Guys you gotta try this: if you disable all the optional windows in the custom overhead panel you get a significant performance improvement, especially in CPU / Main thread limited situations.
I tested this in many scenarios in the last hour and it’s reproducible.
I managed to obtain the following over EDDF with the A320 Neo:
This is clearly a bug because all those icons affect the already overloaded “main thread” even if they do absolutely nothing. If you want you can keep the ATC window only (which costs 2-3 fps) but the ATC can be managed by the AI and you don’t need the window if you understand spoken English. The ATC works 100% without its window anyway, and even if you want to change the weather or other stuff while you fly, you can activate the corresponding icon just when you really need it.
Are you talking about the menu that comes down when we hover with the mouse? The only thing I use it for is weather, so maybe I’ll give that a shot. Although, my performance has significantly improved after the hotfix, so I really haven’t been chasing frames for the past couple of days.
I can reproduce this. Disabling all toolbar buttons brought me up from 55 fps to 60 fps in my usual test scenario: Chicago Midway facing downtown in the A320, 4k Ultra @ 80% scale with traffic and weather disabled.
There’s no good reason why the toolbar button layout needs to cause such a large performance hit, and it’s because the UI library or its implementation in this application is really badly optimized. Having coded UIs for Direct3D applications, it’s actually really frustrating seeing this in such a large title where performance is so important. It makes the game come off as sloppy and thrown together.
Yes I also realised that. I think somebody else talked about it in an other post some times ago.
Since then I always keep only ATC in the menu and my FPS ar not bad.
Any IRL licensed pilot knows the ICAO de facto language is ENGLISH. Similar to why UTC (Zulu Time) is used as the ICAO official time zone for aviation.
@AgentMIB, not only is this is foremost a flying game for non-pilots and not a training tool, as a RW pilot you should know that English isn’t the only ‘de facto’ ICAO language.
I will have to try stripping some of these things out.
Regarding the map.
VFR map performance when popped out to a different display has never been great but it seems to be worse at present.
Tested over the weekend and VFR map costs 20+FPS which is a lot.
The problem is that even if you don’t open those windows, they eat resources. Plus, the ATC window (closed or open) causes 0.5 s pauses every single ATC message and with this trick you get rid of this too.
Yes, there is something very wrong with these UI elements and not only.
I am also puzzled about the glass display gauges that cause such big performance hit when their update frequency is set equal to framerate. I mean, they are 2D gauges that display numbers and lines, not crazy 3D scenes with millions of polygons. Provided that the GPU cannot take care of them (why?), couldn’t they be at least transferred to a CPU thread different from the poor main thread?
Another thing that may be related is the inconsistent frame pacing of this simulator. As if there were different subsystems running at the same time and they are somehow out of sync with each other.
This can be noticed:
by the always jagged aspect of the frametime graph either in the developer tool’s fps counter or in MSI Afterburner’s, in particular in cockpit view
by the brightness flickering that occurs with certain GSync/Freesync monitors even when the framerate is consistently higher than the minimum variable refresh rate. It means that, even if the average framerate is 50-60 fps, it drops periodically well under the VRR, forcing the monitor to double - triple its refresh rate many times per seconds thus causing flickering.
I believe FS 2020 has a heavy legacy on its shoulders and it is (we are, actually!) paying the price of not being developed from scratch.
I shared your post to other MSFS community, and so many of the users there are reporting some noticeable performance improvement after they applied your solution. Nice work you just have done! Can’t wait to test it on my machine too
Even though the fps itself is not a HUGE improvement, I get more stable fps with reduced stuttering which is the part you could actually visually notice easily.
Thanks a lot mate!
And, for those who haven’t seen any improvements, ya guys need to understand the logic behind “main thread” of MSFS and then check what bottlenecks the sim.
