Thank you BragRaindrop933 and KevinSull.
Your advice and knowledge are very gratefully received. Now I have a little more understanding of the pitfalls and idiosyncrasies with MSFS, I think I may be better placed to tackle them with a different approach.
Agree with you this scenario with MSFS is bizarre and they should bottom this out.
@Grabber523 explained it all to me in detail and his techniques are a game changer.
I’m trying to find the thread for you👍
I go optimise my system for those areas then it works better elsewhere. The 30FPS trick is fairly key to fluidity in the sim for me. (see Pilot Pete video I linked to much earlier). I then sit parked in an airliner say at Heathrow and optimise graphics settings for all green/yellow in the dev mode FPS counter. 30FPs gives me a GPU sitting at 70% utilisation and a buttery smooth fluidity to it all. Even on takeoff/landing. You do get occasional blips in visuals with FS, everyone does, but the stutters panning around on takeoff from/landing at Heathrow say are gone for me. Lots of people seem to make the mistake of chasing FPS thinking higher FPS is better but 30FPS continuous is so smooth it feels more than 30FPS. Getting 60FPS above clouds and 25FPS on takeoff and landing are really not desirable performance wise for me. I rarely check my FPS/performance stats any more.
I have a similar rig, 10850K and 3080 and 3440x1440 resolution monitor. I agree 100% that our 3080’s are too powerful for MSFS at the current CPU usage. I constantly see limited by main thread unless I push the render scale up above 150% to get the GPU working harder. The CPU is what feeds the GPU so a bottleneck on the CPU cascades to the juddering we are seeing.
There is a great forum post on how to set up the system but the basics are:
Start at a very high resource usage area such as KJFK. Turn down the high CPU load items and turn up the GPU load items, once you get the GPU loaded then slowly increase the CPU load to an acceptable level and test out the system. In the end the biggest CPU loaded items are LOD and the biggest GPU loaded item is render scale.
Agree he is the man who enlightened us all. Without his investigative background & knowledge we’d all still be stuttering along in FS!
Yeah I must look at this. Did you cap ingame via vsync or through nvidia control panel?
Must check out that video
yes this exactly. The only other tip is the 30FPS trick in the video I posted previously. The balancing of CPU/GPU utilistaion exactly as you describe there in one paragraph (much more concisely than me) is absolutely key.
Thanks also O5BEASTMODE76. Very clear explanation.
Interestingly, things smoothed out considerably when Adaptive Boost Technology (ABT) was enabled in the BIOS but at the cost of stability (lock ups / reboots). This would correlate with what is being said about CPU bottleneck as effectively this gives a higher clock speed and thus more CPU cycles.
Why ABT crashes the system is another topic (in another thread) and is something I will pursue in parallel.
Its all in that video, but if you want the shortcut version it’s -
NVCP 3D Settings (reset all settings first)
Low Latency Mode - ON
Power management Mode - MAX PERFORMANCE
Preferred refresh rate -highest available
Texture Filtering Quality - high performance
VSync - use 3D app setting
NVCP Change Resolution
set res of display and 60Hz for 30FPS
IN FS Graphics Options
VSync - ON
Frames - 30
This on top of Grabber’s CPU/GPU load balancing tips made the sim buttery smooth for me. The video is worth a watch though. One key point is monitor refresh rate. Game at 30FPS and refresh rate needs to be locked at 60Hz. Higher refresh rates are no need for FS and just uses more GPU power and resources up for no reason. Stutters can come from sync issues where monitors have too high refresh rates. Whole number multiples of game FPS I think are better than fractions so 140Hz/160Hz monitor isn’t a whole multiple of 60FPS or 30PFS so the sync will struggle to sync at that fractional ratio. Whole ratios (1x, 2x are better and smoother and less resource intensive for syncing. At least I think that’s how it goes!
I also have HAGS set to OFF
I tried overclocking my CPU, even at a stable all core 4.9 OC I did not see anything really improve other than maybe 1-2 FPS, in the end I set the CPU back to default. Unless Asobo optimizes the CPU usage I don’t think it is going to matter what the clocks are and it is going to be the most stable at stock speeds anyway. It is amazing that everyone with a 1080ti GPU is always sooo smooth but those of us with a newer/better GPU are hindered by it.
Your a gent! Just watching the clip.
Probably too new a feature. Seems like a CPU boost frequency (overclock?). I would also check that your motherboard has latest bios update too as new technology is always evolving along with the software that supports it. sadly i know nothing about this feature though. maybe windows 11 needs correct drivers to make it happen too? latest Intel drivers installed? Intel has it’s own driver support app via website which is always faster than waiting for vendor released drivers.
It’s a lot simpler than some other replies explained. The CPU and GPU have to coordinate at least once per frame in order to draw the screen. One of them always finishes first; dev mode labels the other one as limited. (This is true with vsync off - maybe if vsync is on, then you can be in a “neither limited” state because everything is idling waiting for the next frame?)
VSync is about synchronising your game’s frame rate with your monitor’s refresh rate. Not sure what that has to do with CPU/GPU interactions.
If both my gpu and cpu take 14ms to render a frame with 60fps v-sync on, then there is 2.6 ms of dead time per frame (60fps = 16.6ms frame time), so the framerate is limited by neither (edit, sorry OP, offtopic now)
Sorry you’ve lost me. How does this tie in with balancing CPU and GPU loads to prevent mainthread limiting and reduce stuttering?
I haven’t seen anyone mention RAM. Can be something always overlooked for a new prebuilt PC. Check the UEFI to make sure XMP is enabled, and if you want to dive into a college course depth of info, you can find out online how to configure its timings to its most optimal performance. It’s not overclocking as much as getting the timings dialed in for your individual silicon’s ability.
I also find that when I am flying in a new area, no matter what, there are going to be a few hitches. The simulator is downloading terrain info and storing them in a cache. I minimized this by increasing my roaming cache to an insane amount like 40 Gb. You should be fine with 10Gb really.
Would it make sense to lower the resolution and then increase the render scaling? I ask cause I run the sim in 2160p (on a 2160 TV screen without freesync) and my graphic card is almost idling too.
If you are running at 4K I doubt you need to increase render scale. I have most graphical settings on high/ultra but the TLOD down a bit to keep CPU less mainthread limited.
It also depends on where you measure the figures. Go to a graphically busy place. I use Heathrow (static parked is fine) as it is dense scenery with London loading in probably too. Others have mentioned JFK for same purpose. You do this to get worst case scenario graphically speaking then do the tuning. If you optimise for here then everywhere else will be just fine. Preferably in a graphically complex airliner rather than in a simple (graphically) cessna 152 for example.
I dont read every post here word by word, so thats my 2cents:
Add second m.2 for msfs install only, maybe a third for caches.
3080 is ok but limited in ram so in excessive geometrie/photogrammetry areas it will start paging.
Nvc-panel: Its wrong to set it to max performance. Use balanced instead. Max causes stutters and ctd. Sound weird and I need to test it (recommendation comes from an serious youtuber) by myself and to my surprise my gpu is working much more relaxed now with now loss of fps. At least try and compare here. My 3090 is running now at 70-80% average load with som spikes into the nineties and imho these spikes causes problems when the card is already forced to the max.
Good luck!