But you were the one saying every flight in MSFS is the essentially same. I am well aware that this is not the case for the reasons you mention, so I am glad we agree on that. If the sim varies the size of that hypothetical “data bubble” to account for speed and altitude that’s great. I am not sure that this is the case though. But let’s also remember that there are LODs. So it’s not an “all or nothing” scenario.
What do you mean system performance is not constant? Unless I run out of memory or my hardware throttles down for some reason, the performance output should be constant. Not really sure what you mean honestly.
You misunderstood me. The point is, that “cleaning out” memory is not a performance-intensive operation, because data is not removed but just overwritten. That’s true for persistent storage just as it is for RAM. So stopping the sim for 10 minutes does not help to “clean out” anything. It might help the sim to complete pending draw calls, maybe. But then again when you stop the sim, the aircraft is also not moving. If the sim really bogs down the system so much that it has trouble freeing up memory in time, it’s just a bad design in my book.
Note the word some in the sentence you responded to here. It does release data, but not sufficiently and/or not in a timely fashion.
That’s just not true. At least not on my PC. When I quit MSFS, a standby contingent of 12 GB or so is retained that is not deallocated even hours after exiting the sim. If I try to play any other demanding game after MSFS without clearing the RAM, I get a measurable performance hit.
Yes, but that is all user action and nothing that MSFS does. Your suggestions help of course. I also tuned down the level of detail in certain areas to avoid CTDs.
No, and that’s what I meant when I wrote
It leaves everything to the user without any tools to actually find out why performance is degrading. Other games have guidance, detailing exactly how much RAM certain options will use, and others issue warnings if the selected options are likely not running well.
Right now you can run into degraded performance and CTDs even on a PC that meets the official ideal specs for MSFS. Until I toned down the detail, MSFS would commit more VAS than the system total available. While Windows does not prohibit such behavior in a program, that’s something that should not happen.