Graphics Sanity Check

Hello,

I’m having a bit of trouble figuring out what is going on with my graphics. I have an Intel i7-7700K clocked at 5.0 GHz, 32 GB DDR4 running at 3200 MHz, EVGA Geforce RTX 2070 SUPER XC clocked at… something above stock, and running MSFS off of a Samsung 960 Pro 512 GB into a 2560x1440 display. It runs most things quite well and indeed after the 1.9.5 patch I have been getting 40-50 FPS with every setting maxed out. Something strange has happened though I think where it suddenly seems… like not only are the graphics worse but the performance is worse, too. What’s especially interesting is that 1.9.5 at first seemed wildly better for me and then it… degraded… somehow. I haven’t a clue as to why or how this would be possible so let me walk you through what I did:

  1. Hit “repair” in Settings > Apps; no change.
  2. Hit “reset” in Settings > Apps which apparently reinstalls the game more or less. No change.
  3. Hit “uninstall” in Settings > Apps which for sure uninstalls the game. Went back into Windows Store and redownloaded it. No change.
  4. Said to hell with it and wiped my desktop and installed with a fresh Windows 10 Pro ISO. Was previously on 2004, currently on 20H2. Installed nothing other than drivers and MSFS 2020. No change.

Throughout all of this I would check GeForce Experience to make sure it didn’t overwrite my settings (it didn’t). I checked Nvidia Control Panel to make sure all the settings were default (they were). I was running GeForce 456.71 both before and after reinstalling Windows.

The reason I’m calling it a “sanity check,” though, is that I can’t actually tell if the graphics were objectively better previously (1.9.3 and whatever was immediately before that; I’ve only been playing for a couple weeks) as I don’t have any pictures. I few around Tokyo quickly (yes, all of the additional content has been installed) and took these screenshots.

Could someone possibly take a look and confirm that this is abnormal or not? I’m hoping someone has a similar setup where they could be like “ah, nope, that looks awful” or “yeah, that’s basically what I’m getting”. If it is abnormal, any suggestions as to what could have happened or how to possibly “correct” it would be appreciated. Thank you.

Edit: Just kidding, I can only put one picture in here because I’m new. This is maybe the most useful one.

One thing to double check…
Click on your avatar and make sure it’s still connected to a server. Sometimes I change servers and then go back to my preferred one.
After that go into the data options and make sure all three of the online options are turned on. I’ve had the game turn one off occasionally for some reason.
Regards

Probably a long shot … but if you’re using AI traffic, see this thread:

I was having a similar FPS degradation on longish flights (1hr plus), pulling my hear out, and sure enough - turn off AI traffic and wham! back to 40-50 fps throughout the flight…

Probably only one of many possibilities, but it never for a moment crossed my mind.

I’ve seen others on here report better fps by disabling the VFR map from the top menu.

Check this thread Graphics setting with excellent results in 2560x1440 about actually limiting your fps in the Nvidia Control Panel. I had 7700k (recently upgraded to 10500k) and still have a stock 1080. Set my fps limit to 35 and and it made it a HUGE difference… silky smooth 99% of the time even if the frame rate drops below that. All settings maxed except super sampling off… couldn’t tell any difference between off or 8x8 so kept it off.

Your pic looks OK, but not great. The radio tower especially. I will go there and post waht I am seeing shortly, but in the meantime here are my settings if they help (rig is i9 10900K, 32Gb RAM, RTX 2808 super):




I also have made changes to nVidia control panel - I don’t know if they make much difference though:

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OK, so here is my version. This is in 2K. If you can convert your PNG to JPG, the file size will be smaller and the forum will accept it at 2K - at the moment your pic is at 1280x720, so makes comparison hard.