PSA: When adjusting graphics settings in the sim

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I ran into this little tidbit again today, so thought I would bring it to the attention of the masses, either as a heads-up for the new crowd, or as a reminder to the folks who have been around since day one:

When adjusting graphics settings in-sim, restart the sim and the PC before testing the new settings out!

I recently replaced my 10700k with an 11900k on my Strix Z490-E board, and with hyperthreading disabled, it’s holding 5.3 ghz all-core, all day long with a Noctua NH-D15s.

I am incredibly impressed with the additional overhead and smoothness the CPU provides to the mainthread.

I, of course, have been playing with settings to see how much further I can take my traffic and LODs in relation to keeping my 3060ti happy while rendering on a Samsung G9. This included going into Nvidia Control Panel, dumping my previous settings in there and setting the slider to “performance” to reduce GPU render latency.

Back in the Sim, after adjusting LODs, leaving the menu, and continuing the flights to watch my render latencies, I noticed that my rdrthread and concurrentgtdraw latencies were spiking. Didn’t matter if I was on the ground at JFK, flying over NYC or STL, or parked on a ramp someplace. They were making a fuss and causing all kinds of stuttering, going so far as to interfere with the engine sounds.

I selected “reset to defaults” in the graphics and traffic menus and saved. I then set my graphics to default “Ultra”, set vsync to 30, saved again, closed out the sim, and restarted the PC.

Once back in the game, with the stock Ultra settings and vsync 30 that I set before shut down, everything was smoothed out, and no more spiking anywhere. It’s an old trick, but something I haven’t had to deal with for a long time.

For those curious, I was able to increase TLOD by 100, return Volumetric Clouds to Ultra, and run stock traffic settings, compared to the 5s on the sliders I had with the 10700k.

End result: Stock traffic settings, stock Ultra settings, in-game vsync set to 30, GPU limited and happy.

Side note: I believe the Volumetric Clouds were affected by some over-ambitious settings I had selected in NVCP. Returning the NVCP to “performance” on the slider opened up a ton of headroom on my GPU, which would have impacted the cloud rendering.

TL/DR: NVCP settings can negatively impact performance & restart your PC before testing in-game graphics settings

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I don’t use any of the global Nvidia presets, such as “performance” or anything else. It forces anisotropic filtering and antialiasing settings globally, which is counter-productive in titles that already support their own AF and AA settings. I set my own driver preferences using the Flight Simulator profile.

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Performance shuts those forced settings off.

Quality turns them on.

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Thank you Grabber!

I remember your writings on obtaining CPU/GPU balance were very helpful to me in getting smooth, almost stutter free performance from the SIM. Excellent stuff!

Interestingly, I just upgraded my system as well:

  • MSI Z690 Edge (DDR4) mobo
  • i7 12700k (8 real cores)
  • BeQuiet Dark Rock Pro 4 Cooler
  • 32 GB of G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-3600 CL16 RAM
  • 2TB 3D TLC NAND PCIe Gen 4 x4 NVMe SSD (MicroCenter Brand)

Still using the EVGA RTX 2070 Super FTW3 Ultra with 8GB VRAM.

Running 2560x1440, render scale 100%, most settings on Ultra.

Curious how you are handling FPS cap, Vsync, refresh rate, etc? I just tried running mine locked at 30, GPU Limited, working that 2070 Super hard (is there any other way?:blush:).

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I have the same GPU and 32GB RAM too.
I have a Freesync Gigabyte monitor and turn on Freesyc using OSD Sidekick. I also set Monitors refresh rate to 120 within that program
Vsync is turned off in Nvidia Control Panel.
I set the SIM refresh rate to 30. (which 30 is actually just half of whatever you monitors refresh rate is). In my case I have the Monitor set to 120. Half of that gives me a refresh rate of 60.

I usally run between 45-60 fps in most cases. This is usually at altitude above 2000ft. AGL.
I don’t get stutters or choppy gameplay. Pretty smooth with these settings. I think it has something to do with having Freesync enabled.

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Grabber,

Do you mean that 1). you removed the Program Settings tab for Microsoft Flight Simulator in Manage 3D Settings, and 2). selected "Use my preference emphasizing “Performance” in the Adjust Image Settings with Preview?

Thanks,
Bill

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No cap. No refresh rate tweaks. Just in-game vsync to 30. The G9 is a 120 mhz monitor, so the fps does rise as altitude increases (in game vsync at 30 = 1/2 refresh rate), but the 3060ti tops out just above 40 fps in flight with stock Ultra settings.

According to online cpu/gpu combo calculators, the 11900k and 3060ti favors the cpu by less than 1%, so the combo is naturally barely gpu-bound by default.

This is the first time I have been able to run a default preset in the sim without having to tweak something.

That 12700k should offer a wealth of overhead for the GPU on the ground, I’m not entirely sure what you’re asking about as far as improving things. You should be solidly GPU bound with that setup, so getting more fps by decreasing graphics settings should work great.

You could always do what I did, by resetting traffic and graphics to stock (F12), saving those settings, restarting everything, and tweaking off of that baseline if you feel you need to.

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Yes, exactly this.

On my 10700k I used every setting I had available to “overload” my GPU to cover the mainthread latency.

On the 11900k, I have the extra overhead to “unload” the gpu a bit and get a couple more frames on the ground with higher traffic and LOD settings.

