Hi all,
If youre running study level aircraft and NZCH and also the new WU photogrammetry you will have to be very aware your are rendering a lot.
Try temporarily turning photogrammetry off, this is what we developed NZCH on and what its performance was tuned for. Just before Christmas we found out about NZCH photogrammetry that would be included and we were asked to work on the World Update for Microsoft. We had access to the WU content to develop on and noticed a 10-15fps drop in frames. It wasnt until I adjusted my Terrain level of detail back to 100 did I gain my FPS back to a normal amount.
9900k-i9,32gb DDR4, 2080 @ 4k
You can check our guide here for understanding what is happening under the hood in the performance section.
NZCH has been optimized about as much as its going to get. We built the thing ground up with full optimization in mind, I cant go into our trade secrets but were able to get this level of performance using many tricks.
It even works well on xbox
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I havent seen any improvement with DLSS at any stage - and TAA looks better to me. My TLOD is 140 even lower then yours - and I dont run any traffic and have almost all of my sliders down down to 10 to 15 percent. Again its flyable - I get 30 to 40 FPS - its just for me the panning stutters when I move the camera around which I think is probably not quite enough VRAM. But I can go to either of the other NZ custom airports with the same settings (Auckland and Wellington) and I can stay at 60 fps and no stuttering when panning. For now for me its not really an issue - but just something to note.
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Thereās always DX12 to try out if they improve/fix it in SU12. With SU10 & DX12 & DLSS my perf was so nice, very smooth and then came SU11 which trashed that nice DX12 perf for me. Been battling with things a bit ever since.
NZA, I have photogram off. Followed your guide on performance and turned object render distance from 200 down to 50. I didnāt get any more frames but what I did notice was a lot less stuttering when panning the view around which is awesome. I would ask that you consider some performance cheats like optional interior removal, as a lot of us wonāt use that day to day. I hope none of this is discouraging you guys though, as it is by far the best scenery Iāve seen in any flightsim and at the price it is its shockingly good value. Cheers!
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Iād love an optimized version too as my career mod has me active around this airport and the freeware version is ā¦mehhā¦ This airport absolutely looks stunning but as I watched the trailer on release day I got worried about those FPS and started following this closely before buying. Iām not going to rebuild my highāish end simulator for one airport, flipping around sliders in all directions.
I really donāt need all the interior happening as Iām not on an airport simulator. Yet I do really appreciate the effort itself. Again, it looks like a work of art. Iād love to throw my money on another attempt.
I bought it yesterday. It is superb, but nevertheless unusable for me. The performance is quite bad, and whatās worse is that the performance does not come back even after switching to a flight in a completely different region. Itās like there is a memory leak of sorts, and only quitting and reloading the sim brings the performance back to normal. Iām on SU12 beta, dx12 and VR, so it could well be one of those that cause issues.
But all in all I also wished NZA were to also sell a āliteā version of this product.
You seem like youāve gone the VR and canāt go back program which is cool, but have you tried no VR option and if so, what was performance like?
Yes, indeed. I havenāt flown this sim, or any other sim in pancake mode for many years. So, Iām ill-placed to provide such feedback.
However, Iāve played around with it some more. And it seems that deleting AND disabling the rolling cache seems to have made a world of difference for me. But I need to do some more tetsing to make sure itās not a one-time fluke.
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Is there a way to switch off the Airport interior? I mean the soundscape and detail is someting else. But i rather have no interrior and more FPS. Iām concidering knocking it off the harddrive, because keeping LOD at 10 just so one airport wont load in its details is a bit much to ask for.
Good intetions, but kinda bad excecution.
Hope there is a way to resolve this.
Greetings
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When NZA released the free NZRT, I have questioned that its excessive details have caused FPS to decline, but developers do not think it is a problem, but I say that my configuration is inferior, or it is adjusted to lower image quality. After ORBX and GAYA updated LOWW, I got more FPS. NZWN developed by Flightbeam is equally exciting, but FPS is very high.
NZA needs to reflect on their own structure. It is not to obtain performance by reducing the quality, but to control the quality in a limited area. Donāt play text games with users, FPS is the first element of customer experience.
I agree the performance is not quite there with this airport. I have a very powerful machine (AMD 5800X3D with RTX 4090, so pretty much as good as it gets for MSFS), and I barely scratch 30 fps at the gate with the Fenix. In VR I only get 20-25 fps taxiing around the airport.
Please, NZA / @HybridNZ , take the feedback seriously and see if thereās something that can be done about it. I get way better frames in larger airports in massive cities, like BOS or LAX.
Apart from the poor performance, the airport is stunning.
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Just a note, none of the detail, when youāre taxiing, is loaded in or being rendered. Things have moved on from old sims in this regard, this is one of the optimizations we made, youāre not loading things in when it counts on taxi so whether there is interior or other details on the inside or not doesnāt affect things when youāre in the aircraft. Only when youāre pulling up to the gate is it starting to load things.
