Nvidia’s recommendation on which of it’s 9 presets is right for your PC is definitely a bit hit or miss. But I have found the presents themselves give a good result, if you pick the right one. Nvidia initially recommended my i5 9400f 32gb ram RTX2060 use its 2nd preset resulting in most MSFS settings at low or off. Absolutely wrong for my PC. But I found the Nvidia presets themselves can give a good result. You just have to pick which of the 9 Nvidia presets is right for your PC, which is the aim of the guide.
Interesting fact: playing in full screen does actually decrease performance. I started in full screen and could barely run medium settings with my current set up. Switched to windowed mode and I’m on high settings with very smooth frames.
Nvidia control panel settings are all off, it is best to leave on default.
- Low latency mode reduces input lag but can cause stuttering if your CPU runs into trouble, I reccommend off.
- FXAA / Gamma correction are disabled by default
- Shadercache should be on regardless
- Power management makes little difference.
Adaptive = All turbo ranges
Optimal Power = All turbo ranges and IIRC it stops drawing desktop frames if idle
Max performance = All turbo ranges, if 3d application is detected then it boosts up to base clocks (IIRC)
Now to your graphics settings:
- Fullscreen reduces potential for framerate drops as it passes directly from Game > Monitor instead of Game > DWM > Monitor, but I’m not sure the exact methods used in MSFS, it might not be true “fullscreen”
- Render scaling, my personal idea is that this becomes less of a necessity the higher your resolution. Not the opposite.
- Buildings quality changes shading across buildings the higher the settings you go.
- Trees have exactly the same quality medium and above, only draw distances affected.
- Texture resolution has minimum impact on framerate. Main thing you should be concerned with is VRAM
- Texture supersampling does not seem to actually increase quality up close.
- Windshield effects on Ultra seemingly also affect windshield reflections
- Contact shadows seem identical from low to ultra
- Light shafts also seemingly identical low to ultra
- Depth of field seemingly identical from low to ultra
I haven’t commented on your performance testing as it is wayyyy off from my controlled benchmarks and other report’s I’ve had from friends. You also haven’t gone into very much detail on the CPU / GPU impacts, meaning that the numbers you do have in this thread are essentially useless. Screenshots in settings could also be useful! 
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Thank for the post, I’ve been running MSFS with Low Latency Mode set to Ultra, it’s something that I used in P3D when playing at 30FPS, 30HZ so thought I’d just turn it on. In my mind I thought it would help reduce CPU load 
. Although my FPS is stable at 30 I still get stutters, so when I get back I’ll turn it off and see if it makes any difference
Also not sure if some of you have seen this, but anyone running steam can do some tweak in the steam client before starting the game. I personally rec’d about a 5-7 FPS bump after I followed his steps in the steam client.
Hope it helps someone.
Help optimize FPS via Steam client, youtube vid
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Leave texture to Quality, performance bottlenecks it. As it does in many games. Especially in Death Stranding where id conflicts with DLSS 2.0.
Which sadly isn’t optimized in this game.
No there is no way to save them which I wish there were. I have to do settign by setting test, copy paste Dev results, do the next, ect.
I changed some things from the Website author that didn’t pan out. HE recommended Performance textures of Quality and that a bottleneck no no.
I leaving cache on even tho it’s not utilized on my system.
My other setting are a tad higher, but I went with average current cards, rather than RTX 2080 Super and TI or Titan cards.
As most will notice you take of the first tiem from an area surround by water, how frames plummet.
Create your own post if you want to blast peoples posts with arrogance. Seemingly and fact are different
Defaults are not good for fine tuning performance in games. Nor for all systems. Many factors come into play that the defaults argument will never win.
The original post was done by a tester. I corrected Nvidia side settings that are no longer factors, such as changing to Performance over quality and creating a bottleneck instead. Cache depends on your system. (the Source poster was in fact correct- see Nvidia’s reference information).
I further tweaked, compared DEV TTL and Nvidia Tests. Mainly to see that there is a lot of memory leak issues happening in the game.
Until that is addressed, Middle ground needs to be in place. Especially in airports where water kills your frames with settings too high, even on a Titian RTX and RTX 2080TI, and not man ygamers have the luxury of buying a new card at this time when they are not sure how stable work is, or had to be laid off.
Please follow up with your Controlled benchmarks and the data from both the game and Nvidia DEV core programs. Rather then say my settings are way off when they helped people, realize trial and error and settings affect different systems in different ways is a factor. Especially with the added Junk on many systems.
The real solution is when the Microsoft team and AI team get things tweaked. For ranges of cards. Especially to be able to game in 4k and have Upper end nvidia optimization.
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Great article. Fixed many issues I had. Thanks
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Thanks. Great article,
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I have indeed created my own post, within 16 hours of steam release I was working nonstop 
. I have also been planning this in advance since 7/11/2020, a few weeks after I gained access to the sim.
I have shown you areas where you lack, I hoped you would be able to take it maturely and improve upon the advice you give to the community.
I also rely on the word “seemingly” as I’m not entirely sure if effects such as contact shadows change between low and ultra. Visually and performance wise they are identical, but it could just mean that the differences between low and ultra are not apparent in the specific scenario I tested in. I prefer being on the safe side.
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The same issues keep happening with memory load when Water details load, and It holds data For The shadows. It was so bad during alpha stages and when more detailed Textures were added in the final beta stage. Hopefully this will be fixed.
These helped me. Tried another post recommendation and it dropped my frames.
Since the Last two stages of the alpha it dropped in performance.
Thanks for the PM about how to access Developer SDK for Nvidia hardware to see what specifically is loaded into GPU memory.
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How do I get those skins?
I tested on a mid range 1080. Should be minimal difference in performance delta between stock and oc clockspeeds. It is not like I am flashing more CUDA cores onto my GPU 
. There is no point in “downclocking” to reference clocks. GPU clocks are only comparable from the same GPU and vary from vendor to vendor anyways. A 1060 @ 2ghz is not the same as a 1080 @ 2 ghz.
The point of my guide is for people to read and find which settings affect CPU / GPU performance the most, and for them to prioritize / compromise on their own.
You mention filler garbage? I hoped that the “details tabs” would allow me to keep it short and simple for majority of people, but people interested in my methodology would have that information readily available to them. If you think there is room for improvement, LMK.
I comment here as this guide shows questionable information presented with confidence, which could fool people in a pinch. I did not “stoke myself”, as I did not mention the fact I had days / weeks worth of progress invested into my own guide. I only did so when Spazzy told me to “go make my own guide”.
Yes, there will probably be differences in the performance deltas between systems. PM me and we can both dedicate some time looking into this.
Spazzy, you have 3 CPUs and 4 GPUs to test with. Please put them to good use with apples to apples benchmarks.
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Show some detailed videos please.
The Questionable details is Your opinion only.
All I care about is if it helps others until they patch and optimize the game.
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For all other help I will create a reply for specific GPUs and others can post things that helped them. Reply to that comment.
TIPS: GTX 900 Series
TIPS: GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 Series