For all those considering “breaking the bank” for the best of the best, here’s a worthwhile video from Q8 Pilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol8JMCtjN7w.
He was running about as good a spec PC as you can get right now…
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Hi,
Which airports show low FPS like that ?
I have an RTX 3080 /Ryzen 3900X@4.3Ghz/32 GB 3600 CL16/SSD NVME/ 4K Ultra
On very busy /photogrametric places I sometimes have big fps drops. Going from 35-40 FPS to 20 FPS when I’m below 500 feets. Then goes back up. Streaming related most of the time. When streaming stops FPS come back…
Could look if it is that. Put the game in active pause. If your fps come back up it’s the streaming.
Why ? I don’t know yet…
streaming data needs to be decompressed / handled by the CPU. Pretty logical performance is worse when downloading/processing lots of scenery (photogrammetry or complex hand crafted airports fit this bill).
Yeah, I’ve got a Ryzen 3700X now and the main thread is a bit limiting; my motherboard will take a 5000-series so I’m looking forward to upgrading to a 5800X in a few months. Same core/thread count, but noticeably higher clocks AND that big generational bump in IPC will really boost the slow/stuttery areas like big airports in airliner cockpits that break my immersion experience today. 
Just upgraded my R5 3600 to a R7 5800X myself, since good guys Asrock were quick with the BIOS updates on my B450 motherboard.
Would have gone with a 5600X if there were available, but they’re not, and I have the disposable income, so hey, what the heck 
Pretty happy with it.
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I have an rtx 3080 and a 10900k overclocked to 5.1ghz all core. Ram is 3600mhz of ddr4 32gb. Resolution is 4k. The sim is always bottlenecking the CPU in most cases. What I found that drastically improved my performance more than overclocking the cores was increasing my core ring ratio (cache) as high as possible. For me, that was from 4.3 to 4.8 ghz (Not sure how this works on ryzen). Increasing your ring ratio of your cpu increases the speed at which the cpu communicates with your ram and I found that my performance jumped from the mid-twenties at large airports to low 40’s high 30’s while landing in the cockpit view of the fly by wire mod. Also all graphical options that impact the gpu such as textures, ambient occlusion, reflections, buildings etc, I left on ultra; settings that are heavy on the cpu such as terrain LOD and Object LOD I set to 100. Ultra has them at 200 by default try reducing it to 150 or 100. You hardly notice the difference visually however the performance hit is crazy. Traffic is off. Make sure Nvidia control panel settings are set to prefer maximum performance. One last thing, watch out for render scaling if on higher resolutions as it defaults to 200 on ultra which is essentially doubling your resolution without you possible knowing it. Hope this helps you achieve a smooth experience like it did for me
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One last thing, watch out for render scaling if on higher resolutions as it defaults to 200 on ultra which is essentially doubling your resolution without you possible knowing it.
I agree that you should pretty much never use a large value over 100% for render scaling, but in my experience setting the preset to Ultra has never changed this setting.
In fact, any switching of the presets between low-end, medium, high-end, and ultra has never changed the render scaling setting for me; it always stays where I’ve left it (whether at 100% or 80%).
Do you find it changes when selecting the presets?
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I haven’t switched presets recently since the update. I wonder if that is something that has changed but it has changed before in the past when I have changed from say high to ultra preset.
Must be nice to be rich…
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It really depends where you are. Where I currently live (South Korea) every new AMD cpu and every GPU (3080, 3090, 6800xt and and 6900xt) are available online without scalper prices pretty much from the launch (massively available about 2 weeks after the launch).
I got Ryzen 5800x and rtx3080 a few weeks ago.
Why is everyone so quick to push 4k. What is wrong with 1080 within this Sim I love 1080 in MSFS!
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Nothing wrong with your PC. The game just runs poor.
It has a few Bugs… runs fine for me. Waiting on the patch to see what has been fixed!
I read this as:
I spent THOUSANDS of dollars on hardware from scalpers to play a game at 4K 60fps, but the game is perpetually limited by the main thread of the CPU, no matter how much money or CPU/GPU cores and memory I throw at it.
You’re at 4K, and the 3090 ain’t that great compared to a 3080 or 6800XT. What did you expect?
Look at Youtube videos, 60fps @ 4K isn’t realistic on a 3090 unless you’re flying over the bush.
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I’ve yet to see a 4k YouTube video! 
Do not buy the faster ram. You MIGHT get 3fps extra or you might get incompatibility with the new ram. Ryzen liked fast ram for Ryzen 1 and 1+, 2 and 3 are less susceptible and on top of that, 3000-3200Mhz is the sweet spot for return on investment in terms of performance.
As other have pointed out, check that the XMP profile is actually active in the BIOS.
And go High-End preset instead of Ultra. It still looks incredible. Then you can tweak and see what you want to keep. Sorry, but you’re pushing a high resolution into a known power-hungry game and then flying from big airports. No go.
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I have a i5 3470 (yes, a 2012 socket 1155 oldy, no K) 16GB 1333mhz RAM and a 1660 Super. Monitor is a 34" ultrawide QUHD. Framerates outside plane steady 45’s inside plane steady 35’s. JFK and NY 25’s. Everything on High-End, some ultra, rendering scale 90%, only glass cockpit on low. This set up is completely GPU bound. The GPU utilization sits at 95% or above, showing that it’s the GPU and not the CPU and thus game engine that is limiting the speed of the simulation (stuttering for instance). This results in smooth consistent frame rates. testing shows that the simulator uses just 4 threads and performance is primarily dependent on the single-core speed of the CPU.
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Before doing anything… do you mind posting a picture of your graphics settings in MSFS? I understand you want to run everything at Ultra, but there may be a couple of options in there that we can suggest you turn down which will effectively have no visual impact yet be a huge performance saver.
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Honestly, you could spend £100,000 on a Cray supercomputer and still only get 20FPS at airports in this game. I don’t think any amount of hardware upgrading will change much until Asobo optimise the sim a lot better. There’s so may variables creating so many bottlenecks in it. Not least the online data streaming side of things.
One thing I noticed which increased my performance noticeably, and I’ve not really seen this mentioned elsewhere, is turn off the HUD in the external camera mode. That very obviously got me at least 10FPS in external camera mode but also increased my performance for the interior cockpit camera too. Give it a try.
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Hardly. You are buying yourself a 5-10% increase at most by buying faster RAM, when you can easily expect 60%-100% difference by playing with the settings.
For instance, the Garmin refresh is very taxing on the CPU and don’t add much to the sim. Who needs a Garmin that refreshes at 60 Hz ? I beleive the real ones don’t even refresh at that rate.
Also I doubt you see any difference between LOD 100 and LOD 200, but your CPU/GPU will have a far lower workload, maybe between half and 75% less workload on rendering.
That’s because you can overload any CPU, current or future, by demanding to draw everything with maximum details at any distance, even if the objects are completely invisible because they are 50 miles away.
You buy a CPU that’s 50% faster ?
Double the LOD and it will crawl to its knees just like the less powerful one, but you won’t see any visual difference because it’s alreayd too far away. So lower your expectations and you’ll be fine. Most other games don’t need to draw thousands of details at 10 miles like MSFS does, that’s why you can get noticeable performance boost with more CPU/GPU power, but in MSFS, it’s another matter.
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