Inadvertently increased FPS & Resolution

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63

OK, so seems clear to me what’s happening, but not sure why and might be the order you took these screen shots in.

The first screen shot which is the 1080p shot in sim with 32.9FPS is showing a render resolution of 3840x2160 which is 4K. The fcat it is rendered on a 1080p monitor is irrelevant - the GPU is still processing the 4K level pixels. Your 1080p just can’t display them all (hence poorer quality than 4K monitor).

The next screenshot shows the options menu with 1920x1080 shown.

Here’s my guess - that you had the 4K monitor running. unplugged that and plugged in the 1080p monitor. At this point the sim still thinks it is showing 4K because you’ve not restarted the sim. If you did stop and restart the sim when changing monitor, then it could be a slight bug - ie that because you maybe went straight into flying and didn’t go into options, the sim just carries on working at 4K because you’ve not told it otherwise. It’s not until you go into the options page that it recognises the new resolution.

Anyway, what you are seeing here makes sense - you are running 4K in both shots - one remdered on a 1080p monitor (which essentially loses 3/4 of the pixels when it does it) and one rendered on a 4K monitor which looks much better because it keeps all the pixels.

This doesn’t of course tie in with your original post where you said you were getting 20 FPS at 1080p and then jumping up to 30-35 FPS at 4K. Can you reproduce that 20 FPS and post a screenshot?

64

I made sure I completely shutdown before disconnecting and reconnecting the different monitors. Once the PC was restarted it automatically recognised the different monitor and changed the resolution.

I’m beginning to think there is a bug in the sim now. Giving the amount of other issues and bugs there has been lately it wouldn’t surprise me. A bug I did notice is when I turn developer mode off the FPS counter is still showing. The only way to get rid of it is to completely restart the sim.

I didn’t take any screenshots when I first noticed the FPS gain as mentioned in my first post but I can try to replicate this.

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I made sure I completely shutdown before disconnecting and reconnecting the different monitors. Once the PC was restarted it automatically recognised the different monitor and changed the resolution.

I’m beginning to think there is a bug in the sim now. Giving the amount of other issues and bugs there has been lately it wouldn’t surprise me. A bug I did notice is when I turn developer mode off the FPS counter is still showing. The only way to get rid of it is to completely restart the sim.

I didn’t take any screenshots when I first noticed the FPS gain as mentioned in my first post but I can try to replicate this.

66

In theory, lowering your resolution scaling is basically lowering your resolution. If you run at 90% scalingm your GPU is rendering 10% fewer pixels, so yes, that should give you a small performance boost with a small cost of loss of visual fidelity.

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Very strange. I’ve had the sticky fps counter too. No idea why but the sim is definitely rendering 4K when set to 1080p then

68

Interesting benchmarks evaluating resolution and FPS. If you use 4K resolution, you should benchmark/evaluate the use of 10-bit color depth and HDR and also YCbCr/YUV format vs. RGB.

69

In your second screenshot you see the game says full resolution is 1920x1080, connected to a 1080p monitor. But below at render scale it says 100 render scale equals 3840x2160, 4K

Maybe you have super sampling turned on in the NVidea control panel

Look for DSR, Dynamic Super Resolution

Your game was always running in 4K but ofcourse on a native 4K monitor (and a new monitor) it will look better than downsampled to 1080p.

So you only gain performance from rendering at 3072x1728 (80%) which gets upscaled to 4K, compared to rendering t 3840x2160 downscaled to 1080p.

You could set it to 80%, run it on the 1080p monitor 3072x1728 downsampled to 1080p for the same results.

If you turn DRS off, it will fly at 1080p!

Also your dev mode and fps counter are only half the size as what they would normally be with everything in 1080p. It’s definitely NVidea downsampling the 4K output from the game.

DRS is useful as there was some discussion before that using DRS with render scale 80 with DRS on a 1080p monitor is more efficient in FS2020 than using render scale 160 with 1080p as a base. Or rather it produced better looking pictures when sharpening and TAA were messed up.
Same render resolution, but letting the game upscale and NVidea downscale looked better, then letting the game downscale. TAA was fixed in December so probably not longer an issue.

One more thing, those over bright pictures, do you have HDR on?
Did you change anything in usercfg.opt

If you disable PostProcess completely the sim will get a ton of white out during the day, also already visible in the world map. You need EyeAdaptation and ColorGrading on to correctly convert to SDR monitors.

