPS at 60, and run something like MSI afterburner and check your GPU headroom at uncapped and capped at 60. Or maybe 30 if you’re happy with 30, as probably a lot of people have to play around there. I might try capping at 30 tonight to see if I can tolerate that, in order to have the headroom to cap out the GPU with candy. If you run other sims, like DCS, capping at 60 works wonders, because THAT sim will have the FPS all over the place if you let it, it’s just robbing you of that headroom. 60 FPS works great there, and slowly adjusting the graphics up and up as you test and watch the Afterburner readings allows one to set those graphics right to the end point of the GPU. I usually shoot for 90% on the GPU, leaving 10% headroom for instances when you hit an area with a heavy graphics load.

Thanks again, I know some of what I’ve been saying might seem “yeah dummy, everyone already knew that”, but remember I was gone for about 8 months, so I’m having to discover and workaround all the changes that were made during that time, where normally I would have taken it in as it happened.

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The sad thing is, after all that effort you’ll come back tomorrow having changed nothing, and performance will be different (worse, or hopefully better) again. It’s a constant chase and battle with this software. Has a mind of its own. Never known anything like it for being temperamental and finicky. Just got to learn to live with it and not be too quick to react. Try again tomorrow and it might be back to “normal”. Glad you are getting acceptable performance now though. Happy flights!

9

So thought I’d come back to this. I just built a new PC, same graphics card 3080ti but now have a Aorus Elite Z790 mobo with a 13900k CPU and 64G of ram (same as before).

With this mobo and CPU, I have been experimenting with other flight sims, especially DCS since it can be a GPU/CPU nightmare, hard on any system.

So Gigabyte mobo’s come with and intersting tweak in the bios, under “Tweaking”, one option is “Disable e-cores”. Being unfamiliar with this, I researched and e-cores are a Intel Gen 12 and above CPU thing, with the “P-cores” for heavy processing and “E-cores” basically for background tasks. No need to go into the specifics, but I decided to give that tweak a go, set the Bios tweak to “Disable e-cores” and BAM! Massive improvement in performance. I don’t have specific numbers, but I swear it’s a magic bullet. I did not that occassionaly there are some little glitches in some third party things I run with DCS, a radio enhancement program called Viacom experiences some “skipping” when the control tower is broadcasting, but nothing major. I’m assuming it’s because that process is more of a “system” process, not sure.

And disabling the E-cores did not work on Elite Dangerous at all. It had graphical anomalies launching.

In IL-2 Sturmovik, I really couldn’t tell the difference since the new CPU and mobo run that like a dream with no tweaks.

Tonight, doing some initial testing with E-cores disabled, I noted no game breakers in FS2020 so far, seems to run just fine, and BETTER!. I tested quite a bit with no bios tweaks, and my system ran the sim OK on the global “Ultra” settings, but FPS seemed to stay in the 50’s and dropped to 30’s on occasion. Disabling the E-cores in bios and it seems that I can now run FS2020 with global settings Ultra and maintain the 60fps I have it restricted to in NVCP as I mentioned in the first post.

So far, it seems to run fantastic with the E-cores disabled. If I think of it I’ll actually run and write down testing numbers using MSI afterburner with the e-cores on and off, in both “High” and “Ultra” global settings, and maybe post a couple of youtube videos with the comparisons.

So for those of you with Intel CPU’s 12th gen and above with e-cores, try disabling the e-cores and see how much that improves performance in FS2020. I’m pretty stoked about it so far.

If your Mobo doesn’t have a one-setting “tweak” to disable e-cores, they can probably be manually disabled in the bios under the “Advanced CPU” options in the bios.

It seems to be hit and miss from what I can tell as to which games this tweak will work on, but so far, FS2020 seems to be one I will be running with the e-cores disabled.

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10

So I did some further testing with Bios tweak set to “E-cores disable”, and tested at JFK around sunset with clouds, and compared it with Bios tweak set to “Optimization” (which is the default for the Gigabyte Aorus mobos).

Sadly, I did not see much difference with E-cores disabled in that scenario. Maybe a slight bit of temp reduction and RAM usage, but not so much as to even make a visible difference.

I still think that I did see a noticeable difference in less intense graphics areas (Richmond Virginia and surrounding countryside) so there still may be something there, but NYC it didn’t seem to make much difference.

It’s probably still worth others trying it out, won’t hurt anything. There is some internet chatter about temps on the CPU increasing, but I didn’t see any real difference, so I don’t know if that’s a valid argument. I do use a liquid CPU cooler however.

It does, however, do wonders in other sims, as I mentioned it’s a magic bullet in DCS, there is a marked improvement in DCS performance and FPS with e-cores disabled on my machine.

I’ll keep messing with it, but I think as far as FS2020 goes, if you’ve got a processor that has e-cores (12th gen and above) you’re already ahead of the game, and the people this might be most beneficial to in FS2020 would be those with slower / older processors, and they don’t have the ability to test it anyways.

SYSTEM
CPU: INTEL 13900K
GPU: EVGA FTW 3080 Ti
RAM: 64 G CORSAIR VENGEANCE RBG
MOBO: GIGABYTE AORUS ELITE X WIFI 7
MONITOR: AOC 27" 144hz
NVIDIA CONTROL PANEL SETTINGS: DEFAULT EXCEPT MAX FPS LOCKED TO 60
ADDITIONAL SOFTWARE RUNNING: TRACKIR, VOICEATTACK, OBS RECORDING, MSI AFTERBURNER MONITOR INGAME OVERLAY, LITTLE NAVMAP

FS2020 SETTINGS:
RESOLUTION: 2560x1440, GRAPHICS SET AS BASE ULTRA SETTINGS
WEATHER PRESET: SCATTTERED CLOUDS
TIME OF DAY: SUNSET
ACFT: HYPE OPERATIONS H145 HELICOPTER

BIOS TWEAK: DEFAULT SETTING (OPTIMIZATION)

RESULTS:
GPU TEMP AND LOAD: 72 DEG C, 70% LOAD
CPU TEMP AND LOAD: 75 DEG C, 88% LOAD (HIGHEST CORE READING)
RAM USAGE: 12000 MB
STUTTERS: OCCASIONAL, TRACKIR FAST STUTTERS LOOKING AROUND
FPS: 37-52 (LOCKED AT 60 IN NVCP)

BIOS TWEAK: E-CORES DISABLED

RESULTS:
GPU TEMP AND LOAD: 69 DEG C, 65% LOAD
CPU TEMP AND LOAD: 70 DEG C, 80% LOAD (HIGHEST CORE READING)
RAM USAGE: 10500 MB
STUTTERS: OCCASIONAL, TRACKIR FAST STUTTERS LOOKING AROUND
FPS: 37-52 (LOCKED AT 60 IN NVCP)