I fly both MSFS and X-Plane with VR. With MSFS it’s a crazy struggle; as testament to all these posts on stutter, tearing, performance issues - tweaking settings, making frankly extreme changes to squeeze every percent of power out of the GPU. What I notice is that even when doing NOTHING, MSFS sits at the menus with the GPU running at 90% (using a RTX 2060). No game I’ve ever seen does that. This is especially acute right after a flight session in VR.
I’ll contrast that to X-Plane. With that sim, VR was simply plug and play. No crazy changes. GPU not maxed out at any time, graphics behaving predictably, the menus had the GPU idling (gasp!).
It makes me think that Asobo has a major GPU performance problem going on - like some kind of serious race condition they haven’t tracked down or prioritized (given what happens after exiting a VR session). How can we put pressure on them to identify and fix this properly, rather than forcing the community to work around their poor coding?
Totally agree…the GPU utilisation is a@$e about face.
I recently upgraded from my trusty old 1080ti to an AMD 6900xt with a Ryzen 5800x I already had and have been using the Adrenalin driver performance overlay to watch the various performance parameters.
When using the menus the GPU is running hell for leather giving 180- 220 FPS with GPU util @ almost 100%, GPU SCLK almost max, PWR over 300w, GPU Junc temp over 105c amd the fan running over 2200rpm.
By contrast when actually in flight in a rural setting, Mach loop Wales for example , the FPS is good @ 75 to sometimes over 100, but everything is now ramped down…util 60%, sclk 60%, PWR 150w, temp 85c and fan 1800rpm.
Funnily enough if I then fly over a photogrammetry area…London…the GPU ramps down even more and the FPS falls to around 35fps.
In both cases if I point the A/C towards an empty sky the GPU ramps up again and every parameter increases???
Going back to the main menu causes the GPU to perform like a whirling dervish again.
Throughout all of this the CPU Util stays fairly constant around 20-30% although I can’t see what the individual cores are doing.
As for VR !"£$%^&*()_+…sound of pulling hair out!!!
It’s annoying that when flying with my new 6900xt there seems to be a lot of performance potential available in taxing situations that isn’t used.
I have set up the in game settings to try to get the GPU working it’s a@$e off as recommended using max settings but it never gets above 15-20ms which is about the same as the CPU.
I still get some stutters even in 2d but I don’t have the best Internet download speed…60-70Mbps…so could be Bing downloads…best not mention VR!
Should’ve mentioned I’m running Win 11 Insider…might go back to Win 10 and start from scratch again as I’m having lots of wobbling in VR using an Oculus Quest 2 and I can’t work out what is the root cause of all these graphical anomilies having tried all of the “solutions” on forums…Oculus Software, AMD drivers, Win 11 or MSFS itself?
What you are experiencing here makes sense to me on the basis that neither CPU nor GPU performance is capped in this game by default. Your high GPU load scenarios just mean that the CPU load is lower than the graphics load, so the unrestrained GPU will run as fast as it can, with the menu system being particularly easy for it to punch out as many FPS as it can.
In your photogrammetry scenario, the CPU is the one limiting your performance, which you will not see by monitoring all core load only as you will need to see individual core load to see that one core is maxed out.
The best way to see what is going on is to turn on Developer Mode’s FPS counter, which will tell you what thread, and therefore component, is currently limiting performance, and to view Windows Task Manager performance view, to see GPU utilisation and temperature and CPU individual core load.
The fix for rampant FPS and GPU load in menus is simple - just cap FPS using your video card’s control panel settings. I have my 3080 capped to 60 FPS using nVidia control panel and it works great.
@ResetXPDR Ok get it (wrt to your statement on capping the FPS performance) but…why should I have to? While it does fix the GPU framerate, it doesn’t seem to really fix the GPU load. Additionally, I’ve literally never had a single game or ANY reason for that matter to have to do this. Especially when sitting in a menu! I’ve had to do these kinds of capping things simply to get MSFS to behave, especially so with VR (Oculus). But honestly shouldn’t have to and it’s insane that it pegs the GPU in menus. Again, I make the assertion that this is simply poor coding with poor testing and it needs to be fixed properly. We’re well over a year from release and there’s still significant performance issues? C’mon now. How about fixing them vs more pretty scenery packs?
