Low FPS, This is my laptop fault or the sim fault?

I’m unsure. I used to use P3D v5 and with the same setup I could easily achieve 60fps with most settings on high, only problem I had was constant crashes due to low vram, resolution was the major factor.

This forced me to abandon P3D before update 5.2 arrived, I’ve heard that the crashes no longer occur now, but because I came to this sim, I haven’t looked back, MSFS ( even in its present state) is imho far superior in terms of visuals and it’s getting there with other aspects

I’m hoping that the DX12 coding is done properly to avoid crashes due to low VRAM.

I’m in no position to afford a new GPU at the moment.

Yes, really. Look at memory usage percentage. Your memory use in above image is 82% , which is the bottleneck.

AND look at your screen prints, the FpS reports confirm that… it sais the reader thread (RdThread) is the limiting factor. The rest is waiting for that, you probably have zillions of page fault hits all the time ! Your CPU and GPU are waiting for the RAM and SSD to catch up, because there is no buffer space.

Put 16GB RAM extra and you’ll be fine. With your config (a laptop !? which one !?) I would put 64GB.

Hmm idk cuz i saw 0 hard fault.

But maybe u’re right, because microsoft state 32gb is the ideal ram.

What u think of this:

  • my soldered ram is 8gb 3200mhz
  • if i add external ram 16gb 3200mhz, i will lose dual channel? @ArcanePython931

No there are no hard faults, that would euuhm… freeze things completely. I’m talking measures MSFS takes to fit it all in small memory. Your CPU+GPU are far better, the memory keeps it back from max performance, because MSFS tries to fit it all into 16GB. It spends far more time transferring from SSD to RAM and from RAM to GPU. It’s like having a pipeline with a narrow part… the narrow part will set the performance, not the rest of the pipeline.

I have no idea about how dual channel works in your PC, but if you add memory, you should get dual channel… also when you would add 32GB instead of 16GB. What type/brand is your laptop ?

Oh, because I don’t know there is 32gb ram stick in market.
Rog zephyrus g15 (2021)

I just read in internet, that says modern motherboard in this years can mix ram capacity even can mix ram speed frequency and still run in dual channel without problem.

But if ram stick with speed frequency is greater than the other ram stick, then the speed frequency will follow the lower one.

Modern motherboard is flexible for ram now than old motherboard.

And the good news is my laptop type can support up to 40gb ram:
image

I stumbled upon this topic when I was trying to fix my FPS Limited by Main Thread. I followed this method and it solved my FPS issue, now I get stable 30 FPS and no longer limited by main thread. This helped my case, maybe it can help you.

I Will try

Already try, no effect

I found a crippling area for my system at least.

I was flying around here

The Flying W Ranch GA01 Terrible performance, trees on top of PG trees
Stoney Point Field 6GA0 Roswell PG Area 34°3’31"N 84°23’24"W
Crobb County Intl-Mccollum Field KRYY Marietta PG Area very low fps
And then along Atlanta to
Atlanta Rgnl Falcon Field KFFC Down to 2-5 fps, 30 GB RAM in use

That whole area has PG data, which are mostly forested areas. Apparently it’s all very unoptimized PG data and the sim places auto gen trees over the PG data forest. It’s not too bad at first but it deteriorates as RAM usage keeps increasing. Here I was down below 5fps, and the game had over 30GB allocated


Atlanta Rgnl Falcon Field KFFC

Over Atlanta it’s much better as well as over Hartsfield - Jackson Atlanta I KATL, a very complex handcrafted airport, good performance. It’s all on the PG trees mixed with autogen trees that cripple my system. As soon as I leave the city or airport and go back over the forest, fps tanks.

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Hmm… did you test KATL after the Nordic update or before ? I deinstalled KATL a few weeks ago, now I can fly around Atlanta and land… it is better now ? I still have the airport uninstalled there. Deleted in Content manager… it stays available for download.

After. I don’t remember this problem from before the Nordics update and I did traverse the western side of the USA the same way. Maybe less forests there.

KATL is actually where I got better performance since it’s away from the crippling trees. Flying around Atlanta (in the city) and landing at KATL was fine, yet flying on to KFFC fps tanked again, ram usage went up and I had to land at 2 to 5 fps.

I’ll see if I can find what’s causing the crippling effect. I suspect it’s the autogen trees behind drawn inside the PG data trees. Back to turning things on and off again.

Even I have to defend MSFS at this point. This is NOT a first person shooter. You do NOT need 60FPS. If you are getting 30FPS with minimal stuttering and you have the graphical settings where you like the eye candy you are golden. You won’t find a pc out there that can handle getting 60FPS very often because this game likes your CPU more than the GPU. The game is NOT broken. You are expecting way too much and don’t understand how in-depth flight simulation games operate. I am sure many here would be glad to explain, but going around saying everything else is broken besides your expectations will not gain you much unfortunately.

I have had issues around KATL for months. 3-4 FPS so I have just avoided. Many others have reported the same. I guess KATL is broken… but the rest of the world seems to be fine… 30FPS :laughing:

This game not likes cpu because just utilizing cpu very low. (So many Limited by main thread topic in this forum).

Can u explain what is limited by main thread, people with core i9 gen 9/10 is limited by main thread too. Ram can make limited by main thread too?

Maybe KATL is fixed now, looks fine to me

Better performance than KFFC

Trees Ultra

Tree High

Trees Medium

Trees Low

Without PG Data Trees High

Without PG Data Trees Low

Offline (no data) Trees High

It’s definitely in the handling of the trees on top of the PG mesh trees, crippling.

For comparison, Atlanta PG Data trees high

All shots taken at High settings, terrain detail 100, object detail 150 and giving it ample time to fully resolve the scene. (fps is much lower while it’s loading and generating terrain)

This morning it was down to 5 fps or lower. I had been flying for 5 hours already and performance still degrades over time, plus it had 30 GB ram allocated. After all these tests the game has 22 GB allocated, when I spawned at KFFC initially (with PG data and trees high) it was 16 GB. Memory usage keeps creeping up, which is a long standing problem. After teleporting back to KFFC, 25 GB allocated. down to 22GB 5 minutes later (not moving)

Anyway, solution is to turn the trees to low when PG Data is already all trees. And restart the game every couple hours to ‘fix’ the memory leaks.

Limited by main thread means your processor is processing the maximum amount of information that it possibly can on the main processing thread. Flight Sims in general are notoriously single threaded applications and this sim running on DX11 amplifies that issue. We may get a little better performance and processing allocation when DX12 is released. Just have to wait and see. Having low ram can also cause stuttering. I’m not as sure about how low ram will show up in the FPS counter but I would recommend 32GB. At very minimal 16GB. Make sure you are running in dual channel. Single channel can kill your performance a lot.

@SvenZ I’ll have to take another look at KATL. Hopefully the issues have been fixed. I would have the exact same issues with ram definitely seemed like a memory leak for sure.

So u mean people’s core i9 gen 9/10/11 can’t handle this game perfectly cuz the limited main thread keep popped up.

Atlanta, a major US city and one of the more detailed cities in the game, is basically unflyable until there’s a fix for it.

It’s kind of disheartening to spend over a thousand dollars on pc, video card, and game and you can’t fly over Atlanta because there’s something wrong with the game.

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