I find this sooooo frustrating that this is not yet resolved. I fly the CRJ and with my eyes the instruments are not really legible. I pop out 4 of the screens, pullover to monitor #2 (same GPU) and maximize. Now I can at least see what’s happening but at the cost of 30% frame rate hit.
The frustration is that non core items seem to be getting prioritised over things like this. I see thoughts about drawing to 2 instruments but that kind of drop makes no sense - it’s got to be at a more fundamental level as it makes no difference at all if I pop out 1 or 4 instruments - this is DirectX or Windows or core graphics code in the sim.
PLEASE MS/Asobo at the very least, include this issue on a priority basis and let us know that you have heard and understand how impacting this is?
Using two screens still but no longer for pop outs - second screen used for LittleNavMap only. Is it my imagination or have I read somewhere that the pop out problem may be due to having different monitor screen resolutions?
Correct. Performance is unaffected by popouts on different resolutions of screens. It’s the same on a 1 monitor system or multiple.
@L10NEL1948 - the ability to interact with a popout window (like clicking on the selections in the ATC window as an example) are indeed affected, not performance. It seems to have more to do with screen aspect ratios than resolution. For example, my main screen is a 21:9 aspect ratio. I can interact with popouts on that screen easily. But if I move stuff to one of my other monitors (16:9), I lose any ability to click and activate options in the popouts. Move it back, it works again.
I really don’t think it has anything to do with aspect ratios. modern GPUs can handle aspect ratios with a fair amount of ease. This is also borne out by the fact that my system load is dramatically reduced. This is indicative of a lower load call. If the programme was struggling with conversion then the load call would go up not down.
I believe there is a limiter applied to certain areas in the cockpit, and those limits are being carried over when you pull the screen away from the cockpit area. Some one needs to add an exception to that limiter.
Agreed. I don’t think aspect ratio or resolution has anything to do performance. That introduces other bugs that you can bet Asobo neither tested for nor care about. But performance is another thing altogether.
My results are like yours. I have high 90 percentile GPU usage and smooth 45-ish fps with my performance being GPU limited (RTX 2080) according to the MSFS frame counter.
As soon as I pop out a window (on the same monitor), my fps drops to 30 fps, GPU drops to 50-60% usage, and I become main thread limited. Moving my window onto another monitor, even if powered by another GPU (I tried with a 1070 as a second GPU) has zero effect. It behaves exactly as your system did in your video.
Has anyone noticed a difference in this when using render scaling?
I didn’t notice it when I was using 1080 with 100% render scale, but then I upgraded my main panel to 4k using 70% render scale I noticed it a lot, 50% drop in frames with screen popped out.
Didn’t make the connection at first, but then recently I tried lower graphics settings with 100% render scale at 4K and the popout frame rate drop didn’t happen.
Although I still don’t use them as they still seem to induce a noticable lag when panning my view around.
Makes sense. In my case, I run at near 100% GPU usage without popouts. The second one is popped out, my GPU drops to about 60% usage. You’re basically throwing nearly half your GPU’s performance away, so it makes sense that lower graphics settings will increase performance.
Looking at my experience, it appears to me that if I have a frame rate limit set (in the graphics driver settings or in the sim) whatever frame rate I set is shared slightly inequally between the main display and each pop-out.
So if I set a frame rate of 60fps (which makes sense for the sim: any faster is pointless power and heat) as soon as I pop out a panel, the 60fps is shared between the sim and the panel, so I lose around 20fps (don’t seem to lose 30fps, though). Pop out a second panel and the loss is more than 30fps.
Of course, the solution is not to set a max frame rate anywhere, even if that eventually causes heat-related throttling.
I’d be interested to hear if anyone still has this problem when they have checked that there is no refresh rate throttling in the graphics driver settings, in the graphics MSFS settings, or in the in-game settings. It solved the problem for me!
If an additional monitor is not connected directly to the graphics card, but to the separate port on the mainboard, there is (at least for me) no drop in frame rate in the flight simulator.
My main 4k monitor is connected to an NVIDIA card. Two other monitors are connected directly to the mainboard to the GPU of the Intel i9 processor (used in FS2020 for Little Navmap, AirManager instruments and FS2020 pop out instruments). As long as the instruments stay on these two secondary monitors, I have no drop in frame rate. However, if I move (even a tiny piece) of a pop out instrument to the main 4k monitor (on the NVIDIA card) I have the known drastic frame rate drops in FS2020.
Having my additional monitors not connected to the main graphics card didn’t make any difference to the frame rate drop. However, these were connected to USB3 to HDMI adapters. Perhaps they were still using the Nvidia stuff.
What you are doing is not just not connecting them to the Nvidia card, but you are also connecting them to a different graphics card. It sounds similar, but the results are not necessarily the same.
My setup is my main 3 monitors (1 for sim, and 2 side monitors for helper apps like Navigraph, LNM, etc) connected to my RTX2080. My 2 touch screen monitors where I place my popout panels are connected via USB3 to HDMI.
However, I did test the 2nd hardware GPU theory not losing fps by installing a second GPU in my system (GTX1070) and connecting one of my touch monitors that way. It made zero difference in performance moving the popout to that monitor than when it was using the USB to HDMI. Same frame rate loss every time no matter what.
