So I just got a new PC and am looking for some help with my settings and where to even start to be honest. What settings can I go off of? Perhaps I can get started by going off of one of your guys settings and tweak it from there.
I have a 4k monitor and am looking to play in the highest resolution possible. If anybody with similar specs can help me get started that would be great. Thank you
Nearly three years in and I’m still posting this video…
Note that several settings currently available are not included because this was recorded shortly after the initial launch in 2020. But it’s still a great resource to determine which settings are right for you. Some visual settings have very little impact on what you see on the screen, but have a big impact on performance - those are the ones you want to turn down. That way you have more resources available to render things like Ultra clouds. Also noteworthy is that anything past Medium on Building quality only affects buildings so far off in the distance that it’s barely noticeable.
So grab a favorite beverage (it’s long), along with pen and paper, then sit down and go through this video.
It is a weird game to set up, many settings videos and guides are outdated.
I haven’t written this all out in a while.
Your main settings to be concerned about are Terrain Level of Detail (TLOD) and Render Scaling (RS).
You can open Developer’s Mode in your settings and watch the FPS and bottlenecks.
Load a flight starting from a major airport near a photogrammetry city. Load in an airliner or other taxing aircraft. KJFK is brilliant for this as NYC is about as demanding as the sim gets. Your sim is MOST taxed on or near the ground. Large or advanced 3rd party aircraft are the most taxing aircraft.
Then watch the FPS monitor to get your FPS at a constant 30+ or 60+ FPS while you adjust your graphics settings. TLOD is the most taxing setting for your CPU Main Thread, RS and resolution are the most taxing for your GPU.
Find settings that hit 30 or 60 FPS all the time. Lock FPS at 30 or 60. And your sim will never dip below that, because usually you will be in the air, away from a major airport, away from photogrammetry, and perhaps in a simpler plane. If you can hit your target at KJFK, you will keep those results everywhere else.
You can run a LOT of things at High/Ultra even on a medium spec PC if you adjust your TLOD, RS and resolution accordingly. TLOD or 100-200 is doable on many new machines. More can grind them to a halt. Same with RS and graphics cards.
Do NOT expect to turn everything up to 11 and get smooth results. It takes some testing and trial and error before you find the Goldilocks Zone for a new system.
One thing the previous posts implied but did not state directly is that the goal is smooth, fluid performance above 30fps. Don’t try and chase the maximum fps as you will certainly get very frustrated!
Yes! This is an odd game where a smooth 30 FPS may be your best option. Yes, higher FPS is possible, but it has never been great for high framerates, and a stuttering 60 is much worse than a smooth 30. LOCK your FPS to 30 or 60 once configured for that FPS to keep stutters at bay.
This sim starts to feel VERY weird if the FPS is varying too much. A steady FPS is the key to a good feel at the stick or yoke.
Here’s another great guide. It’s also slightly out of date but it shows comparison pictures and FPS % costs for each setting in bottlenecked situations!
Nearly ALL of these performance-tuning recommendations suck for MSFS because the authors miss the fact that a MSFS PC is more likely to be limited by the CPU than the GPU. If you don’t know whether the CPU or GPU is limiting your framerate (use the in-game Developer Mode, Debug, Show FPS tool) then any recommendation of a settings change is meaningless because reducing e.g. an anti-aliasiing setting setting (which purely affects the GPU) is going to make ZERO difference to your framerate if you’re “Limited by CPU”.
So the FIRST thing you want to do if you see a MSFS performance guide is see if it mentions the crucial first step is to find out if your framerate is limited by CPU or GPU. If it doesn’t, don’t bother reading the article.
Thanks. That’s a very interesting approach. Although I know about the general idiosyncrasies of MSFS performance I have never really thought about how to systematically set up my settings before. Always muddled through somehow.
Will try that!
My system is a bit more powerful than the one used for that awesome video.
5800X3D vs. i7-7600k
3090 Ti vs. 1080 Ti
But it was still very valuable, showing that there is very little difference across the spectrum for some settings (like buildings and trees.)
Clouds are Ultra - always…
I’m going to set everything to these settings, and adjust from there.
Buildings Medium
Trees Medium
Grass Medium
TLOD 125
OLOD 150
Clouds Ultra
Water Waves High
Ambient Occlusion High
Anisotropic 8X, Supersampling 6x6
Shadow Maps 1536
Terrain Shadows 256
Lens Flare On
Bloom On
Light Shafts High
Windshied Effects High
Contact Shadows High
Reflections High
DOF Medium
Lens Correction ???
Texture Resolution Ultra
I enable Anisotropic Filtering in NVCP, and turn it off in the sim.
What about Ambient Occlusion? Should I enable it in NVCP and also in the sim?
Hi, I have seen this same comment a lot. But my problem is limited computer knowledge. So I read these comments, and it mostly goes over my head, so I do nothing. Is there an online tutorial or some such, which can talk me through how I check this out please?