@ItalicRaindrop6 I see similar weirdness. I’ve found with VR, on top of making these crazy setting changes described on this forum, that when I start a flight and before I switch to VR, I just need to let MSFS settle itself down for a couple of minutes on the runway. If I try to switch too early it totally screws up the VR, w/ major visual breakups etc. Back out, start the entire game again. Note that checking the GPU performance during the backout that the GPU is now pegged even in the VR session and through the menus…poor little GPU, getting abused like a bitcoin miner…maybe that’s what’s happening? They are using our PCs to mine bitcoin when they are in menus? lol. FWIW very brave to use Win11 insider
Wow my VR experiences between XP11 and MSFS are night and day. With MSFS VR I can run mostly high/ultra settings smoothly in VR while it takes full advantage of my GPU. While with XP11 any decent higher antialiasing settings introduce stutters and lower fps as if XP11 wouldn’t even fully use my GPU. Meanwhile XP11 doesn’t even have half the visual quality and details of MSFS. XP11 doesn’t like the full world object slider maxed but MSFS is default full world objects. XP11 still struggles with running addon sceneries like St Barts/Sint Marteen in VR as I’m still disappointed about buying because the XP11 St Barts addon is gorgeous.
MSFS runs even the larger more complex scenery addons in VR smoothly for me.
On my system MSFS takes far more advantage of my hardware than XP11 significantly.
You have to be GPU limited. Not mainthread limited or your GPU can’t do its thing.
Lower LODs.
increase everything else to make your GPU WORK. Your GPU Is basically sitting there waiting on the CPU and the CPU tries too hard to make the next frame before it even knows what the hell is going on in the sim.
Monitor dev mode fps counter and get your GPU frame times to 32ms.
It’s the only fool proof solution out there. After struggling since launch I’m now preaching his advice where I can.
Nvcp, driver’s, hags, it’s all secondary compared to making sure your not mainthread limited.
3080Ti with the G2. XP11 VR is not perfect. Nuf said. A flight sim with the G2 pushes the envelope of what’s possible with computers. Try OXR65 with FXAA100 (yes FXAA, not TAA), no Supersampling, no NIS, with LOW texture resolution. Smaller, lighter frames are the way to go with this sim.
Having a WMR headset, MSFS is much more plug and play than XP.
With XP you have a whole convoluted starting process at times…start WMR, start SteamVR, turn on controllers, enter VR mode, hold your tongue right and cross your left index finger and middle finger, and hopefully everything will work.
With MSFS you just…turn it on.
That being said vanilla X-plane I obviously get better FPS. But start adding ortho, custom scenery, etc, and for me I can’t really say one is better than the other with the VR implementation.
It all comes down to one thing for me: You want to fly prettier VFR, you fly MSFS. You want to fly tubes, instruments, or accurate systems, you fly XP (with third party planes). As I mostly fly VFR GA planes, MSFS is the current winner hands down. If I was wanting to fly 737s, I’d be flying the Zibo in XP without even considering MSFS.
Thanks all for the comments. I get there are going to be different experiences for everyone, different use cases, differences in hardware etc. I sure don’t have the issues that @jpru2001 experiences with XP - I just switch VR on and it just works. I can also appreciate the feedback that MSFS has richer graphics especially so with VFR flying. Don’t we all love pretty scenery? But the meta point of this thread is that something seems to be wrong where sitting in a menu results in 90% GPU utilization. When actually flying the sim, the GPU is pegged. I just don’t see that elsewhere. Not in FPS games, “world sim games”, or other sims. And it’s not like I have the textures dialled up on MSFS vs XP either…in fact I have it dialled up way more in XP than MSFS. I have to scale it way back on MSFS simply bc it just can’t do it.
So I’m going to log a bug with the Asobo team and will post the bug link. If you all want/can add weight to it then great
