Severe FPS Drop at Night MSFS 2024 (All Airports, All Aircraft)

Bug Reporting Hub Install, Performance & Graphics
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1

Hi everyone,

I’ve recently started experiencing a major performance issue in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, specifically during nighttime operations.

Issue Summary

  • During the day, performance is stable at around 116 FPS

  • At night, FPS drops significantly to around 90 FPS (or lower)

  • This happens consistently at all major airports, regardless of location or aircraft

Tested Locations

I’ve tested across multiple major airports, including:

  • VHHH (Hong Kong)

  • KJFK (New York JFK)

  • EGLL (London Heathrow)

  • OMDB (Dubai)

  • YSSY (Sydney)

  • EHAM (Amsterdam)

  • EGCC (Manchester)

  • EFHK (Helsinki)

The issue occurs universally across all of them.

Troubleshooting Already Done

  • Cleared the Community folder (no add-ons)

  • Tested with default aircraft only

  • Completely removed and reinstalled NVIDIA drivers using DDU

  • Monitored thermals and VRAM usage (everything normal)

  • No signs of CPU/GPU throttling or spikes

Key Observation

  • The issue is strictly tied to nighttime

  • Daytime performance remains perfectly stable

  • Night performance is consistently degraded regardless of settings or scenario

System Specs

  • CPU: i9-14900K (water-cooled)

  • GPU: RTX 5070 Ti

  • RAM: 32GB DDR4 @ 3600MHz

  • Storage: 4TB (2× SSDs)

  • Monitor: Alienware AW3418DW (G-SYNC)

Additional Notes

  • This issue started suddenly, without any clear change on my end

  • No recent hardware changes or known system instability

  • Performance drop feels rendering-related (lighting?) rather than hardware limitation

Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

2

Yeah, the same thing happens to me, but I’m on xbox. At night when ever I have been flying for a couple of hours, My frames just instatly drop whenever I do anything. Even when I dont touch a thing my game becomes all stuttery like only updating once every 2 seconds. It makes it almost impossible to fly.

3

Same situation here. I lose 20 FPS in Night time compared to day daytime on ground.

4

Has anyone figured out a solution to this? I’m still going from 30 fps to 22-23 fps at night. I don’t think I’ve even done a night flight since I migrated from 2020 to 2024

5

I am also having this issue probably something like 25% fps drop during night. It is enough to just change time of day to when it is dark and all of a sudden there is massive fps drop. Wish this issue would get more attention

6

Why is this an issue or a bug? Isn’t it that at night millions of light sources have to be rendered additionally and therefore FPS goes down?

7

I’m not seeing this at ZBAA in SU6 v1.8.14.0. Framerates on my PC are hovering around 90 when ready on the ground at the airport, which is about the same as when I arrived during the afternoon yesterday. I’ve not checked the airports listed in the OP, though.