Had had my system running well for over a year. For the last month have been fighting a issue where consistently getting micro stutters and/or lag in responsiveness to/from USB devices (more of the lag to/from USB than stutters). Happens every single flight, all AI traffic and live weather off, DX12 or DX11, DLSS or TAA. FPS running around 30-40 (I have triple 55" TVs).
Been doing all kinds of troubleshooting:
- Full system restore (MSI system)
- Reinstall MSFS 2020
- Updated all drivers
- Installed a power monitor to check usage
- Opened case and cleaned it
- Added more powered USB ports (all of mine are powered)
- Max performanced everything in power plan
- and more…
I’ve also been running Process Monitor. I detected an issue that other users were seeing from FlightSimulator.exe in which input.PNF constantly reported FILE LOCKED WITH ONLY READERS [How to troubleshoot MSFS freezing up - #42 by trespolodrone]. I rebuilt the input.PNF and that error went away, but I’m also getting the same FILE LOCKED WITH ONLY READERS error on several .dll files [d3d9.dll, d3d8.dll, d3d.dll, ddraw.dll, opengl32.dll]. No idea if those mean anything or resolvable, however I did notice that the stutters and USB lag happen more immediately when I open one of the in game windows (like the ATC window for example).
I do run a lot of peripherals, but I also have a pretty beefy system that had zero issues for a year.
Intel i7 137007
RTX 4080 16GB
6 Logitech FIPs
RSG - Switch Panel, GMA350, GNS 530/430
8 Flight Illusion Gauges
Brunner CLS-NG Yoke and Rudder
Logitech Radio panel & Multipanel
Honeycomb Bravo TQ
About out of ideas on where to even start next. Would appreciate any advice or ideas. Thanks!
Do you also hear the USB disconnect / connect chime when it happens?
I suspect you’re running into a USB BUS overload issue which is easily resolved by running an externally powered USB hub.
Also ensure you have USB power saving / suspend option turned off in Device Manager for all USB devices and hubs.
Logitech FIPS draw allot of power. Despite the size of your PSU, the USB bus can only handle / deliver so much.
Some simple tests removing some of the USB devices before flight will help narrow down the cause. As a general point, now days it’s way better to have a single touch screen monitor displaying instruments than it is those archaic FIP’s. A worthwhile upgrade.
Interesting. The symptoms certainly go along with USB overload, however ALL of my USB devices are connected via powered USB hubs. I’m on max performance power plan and have disabled power saving on every USB device in device manager.
Doing some testing with about half of my USB devices disconnected and the issue is significantly less frequent, but still exists. Also starting (just now with devices disconnected to USB disconnect / connect annunciations from Windows - so it appears I’m onto the right problem but I’m still stumped on how to fully diagnose or resolve.
Is there a way to see a graph of power draw on the PCI buss? Looking in HWInfo, but don’t see anything. What would cause it to be fine for over a year and then suddenly start having acute problems? MB going bad, power supply going bad, bad luck? I know I have a lot of USB devices, but like I said, they all run on powered hubs and I’ve seen rigs that look like they have WAY more than my 25 or so.
Thank you for the input!
Not sure if you are aware but like most other things usb hubs are of varying quality. A flaky usb hub has often been the cause for flight sim issues.
Which motherboard model you have?
Yep, thanks. I have very expensive (and hopefully good) StarTech 16 port and another pricey 16 port. I guess one of them or their power supplies could be going out? Will do some testing on those. some days I feel like maintaining an actual airplane is less work than maintaining a sim rig. Thank you.
MSI PRO-B660M-A-CEC-WIFI-DDR4. Couple of years old.
Which BIOS version do you have installed?
For what it’s worth I have this issue to some degree as well. I don’t think it’s a USB hub issue in my case because things happen across different ports. Moving things around to different ports on the motherboard has gone a long way to mitigating it.
Another trigger seemed to be an external hard drive spinning up (it has its own power supply, so my guess is it hogs the bus while spinning up or something), so I had disabled “allow the computer to turn off this device to save power”. To avoid having to have it run all the time I instead created another power plan, one which disabled “turn off USB devices to save power” which I would switch to when needed.
This is an ASUS Z690 board, Intel USB. If I open “view reliability history” usually this is accompanied by LiveKernelEvent 141/144