Hello everyone, since purchasing this game in December I’ve been plagued with a terrible 2 second freeze every 60 seconds. This has been consistent in every sim update since then. I’ve tried so many things to resolve this, including:
Disabling real time traffic
Disabling online features
Dropping resolution/settings
Caching a massive area and flying only within the cached area
Reinstalling drivers (chipset and GPU)
Reinstalling Windows 10 (and I keep my Windows installs about as clean as you can reasonably get them)
Swapped out individual components to test if it’s a RAM, PSU, or GPU issue. It’s not.
I have a very high end build - 9900K OC’ed to 4.8GHz all cores, 32GB 3200MHz CL14 RAM, 1000W PSU from EVGA, and a 3090FE running at stock. I don’t think it’s a hardware issue.
This issue happens exactly every 60 seconds on the dot - see this frametime chart:
I’ve seen other threads with this issue with no fix, on this very forum and on Reddit, but I can’t include links in the original post. Just a Google search of “microsoft flight sim frametime spike every 60 seconds” will yield a TON of different threads.
Is there any hope? Can Asobo even fix something like this?
Yes, aggressively. Absolutely nothing else is spiking the CPU or running in the background. This is also the only game where I have this issue.
I can’t upload an attachment because I’m a new user, but I took a video of me just spinning the camera around while the plane is sitting idle in an airport, and I still get the frametime spikes. Only in this game.
Long shot: are you in 4K? Do you have a desktop background of 4K pictures/images that changes every 1 minute? If so, try disbling that. Has been a known issue for a long time in windows.
Wow. I just figured it out, and I’m not sure if there’s a fix.
For anyone else who experiences this - do you happen to have a VR headset plugged in?
Every 60 seconds a SteamVR process called vrserver.exe runs and coincides with the frametime spike. It doesn’t use any RAM or CPU so I only found this out by sorting my processes by reverse alphabetical order and sure enough, every time the frametime spike occurs, vrserver.exe pops up for a brief second.
I think this might be causing issues in other games as well, just not nearly as bad as MSFS which is a full 2 second freeze for whatever reason.
I’m working on getting a video on Youtube so I can show it.
I can’t add in direct links yet because of my member age, but if you paste this link into a browser it should take you to this youtube video:
youtu.be/i9aImxeyVVM
At the start and end of the video you can see the process pop up and then the stutter occurs.
This is definitely the issue… I guess it’s time to follow up with the other people who also experience this stutter to see if it’s the issue they’re facing as well.
Sure the frametimes are still atrocious, but that’s mostly due to the game seemingly being unable to leverage more than a few of my CPU threads (and I’m flying over Seattle at the moment). Compared to the first frametime graph where you can see literal 2 second pauses, this is miles better.
Thanks again everyone for the responses. I’m going to mark this topic as resolved and will reach out to Steam support.
