Hey everyone, first post here so apologies if its in the wrong place or in a poor format.
I’ve been simming on my new machine for about a month now and have had a great time, played FSX as a kid and MSFS is everything that I could have hoped for back then. This game is a lot more fun when you can actually land the plane lol.
Anyway, I’ve also become more interested in the relationship between computer hardware and software so have picked up performance tuning as a bit of a hobby which is what leads me to posting here. I’ve spent more time tuning my system and the sim over the last week than I have flying and wanted to share some of my experiences and try to dive deeper into what is actually happening here and why. (It is just amazing to me that a few square inches of highly pressed and etched sand and metal can create a virtual world)
My system:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7900x (OC to 5.6MHz)
GPU: NVDA RTX 4090 MSI Gaming Trio (OC to 3.0MHz)
Board: ROG STRIX B650E-F Wifi
RAM: 2x G.Skill F5-6000J3636F16GX2-FX5 (32gb total)
SSD: Samsung SSD 980 PRO 1TB
PSU: MSI MPG A1000G PCIE5 (1000 watts)
Cooler: Corsair iCUE H100i ELITE CAPELLIX XT
NVDA Game Ready Driver 535.98
So what I’m trying to work through right now is the disappearance of AI ground aircraft, which were working well (from a tech perspective) until just a few days ago. I’ve done some searching around this and other forums and it seems that there is a pretty rigid SimObject limit so I’m trying to figure out if I’m violating that which would tell me the only solution for now is dressing-down my community folder. If that is the case, I have no problem with that but, again, I’m trying to maximize the hardware and software.
Don’t get me wrong, the performance with this system is spectacular, it has no problems maintaining 60-90 FPS (from NVDA performance) on Ultra maxed settings anywhere but NYC which is totally understandable due to the city scenery, and even out of KJFK on take off its still usually above 40 FPS. LEBB (Bilbao) is really the only other place where I’ve had FPS drops but that is a very detailed custom airport with a few POIs too so not totally surprising.
So on to the observations. As I said, what got me on this track was disappearing FSTraffic aircraft and their troubleshooting page mentions that if the jetways are moving but no models appear, it is likely that the sims object limit has been reached, which is exactly what is happening for me. Additionally, the game tends to exit flights extremely slowly and its actually faster for me to restart it entirely and other topics seem to suggest that this could be related to something in the community folder. I also use GSX pro and have tinkered around with the extra clutter settings but to no avail.
Interestingly though, if I load any of the effected airports with a runway start (as opposed to gate) the AI aircraft seem to work. This causes two issues that are likely related though. First, large objects such as terminal exteriors take a little bit (2 seconds?) to load and they first load as grey squares. (are these LODs? I have no dev background) The second issue has only happened once but I assume I could recreate it, which is a large, sharp geometric shape spawned a few miles from the airport. As I sort of suspected, when I hover over it with the drone cam, it corrects but then reappears when I go to cockpit cam. This happened outside of INIs JFK and I also have a custom city scenery so, again, not shocking but piqued my curiosity. When I load to the runway, the exit speed of the sim to main menu drastically improves as well.
I enabled dev mode to dig deeper and tried to add up the amount of objects used (I’ve heard the limit is 1000?) and the SimObject stats window adds up to about 700 so I was wondering if anyone knows more about this or how to get a more relevant count as it relates to game limits. I also noticed though the debugger that at gates with jetways but no planes, it shows “LOD 0/0” where the plane should be.
I have tried to load a variety of combinations of planes and airports as I primarily use the Fenix A320 and wondered if that might increase the object count, but the same airports are having issues with the default A310. I got traffic to return with a gate load at the default KTPA after the upgraded LFPG, default KIAH, FlyTampa KLAS, Ini KJFK, LVFRs KBWI and a number of other airports of varying size and quality failed to load them at the gate. I was wondering if this was related to the urban area as opposed to the actual (e.g. NYC is weighed down by the KJFK KLGA KEWR airport objects as opposed to the scenery itself) so I tried loading into the default KEWR with the Fenix and default KTEB with the default Cessna 172 but that changed nothing which wasn’t really surprising.
I don’t think that this has anything to do with my machine because the utilizations are still very reasonable and performance is otherwise strong. My sim does tend to crash more than I’d like but I think that’s ok given the stress I have purposely put on the hardware and software. Recently though it has been crashing without an error message which from what ive read here possibly related to a game ready driver, though I believe it has only happened to me in dev mode so I guess it could be that too.
One thing I haven’t tried is quarantining different things from my community folder, which I might do but figure would take more time and effort to conduct.
So these have been a few of my observations so far and I anted to share and maybe start a conversation around pushing this incredible game to its absolute limits, possibly for no other reason than to find where those limits truly are. I’m probably forgetting a few points but want to get this started so will likely add to it and looking forward to the interactions. I was particularly interested in the quirk that the AI traffic loads when I start on the runway but not at the gate so hoping someone has some insight into what is causing that, as hardcore software dev is well above my pay grade (I have a little background in covering chip cos but nothing as far as development). If it turns out that I’ve hit a hard limit here, no problem! I’ll tune-down my addons and enjoy the experience, but I am definitely curious as to what is happening here and why.
rz