None of the graphical options make any difference to the frame rate

[Nekhebu]

As many (most?) of you out there I have spent quite a bit of time over the last few days trying to get the game running at acceptable frame rates. Out of desperation started experimenting with different resolutions and graphics levels yesterday and noticed something weird that doesn’t make any sense.

I’m using an ultra-wide monitor default resolution of which is 3440x1440. The biggest issue with it is that that it’s literally the only ultra-wide resolution that is available in the game. Every other is pretty much 16:9 which obviously makes the picture far too stretched to be even playable and means that my only choice is to either play at native resolution (potentially with scaling) or play in a window (eww).

Anyway, long story short I performed some deeply scientific tests and here is what I found:

Lowest graphics, smallest window

Setting graphics to their lowest and changing display mode to windowed yields around 34 frames per second:

Lowest graphics, largest window

Making the window as big as it goes while keeping the lowest graphics settings give me around 31 frames per second:

Medium graphics, smallest window

Bumping graphics quality to medium preset and making the window as small as it goes gives me 33 frames per second!

Seeing how nothing works, I decided to set the resolution scaling to 30%, because that would SURELY affect the frame rates, right? No. Same 31 frames per second:

Medium graphics, largest window

Yet again, keeping graphics settings as it and only resizing the window to fit my screen gives me, you guessed it, 33 frames per second:

Task Manager

During all my tests my relatively ancient CPU (i7-3770K) and GPU (980 GTX) didn’t even get maxed out.

Medium graphics, smallest window:

Medium graphics, largest window:

What on earth is going on? It’s like literally none of the options make any difference and there is something magical, invisible that is making the game bottom out at roughly the same framerates. Surely making the window as small as you can, dropping quality to rubbish and setting resolution scaling to 30% should give me good framerates? Right? I’m getting 80-90 FPS in DCS for god’s sake. Every other modern game still runs relatively well on medium/high graphics settings at 30, 60 and sometimes more frames per second yet this game just isn’t affected by any of the graphical settings.

Anyone else noticing the same thing?

[Zevon2112]

I find that at all but the very highest settings the game is CPU and not GPU limited.

Try turning off all traffic/ai and see if that helps

[Nekhebu]

I did this all with data turned off completely and no AI traffic or anything. It’s literally everything that can be disabled was disabled.

Also, as I mentioned - my CPU wasn’t even bottoming out.

[WeamDreaver]

Turn off live traffic and live weather.
Any difference?

[MrAdrianSW]

It looks like something it locking the frame rate. The GPU utilization does change.
Id check for FrameRate settings, VSync, and other things that would limit the Frame rate.

[NBKTHE1]

Your 3770K is the bottleneck, although its not maxing out, 1 thread will either be, or… because of how threading works in this sim, the main thread is waiting for other threads to finish to move on.

Goto options and enable developer mode, then in the menus it puts on, enable frame rate, then it will tell you why its running slow, more than likely it will say main thread.

[E1ephant42]

Check all your cores. I’ll bet that like me, one of your cores will be hard pegged at 100%.

[Nekhebu]

Here’s the CPU usage on lowest graphical settings and smallest window at 100% scaling:

Hovering around 34-36 frames per second.

[Garack666]

Learn to read the taskmanager. Even 30% CPU usage CAN mean absolut CPU Limit.

Depends on:

• how the game utilize a CPU

• Cores / Threads Numbers, with a 4 Core 0 Thread CPU 1 core 100% 1 core 20% 1 Core 0% means 30% CPU Usage. thats absolut cpu limit cause 1 core is at 100

With 4 more Threads (4 Cores / 4 Threads) thinks get more complicated.

Your 3770k is clearly in CPU Limit. Well even my 9900K is on bigger airplanes.

[MikeDaMan34]

Dumb question but did you restart the sim after making changes to the graphics settings? I know one of the options requires a restart so would assume changing the global setting would require the same.

[NBKTHE1]

@NBKTHE1

Goto options and enable developer mode, then in the menus it puts on, enable frame rate, then it will tell you why its running slow, more than likely it will say main thread.

This ^ - it tells you so you don’t need to second guess, this forum is littered with people asking the same questions, yes its completely CPU heavy, yes it needs optimising.

[cepact]

same thing with my 3700X, I regret going AMD … the game is severely CPU limited there is nothing to do to make FPS better, I hope they can optimize it

[JoanneSpanner]

Looking at the graphic there, it seems like none of the cores are maxed out, despite what people are saying.

[NBKTHE1]

Correct, it does not need to be maxed, I’ts simply waiting. Its how multithreading works, one main thread does the majority and schedules the other threads, due to this, the main thread needs to wait for the other threads to finish their task the main thread gave them, only the main thread can do UI and draw calls. How do I know this? Because I’ve been writing software for the last 15 years.

[JoanneSpanner]

But what is it waiting for if the other cores aren’t maxed out either? Either way, doesn’t this suggest that adding more processing power (either in terms of raw single thread speed or more cores) won’t fix anything?

[Garack666]

You need single core power like in all Sims…

More is better 9900k@5.3 like

Perhaps they can optimize more

And fast Ram help in cpu limits

[AlightLemming7]

I was getting a slideshow the other day at 4K and I tried turning the resolution down to 480p at 30% resolution scaling with all the other settings turned all the way down and it still ran at like 20FPS. The aliasing was MAJESTIC.

The next day, it was back to normal and running at about 40FPS at 4K/Ultra. I really don’t know what changed, but I did reboot between those results.

In short: computers are weird.

[NBKTHE1]

More modern CPUs can perform vastly better compared to the older generation, regardless of clock speed, it’s just how the architecture works. So yes and no basically, more modern CPUs will get you more frames, but it won’t be an insane amount.

[JellySnek3160]

Ryzen 5 1600, 32GB RAM, RTX2070 Super

Same issue. I locked game to 30FPS via Nvidia Control Panel.

Digital Foundry was able to get much higher framerates, I refuse to believe my PC is capable of only 30-40FPS on medium.

[zljlo]

A few things to try, from experience, and from other threads:

• Disabling the VFR map, from the in flight menu, because in some situations it’s extremely CPU intensive. I get twice the FPS when I disable it, if I have long flight plans with 50+ waypoints loaded, in external view, and some improvements in cockpits as well.

• Adjusting the windows performance options for background services, from here:

It’s counterintuitive, but it has helped some people.

And finally you could try changing some settings in the NVidia profile for the flight simulator that have been enabled by the latest driver, which seems to have caused problems for some people:

Those two options in bold have been changed from the defaults, in the latest driver version. You could try setting the Threaded Optimization to Auto, restart the simulator, and see if it made any difference.

In any case, with the current settings, the CPU is clearly the bottleneck. Also this simulator seems very sensitive to RAM speed, and that CPU supports only DDR3, which can be twice as slow as DDR4, and that would also show as a CPU bottleneck.