Flight sims have always been demanding on PC hardware much more than typical games. You can look back at the forums of all the other sims and see similar complaints about not being able to run at max settings and resolution and simmers wishing for better hardware to finally run it with all the bells and whistles.
To run the sim well, you have to adjust the settings to find the sweet spot for your hardware. Too many posts about people trying to run 4k ultra and expecting everything to be perfect.
I get it. You bought the most expensive PC and you need to feel validated. Maybe starting at lower graphics settings and gradually turning up things may be the solution for many. This is not a contest.
With regards to GPUs, it’s simply not the case that a higher number on your card means linear improvement on performance. The 30xx series cards can push more pixels per frame but are not that much faster than the lower series cards. Moore’s law is flattening out.
Ultra, high, medium and low are just labels. They don’t imply a fixed level of performance and visual quality. Each update will change things under the hood, sometimes adding new features that place more load on the sim. Sometimes, they take things away. That is what optimization in gaming really means, reducing rendering load to improve performance. Ideally, everything looks the same, but sometimes we can see degradation.
Maybe along with posters listing hardware specs, they can also list previous flight sims they have flown. It may be enlightening to see if long time simmers are more or less satisfied than new simmers.
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Sometime, the super ultra-wide screens that have 32:9 aspect ratios are bascially 2 physical panels in one bezel. In a sense, it’s basically like having 2 screens. But as far as the sim is concerned, that’s only a single screen running 1920x1080x2 pixels (assuming it’s 1080p).
The problem is that people USED to be able to run this sim at ULTRA with good frame rates back at launch and for the few ensuing months. It looked fantastic and ran well. Stutters have always been an issue to some degree, but overall, higher frame rates were the norm.
Then starting with the VR update in December, each subsequent major update seems to have chipped away at that performance level.
There are definitely folks who have their expectations set way too high and thought throwing money at top of the line, bleeding edge hardware would get them a smooth, consistent 60+ fps at 4K ultra, and they complain if they don’t get that. But a large number of players have much more realistic expectations. They just want the sim to look and perform the way it did when they first bought it at launch.
THe MSFS experience (in terms of looks and performance) is seriously degraded since launch.
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Just to confuse things…if you are rendering the game fullscreen on 1 monitor the gpu only really has to push Windows Desktop Experience fancies on the other monitors (and you can turn those off) so the overhead of multiple monitors AT PRESENT isn’t that high for reasonably modern GPU’s.
What the pop out windows do if they are dragged over to another monitor is a bit of grey area at present but hypothetically thats just a 2d space and it might treat the pop out box as the res that the box is sitting at rather than full screen.
With all the changes made since launch, it’s understandable that ultra is now more demanding than it was back then.
I use the popout instruments for my cockpit setup. They seem to be 2D rendered separately from the main sim window. I lose a couple of fps (negligible) when the first instrument is initially undocked. There’s little to no penalty for undocking more or moving them to another screen as long as you don’t have the dumb screen scaling options selected on the EXE file. Those settings will murder your frame rate with undocked instruments.
It wasn’t always that way though. Initially, undocking instruments and panels caused a huge fps hit. On my system, it was 10 fps for the first, and 3-5 fps for any subsequent window. They seem to have fixed that a few months ago with the rendering engine updates that came wiht the VR update.
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so strange at the various experiences. I have a default Alienware installed on a dedicated SSD with a 2080 Super, 32GB Ram and a 50in 4k TV @ 4k and it runs smooth. Im not a frame chaser and do not even look at what I’m getting. It just runs completely fine.
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Being more demanding is one thing. But going from 50+ fps to struggling to maintain 20 fps on a 10900k + 3090 is neither normal or acceptable.
I don’t have a system anywhere near that beefy, but many people with said hardware are experiencing serious performance issues where previously their only complaint was microstuttering.
Even with my Ryzen 2700X and RTX2080, I was able to run near 50 fps @ Ultra at launch. Now I struggle to hit 30 fps. Wold Update 3 was the real killer for me though, robbing me of 15 fps. Even after last week’s patch, I’m still unable to see the same level of performance I was seeing before SU3.
I find it curious that so many describe 25 fps to be “unflyable”. My system consistently delivers around 20-22 fps with High-End settings and I find it beautiful and a joy to fly. Even down in the high teens the sim is absolutely immersive. Would I like 50+fps? Sure! Am I going to chuck the whole thing for 20 fps? Nope!
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Those are going for north of $1,000 right now. Course, 2070 Supers are going for north of $800, so for a $200 delta, I might be willing to make that upgrade. But when you’re dealing with ebay, there are no guarantees that you can actually pull something like that off. But now you’ve actually got me thinking… Is it really worth $200 for the performance delta between a 2070 Super and a 2080ti, and given that my 2070S is really pretty good in all but the most scenery dense environments (in VR, which is what I care about), would I even notice…
Things that make you go hmmmmm…
It’s not unflyable. But if that’s your baseline / average level, you inevitably will come across busy areas that will drop you in the teens. At that point, it’s not very enjoyable for most at best, and unplayable for others at worse - depending on how low it drops and the tolerance levels for low frame rates of the user. The higher average / baseline, the higher the lows will be and the better the experience will be.
At launch, I never say frame rates under 30 fps and it was glorious. I miss that immensely.
The core voltage is set to 1.36 at 5.01ghz and the idle temperature jumps ranges between mid 70s and low 80s but then lowers to 51. 3% cpu utilization. It just keeps jumping up and down until I sim where it reaches an average of 75-80 but reaches 100
Can you sell me your RTX 3090 & let me try for myself on my rig ?
@Valkenswaard, actually the universe does have a frame rate. (That’s one of the reasons I think we’re literally living in a digital simulation of some kind.) Google “Planck time” and be prepared to fall into a google rathole for days!!!
EDIT: Oh, and I got my PPL decades ago, and a shiny instrument rating to go along with it. But because of my disability, I’m afraid virtual flying is all I can do these days. But thanks be to the gods, the old and the new, for VR. It’s literally like being back in the cockpit like the old days, but without paying $5-$7/gallon for AVGAS.
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Does the universe have a frame rate, or all our measuring instruments, including our senses/nervous system? Sorry, you may flag me for veering off topic 
.
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Lol, really?
I am running the game with GTX970 with a lot of satisfaction. It is a simulator, not a first person shooter.
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Wow. I have a Ryzen 7 3800X, 1080TI Extreme, 48GB of RAM and a 2GB internet connection. I my 1080 pushes 3 screens, main one 1440p and other 2 1080p. I use a prgram called Project Lasso to optimize my CPU while playing MSFS and have zero issues with performance. I have been looking for at least a 3060TI, but everyone who has higher end cards seem to be having issues. I fly either 1080 or 1440, depends on the mood. So might have to run with the 1080TI E for a bit more.
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Whom ever created this digital simulation has no life! How boring can that be to stare at this simulation. 
Planks constant wasn’t a measurement. It was derived via a mathematical function. Any shorter pulse creates non-meaningful information. Try a YouTube video… interesting stuff!
