In the most recent developer livestream (September 2026), Seb went into some good discussion around how Off Screen Terrain Pre-Caching works in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. I believe there has been a lot of confusion up to this point on how this impacts simulator performance during camera “panning” moments, which is where the sim really struggles with stutters.
It’s been the opinion of many, including myself, that VRAM garbage collection is tuned too aggressively for many PC use cases.
In my system, I have 24 GiB of VRAM available. The worst case scenarios I run into tend to use only 12-14 GiB of that VRAM.
But, if I change a camera view (such as to the overhead panel), I will notice the sim very quickly evict large amounts of that allocated VRAM. When I switch back to my main cockpit view, the previously-evicted assets need to be quickly paged back in, causing a very noticeable and jarring stutter that is consistently reproducible. This has been discussed at length in other threads.
As Seb mentioned, this is an expensive computational process, as those assets are coming from one of: streaming from a server (worst case), rolling cache (disk), or main memory (system RAM).
So this led me to think, maybe another option could be added to advanced graphics settings: Off Screen Object Pre-Caching. In theory, this could adjust the number of cached object assets - separate from terrain data, and be adjustable on a per-user basis (Low/Medium/High/Ultra). Airport objects, aircraft objects, etc.
Is this something the developers could consider, so that we can take advantage of unused VRAM and not resort to expensive paging of memory?
Thanks, and hopefully this can be a useful discussion.
