This has been a very interesting find and highlights some interesting aspects of what is going on in the sim. I spent the better half of the morning profiling frames through nSight to see if I could glean anything about what’s going on. The frame time has always been very good even when running at one frame per 2 seconds so I didn’t expect there to be any issue so far as rendering is concerned. However, sometimes it can lead you to interesting places.
First and foremost, though, I do not believe this to be specifically an issue of “where you are”. It’s only tangentially related. In other words, if its true that if you’re in that area and that is the issue, it should be consistently reproducible. However, it is not, but there is a relationship. In some cases it will begin stuttering further towards DFW than others, but not much. In some cases, it will stop immediately upon retreating to the “safe zone” so to speak. Yet in other cases it will persist long after you’ve gone back to your safe space. If you drop the terrain LOD down to 10, it actually does not happen at all.
Here’s where the real problem I have is. The terrain detail distance is one of the single biggest determining factors in performance in the sim, yet it is so incredibly poorly explained. Having spent a few hours in nSight on this, it appears so far that I can tell that from a range of 10 - 100, it is increasing in area the distance to which you can see terrain features such as trees, buildings, and detailed tiles. After about 100, it seems that the distance does not increase but you’re populating more stuff within that max range.
This is why “where you are” is tangentially related. It seems to be that the way the data is streamed in is not always symmetric or deterministic. IE: I can be at an exact place in space, moving the same direction, at the same speed, at the same altitude and it won’t be guaranteed that the next terrain data tiles to be loaded in will happen at the same point. Nor will they be unloaded at the same point. If there is a scenery issue then in theory it should be possible to find that place and reproduce the issue constantly.
There is an issue in the process, it appears, that the data may exacerbate. It’s possible its simply in the process itself. Without more specific information as to the streaming process and data sanitation it’s really impossible to say.
I can say for certain, however, it is not a rendering issue. It does not appear to be a connectivity issue from the user end, although, there could be one within their cloud network. It simply appears to be that there are some areas with either old/conflicting data that are exacerbating a bad process or that there is errant data causing the process to stall. Without more information it’s impossible to know.