Depending on whether you are CPU or GPU bound, NVCP settings can either help get your GPU slowed down or sped up, depending on how much processor render latency you’re trying to cover.

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Not looking to improve things. I’m getting excellent results, no issues at all. Just curious how you handled the items I asked about.

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Thank you for the detailed reply!

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Oh, yeah man, my bad. I read it wrong the first time :laughing:

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No worries! You’ve helped me out a lot. Figured I’d pick your brain for some additional knowledge/wisdom😊

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I’m not complaining about performance. You helped me so much tuning my sim to be balanced between gpu and CPU. For me 2 things is really unstable though as you already know i bet. Those things are Photogrammetry and traffic. I think those 2 things makes us need to change our settings to be stable depending on where we fly.

The most stable sim i got were when i turned those 2 things off completely. I know the sim feels really empty without traffic but also really stable :smile:

I really hope Asobo manage to optimise those things in the future without reducing quality in them.

What are your thoughts about those 2 things @Grabber523?

Why do you think PG is too CPU demanding in some locations and too gpu demandin in other locations?

Blackshark buildings i get longer drawdistance with and does not look melted, those pg looks melted in the distance. Feels that kind of detail doesn’t need that much of gpu and cpu.

Thank you for all help making me run the sim smooth when i had problems.

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To be honest, I never felt the need to turn off photogrammetry. I did do the photo city deletes for the world updates, but saw marginal increases in performance, enough to write off as variance. Same with HAGS…on or off, didn’t seem to matter.

Turning off hyperthreading was a massive performance benefit for me, because my CPU overclock could be way more aggressive at much higher clock speeds and still be rock-stable.

Traffic after SU9 was a major impact with the 10700k. Not an issue after the 11900k, again, I’m back to stock traffic settings.

I experienced melty buildings with PG on at lower LODs. Aside from increasing LODs to at least 200, I don’t have any other suggestions or observations about that. If your CPU is strong enough to support 200 LODs, then you should be ok.

I have never experienced the frame drops after a certain amount of time, and every CTD I ever experienced was easily remedied by updating drivers, validating GPU overclock settings against furmark (tessmark) and reducing them as necessary after driver updates, validating BIOS settings by resetting to default and reapplying settings after a restart when hardware instability was suspected, running DISM and SFC occasionally, etc.

Basic stuff.

I will keep my other thoughts about hardware and brand selection, PC maintenance, troubleshooting skills, user error, and managed expectations to myself in regards to the rampant negativity on this forum.

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Thank you, for your thoughts :slight_smile: Well, without PG and traffic i can run the sim with t-lod 400 and with pg i’m running it between 150-200 depending on plane and location. I’m using 4k renderscale 75. Really happy with performance just pg and traffic that makes me really confused why it’s so different demanding depending on where we fly. Traffic may be because we have more traffic in the real world now :slight_smile:

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Yeah, traffic became tricky. Like, with JUST real-world traffic, it seemed to be ok. With JUST live traffic it seemed to be ok. But the 3 top sliders in the traffic menu seemed to make an enormous impact. Even having traffic nameplates enabled/disabled changed mainthread load noticeably. I opted to leave the real-world and live traffic enabled and reduce those top 3 sliders to values of 5 before I was stutter-free over JFK on the 10700k. Other sliders didn’t seem to have any real impact at all when playing with them. I’m sure when SU10 comes out, I will be spending more time seeing which way hardware and rendering loads swing again.

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Agree, if i use dx12 after su 10 i bet i will have increased gpu load ovarall but maybe DLSS will balance that out i hope.

Lets hope everyone will be satisfied with su10. I’m a bit tired of performance/graphics complains. They have been around here since release. It will never be perfect optimised. We as users can balance that out if we all learn how to manage it.

Those three sliders you mention is really heavy on my system too. I have everything in that traffic settings turned off/0. I will try only have live-weather on :slight_smile:

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Perhaps. As someone who has been simming for close to 30 years, and has lived through the struggles of getting sims of the past to hit 15-20 fps with okay graphics settings, I have “extremely managed expectations” about what DX12 and DLSS will bring to the sim :laughing:

I hope it does improve, but I also think that it will not measure up to the hype people are giving it.

Time will tell.

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100% agree. And that will make the negativity increase. Not easy to be devs for sure.

I’m also complained, should not say anything else but i mostly complain about the weather that i found has getting worse. Tried to help in those topics about performance but it feels like they complain but wants Asobo to balance their settings to be able to run the sim smooth. We have different options because the amount of different hardware is unlimited. Asobo can’t optimise it and make everyone happy. Thats a fact.

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Yeah. It seems like people either forget or just don’t understand that at it’s core a simulator is not a game, and the computational loads required for it to run things like how air behaves under varying conditions alone are enormous.

And that’s before things like textures, buildings, vehicles, other airplanes, and all those other items that make it pretty are introduced.

There are limitations in a simulator that outweigh the typical MOAR MONEY = MOAR POWER = MOAR FPS formula that seems to drive the PC gaming culture.

I think the devs have performed miracles getting the old code to where it is today. Especially when it comes to balancing CPU loads. I know there is a lot for them to do still, and I look forward to future sim updates where those things are addressed.

But I also had a baseline understanding of what to expect as far as making this thing run well from past sims, and it had nothing to do with relying on the GPU to do all the work.

It’s just a different animal, and it confuses people.

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