{PostProcess
	Enabled 1
	EyeAdaptation 1
	ColorGrading 1
	Sharpen 0
	Fringe 0
	LensDistortion 0
	Dirt 0
	LensFlare 0
	FilmGrain 0
	Vignette 0
	LensBlurMultiplier 1.000000
	FringeMultiplier 1.000000
}
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70

Yeah you’re right, it does show 3840x2160 in his first image that is supposed to be 1920x1080.

1 Like
71

Thanks for the information this is very helpful to understand what is going on. I agree it does look like the game is running at 4K with the 1080p monitor.

Although I’m now even more confused as upon check the Nvidia setting DSR is off. I would point out that I’m checking this with the 4K monitor attached. Is it best to check this setting with the 1080p monitor connected? Is this setting likely to change by itself once a 1080p monitor is connected to the PC? I have packed it away but could check again just in case.

NVIDIA Control Panel 19_03_2021 18_12_57
NVIDIA Control Panel 19_03_2021 18_12_572871×1636 184 KB

Yes I have HDR on in game and in the windows settings. I’m not seeing the brightness on screen like is shown in my screenshots. It just appears when I take a screenshot.

No I haven’t changed anything in the usercfg.opt

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Am I the only who saw Asobo advise, as a temporary mitigation very soon after SU3, that you reduce render scaling to below 100 if you were hit by the FPS-disease spread with SU3? I took it as an indication that they had spotted something in relation to super-sampling.

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I don’t agree. A lot of persons who posted with the performance problem already have RenderScale at 100 or below. The MSFS support just thought it could be a temp workaround to retrieve some fps, which is not the case as mainly it seems the problem land on the CPU side instead of GPU…

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Nah. People are suffering from a performance bug. Lowering the render scale reduces the load on the GPU, thus alleviating some of the effect of that bug.

It’s a simple temporary workaround, not a cause for the bug.

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So heres an idea.

I have a 1080p monitor. If i use DSR, upscale the resolution in nvidia, then reduce the rended scaling in MSFS could that yield anything, or am i just chasing my own tail?

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Yes they did. It does nothing to fix stutters, nor does is help those of us hit with the lovely single digit frame rate bug. It’s a wild guess on their part, nothing more.

In theory, that should work though. Lower resolution = higher performance. THere’s nothing new, special or magical about that “solution”. It’s worked that way since computers started being able to display graphics. It’s akin to telling someone who’s thirsty to drink water. But for us with the serious fps bug, it has no effect.

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77

The serious fps bug is a thing for sure, but we have also the serious stutter problem which affect more VR users (as in VR stutter make you sick quicker than in monitor), and it was also introduced recently and it’s worse from WU3 and SU3. I mean I have place where I’m not affected by the fps bug, and where I have more than 30% GPU headroom when in VR, but can’t play due to horrible stutter probably induced by CPU spike because the serious fps bug.

One fix too rules them all! :doughnut: (<= This is a Ring, not a donut)

78

So if I’m running Windows and MSFS at 2560x1440 that isn’t really 4k, it’s more like 2.5k?
If I’m plugged into a 4k TV is it upscaled to 4k and as far as my eyes are concerned I’m seeing 4k (although my gpu is only pumping out 2.5k)? If not, what is the correct resolution description I should be using?

I did read the posted article on this thread as well as Tom’s Hardware but I’m still more confused than a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs!

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Natively it’ll run at whatever resolution the display you’re plugged into runs at. If you’re using a 1440p monitor, that’s its resolution. If you’re running on a 4K TV, it’s not upscaling. It’s running at native 4K. Unless you change the resolution scaling. If you look beside the scaling slider in the option menu, it will show you what resolution it’s being rendered at.

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It probably turned off for the 4K monitor, new hardware profile. Plus it’s probably not available for 4K monitors since that would mean rendering at 8K.

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You won’t yield anything in performance, but you can tweak image quality that way. If you use any of the Nvidea picture enhancements than your results will be better with DSR.

120 renderscale without DSR vs 60 renderscale with DSR, the second option gives NVidea more pixels to work with for sharpening etc. Both have the game render at 2304x1296.

As with anything, work with the highest resolution until the final stage. But if you don’t use any external image enhancements it won’t make any difference. Well perhaps a little lower performance since your using bigger image buffers and an extra down sampling step for no gains.

82

That’s interesting I did think this may be the case. I wonder how many others there are unaware that there system is doing this and actually hindering performance. Nowhere in the sim settings does it indicate this, unless you are in developer mode and view the FPS. I think it may be worth others checking their system and turning DSR off as it could be affecting their frame rates. Would be interesting to hear from anyone who has a 1080p monitor and has tried this to see what affect it has.