As far as hardware goes, The airport was tested an optimised for āhigh-endā settings on everything from a gen3 intel with GTX 970 up to a i9-9900k,32gb, 2080 and 3080s and everything in between on all all major study-level aircraft.
The Fenix with its external flight model and subsystem obviously performed the worst but was able to stay above 35fps which was the target.
WUNZ photogrammetry was added recently which adds a lot of load to peopleās setups but its still above the threshold.
There really isnāt anything we can do optimisation wise it really is as optimised as its going to get. Everything is LODed to disappear and you can control that with object level of detail (back in the hands of the user)
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Ah okay, good to know. Do you guys know what feature it is that is likely more demanding on PCās than other less fancy addons?
The balance is not loading everything in at once, causing disk and VRAM load/unload stutters. So that gets staggered carefully with distance using the LODs.
Try PMDG or Flybywire and see how you go with those. On my older system I used DLSS / Performance mode on DX11 with 8GB VRAM it was happy.
Stutters are also a sign of thermal throttling on your CPU or GPU. Different people live in different climates and this can also cause pain when your system is under a lot of load. The Fenix would do this to mine a lot in many airports.
Yeah Iāve got the stutters gone now with the change in distance slider. FPS is still 5-10 lower constantly though. One thing I noticed is flightsim is constantly saying its limited by my mainthread. This is pretty usual for my setup but normally it flickers around to GPU noticeably. Seems chch is pinned on CPU though. Temps seem good.
Check this out, I know a lot of people are a bit too proud to watch these types of videos but there are some really good high level bits of information in here.
Also this is what we use when developing airports and choosing texture sizes etc.
https://docs.flightsimulator.com/html/Asset_Creation/Textures/Textures.htm?agt=index
Specifically the section on " Reviewing Texture Quality And Memory Usage"
We have a lot of experience in this area and understand the stack entirely.
A lot of people wildly mess with settings but not always understand their hardware vs settings limitations. This can cause disappointment when theyre using mods and the realities of their hardware and the way the Sim renders and processes. The sim is really good as a AAA title, but remember it has legacy architectural choices that arent always the best multithreading-wise, Mods that people use also are limited in those architectural choices too EG The Fenix with its external flight modelā¦ thus placing more strain on your systems single thread and a single coreās performance.
Ill also give you one other bit of advice, turn off the FPS counter and forget about it. A lot of people fly around with it on. I did for 1 1/2 years as did my team when developing NZCH and others to make sure something we placed or imported didnāt ank FPS. It was a relief when I could turn it off and forget about it recently to do some actual flying.
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In fact, I donāt want to change my settings, because my current settings are very smooth in many large airports, such as NZWN, NZQN, KLAX, LOWW, EBBR, ZSPD, and ZBAA, without stuttering, but my performance in NZCH is very poor.
NZA doesnāt need to suggest how to optimize performance, because if I know that so-called performance optimization works in NZCH, I wonāt post here.
If NZA considers not to excessively improve the image quality at the expense of performance, like some manufacturers, it can provide low-precision texture maps and take care of all PC space users, which can gain a good reputation. If you want to filter users through hardware, I donāt think it is necessary to talk about NZAās performance here.
Improving performance by reducing image quality is the most offensive reason in the game development industry.
Post a few screenshots of your settings and the FPS counter turned on please. Should be able diagnose what the issue is fairly quickly.
PS texture resolution and count is pretty low on NZCH already. It was one of many optimizations we made.
I donāt mean this in an unfriendly way @HybridNZ , but posting setting guides and talking about temperature throttling feels a little as if you were talking to rookies. Nevertheless, I appreciate that you take the time to provide some support here in the forums. Just to be clear, I am not doubting you took many efforts to optimize the scenery for performance, and I respect the work that went into it. But still, something seems not quite right, and I sincerely hope it can be fixed. The scenery looks wonderful and it would be a shame if the enjoyment of flying into Christchurch remains hindered by performance issues.
As I said, I have a highly optimized system for MSFS, and especially MSFS VR. Itās not the temperatures, itās not the Fenix, itās not my settings - it is the airport.
Here are two comparison shots at your NZCH and Flightbeams NZAA I just took with the default Cessna, live weather, and the drone cam looking at the terminal. No traffic was enabled either, and I have well regulated settings for my high-end system (5800X3D, RTX 4090, 32 GB DDR4-3600). Visibility & clouds in these situations was even more demanding in Auckland.
As you can see, I am far from any critical values for RAM, VRAM, GPU and CPU temps.
As you can also see, in NZCH I am mainthread and therefore CPU limited and canāt even reach stable 60 fps limit in this very barebones situation - as I said, no complex aircraft was used here.
Something is not right with the scenery. I canāt quite point my finger to what it is, but it eats up a lot of CPU resources. Maybe all the little animations? I will try to investigate some more.
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