My latest observations with just about 100 hrs flying MSFS

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Here’s a bit of a diary from battling with MSFS this weekend.

Thursday - All worked well on and I was able to get a couple of medium length flights in without any problems. Running the latest version of MSFS, AMD drivers 20.9.1, etc.

Friday - Had changed nothing in my configuration and none of my controllers were working. I have a fairly beefy setup, so I went to controls settings and the app was just showing me a spinner. After that, all I could do was to kill the app through Task Manager. Searched high and low for a solution and could find none. I had to reinstall the app, and even then, the problem persisted. Did you know that all your settings are stored in a directory and that even after reinstalling the app, the same corrupted or bad settings will be copied right back from the cloud? Yeah, I didn’t know either. After a frustrating 24 hours, I was finally able to chat with someone at Xbox support (yes, I’m on a PC). He told me that I should check my Microsoft Store app and make sure that I had that up to date. I checked and there were a few things to update. One in particular caught my eye…Gaming Services. I went ahead and updated that, and lo and behold all was working perfectly fine again.

Saturday - Got a couple of quick flights in. Then, looked at my AMD Radeon Software and noticed that there was a driver update available. Hmm. I went ahead and upgraded from 20.9.1 to 20.9.2 on my Radeon 5600 XT card. Got a couple of more flights in with no problems. I shut off my computer and came back later in the day with a freshly rebooted system. I would get about 5 minutes into a flight and the computer started crashing with “Referenced memory could not be read errors’”!!! Stopping short of throwing the f#$%^&* computer out the window, I tried a few things…like reinstalling MSFS again (probably the 5th time in the past couple of days). In my mind, it couldn’t be the driver since it worked great just before.

Sunday - Tried again after reinstalling MSFS and again crashing to CTDs and to this memory error. I finally said, well, let’s see if a full uninstall of the driver using the AMD Cleanup Utility in safe mode and reinstalling would clear the problem. Ran through the procedure, and interestingly enough, it pointed me back to the OLD driver…which seems to be the recommended driver for my card. I reinstalled the old driver and voila, all was working fine again. Why it gave me the option to update the driver before, I don’t know. Now, the Radeon Software doesn’t give that option and it’s telling me that the 20.9.1 is the current driver for my card.

Here is my suggestion to all. If your system is working fine, DON’T CHANGE ANYTHING. Especially, if it’s system related. That goes for GPU drivers, mobo firmware updates, trying to overclock your CPU or GPU, etc. It’s tempting, but just leave it alone. It makes for a much happier simmer…

Good luck out there!

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There have been some good guides on system optimisation in the past. People should spend some time on them. Even though they are not up to date any more, they will teach people how to build a stable system. Nick’s FSX bible was a masterpiece and the system portion is still very much valid.

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Yep, there have been some great guides. I’ve probably read just about all of them. I’ve been messing around with sims since 1995, so, this isn’t my first rodeo. That’s what I’m saying…I had my system up and running, no problems, great frame rates, etc. The first issue I had no control about. Something changed and I needed to get the store app updated. The second, I shouldn’t believe everything that AMD sends my way for suggested updates.

To each his own, I guess, when it comes to fiddling around with your system to try to eek 2 more FPS. What I’m trying to get to is that I would’ve much rather been flying than working on this stuff. Literally, spent hours trying to determine what the problem was and testing different solutions.

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100 hours? You must be a masochistic. But thanks for an interesting post.

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I know right?! Of course, what I did loose in all of this is that count…so I can’t prove it anymore.

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Great advice!

MSFS works fine on my modest system (zero CTDs in 150+ hours), and although I’d like to upgrade my system specs for quicker frame rates, I’m waiting until MSFS becomes more stable.

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I agree, if you get it working, dont do anything.

But, one thing that I think has helped me is I used to keep a 100g rolling cache on an SSD. Well I lowered it to 50g. I was having problems… And finally I set it to 30g and for some reason all of my issues with crashes at airports and stuff have for the most part stopped. Every time I change graphic settings in game I clear cache and havent had many problems for days. Do I know what this means, no I do not. I even get 30+ FPS at Seatac with MP and live traffic on 1440p ultra…

Speaking of that, I think I just had some of the most fun ive had in this game so far…
ATC, MP, Live traffic, Live weather on - Starting cold and dark at SeaTac airport, request touch and go pattern for like an hour. 30kt wind, overcast, TONS of SWA, Alaska, United live traffic and im doing left hand patterns in front of their final approaches landing 16R in a 172 with ATC approval :rofl: Cleared maybe 15 landings, and went around maybe 3 times. Was actually amazing to be honest…

Lets just say when this sim works - it’s incredible. I could literally fly that pattern all day. Unfortunately it doesnt seem to log touch and go as landings and takeoffs, which I guess is fine.

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Hahaha… so true… ROFL

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I do something similar. But! When I find the settings I like, after I exit the game I make copies of my UserCfg.opt file. Mine is in: C:\Users<USERID>\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache

So, I have UserCfg.opt.Ultra-100-100-100 (for mostly Ultra settings, and 100 render, terrain, object LOD), UserCfg.opt.High-100-125-100, and so on. Whenever I mess something up, I just exit the game and copy back one of the backups I made to UserCfg.opt.

Hope that helps!

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The 20.9.2 causes crashes for more people in other games as well, it completely froze my pc up twice! I wiped the entire drivers with DDU and installed 20.9.1 again and no more crashes.

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Whelp, got double downed by the Camera smartcam crash… just as I was having real fun. Hopefully they really do fix it on Tuesday’s patch.

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Interesting. I started doing a similar thing with the controller settings with the “wgs” directory at the same level as “LocalCache”. However, the wgs directory contents get overwritten with whatever is stored on the cloud on startup.

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Good! I wasn’t crazy after all! Thanks for verifying that.

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As long as we’re here…has anybody noticed a strange issue with the live weather the past couple of days? As in clear sky “lightning”? Clear skies and there is lightning all over the place. As well, if you fly in the Pacific Northwest of the US, the winds aloft are crazy strong! 90 knots in some cases. The TBM couldn’t handle it and broke apart in midair.

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Truer words have never been spoken. Unless something rapidly changes (IE a new update breaks stuff for you), don’t fix what’s not broken! I’ve gone through a bit of tinkering myself to get everything nice and sound.

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Yes. I’ve reported it. Lightning has been happening all over the place with live weather. Anything with few clouds or more seems to want to become a wicked lightning storm.

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Here are my observation

8/18 - Came home from work and installed the sim (about 2 hrs)

8/19- 10/11 Updated and installed patches, windows updates, nvidia drivers

10/12 woke up this morning start the game wait about a minute or so and I’m at the main screen. 5 minutes later I’m flying around CLT