After several hours making a bunch of short flights, I have to say SU7 has not been super-great. I’m running a 5-year old gaming laptop, so pretty low-spec for this sim. After the hot fixes for SU5 and then SU6, I’ve managed to keep a steady 30fps (VSYNC locked and frame-limited) in glass cockpit planes in most parts of the world, even dense cities. My graphics settings are set to 1080p High End across the board, with just a few tweaks like turning off motion blur and reducing depth of field. Sure, I’d get some stutters or tearing occasionally, but not bad enough to impact actually flying the plane - these were purely visual hitches that mostly occurred over dense urban areas.
After SU7, with otherwise identical graphics settings and flying most of the same planes, I’m down to 26-30 fps that rarely steadies back up. I also tested DX12 just on a lark but that is a disaster with my now-venerable GTX 1070. I was getting dips into single-digit frame-rates, jumping up to mid/high teens, and hardly getting past low/mid 20’s. So after that mess, I reverted back to DX11, restarted the sim and at least got back to upper-20 fps.
Sadly, however, the dip in frame rates does not seem to correlate with system load - my CPU is showing 70-90% load, my GPU in the 50-70% range, and my 8GB VRAM showing only about 50%. So I have no idea what is hanging things up in SU7 compared to SU6.
Worse, the lower frame seems to absolutely correlate with airplane control and responsiveness. Some of the stutters and hesitations in performance are causing the sim to miss control inputs or have delayed response, creating a bad feedback loop between control input-render/display result of input/next control input. Engineers and scientists refer to this kind of in-built delay as hysteris - the delay or lag between input and response. After SU6, this hysteresis was minimal - now it seems much longer on my poor system.
Fortunately, I have a new PC coming this weekend so with luck, I’ll get performance back (and then some) with brute force and money, lol.