Consensus with MSFS resolution settings is that resolution should be set to your screen’s native rez and then render scaling can be adjusted to achieve suitable framerates. I’ve been running at 3840x2160 with renderscaling at 0.7 or even 0.6 to get a reliable 30FPS on my middling 2070.
What I noticed is there is another variable in UserCfg.opt called SecondaryScaling. This is not adjusted by the in game render scaling slider & defaults to 1.0000. It can be manually edited however and I’ve found reducing the value gives significant FPS gains in areas where the sim is GPU limited. When CPU limited (eg in heavily trafficked airports or CPU intensive airliners) it doesn’t make much difference to FPS but perhaps smoothness is better.
Not sure exactly what SecondaryScaling does. Searching doesn’t throw up many results. It’s obviously reducing the number of pixels served up somewhere but as far as I can tell it only makes the cockpit instruments look at little less clear. This can be countered by increasing PrimaryScaling without reducing the FPS gain by much. Still experimenting but the settings below are giving me the most satisfying performance improvement so far:
I haven’t played with it recently, but when I did in the past, I found there was a very noticeable degradation of visual fidelity using secondary scaling less than 1.00000 vs scaling that’s hardly noticeable with primary scaling.
I reduced the secondary scaling to 0.8, and saw an increase of around 10-12 fps.
There is, however, a just-slightly-out-of-focus look to everything. I’m not yet sure if it’s worth it. Interesting find, though!
Further testing needs to be done, but I think 0.900000 is the best option for image quality and performance. seeing a pretty consistent 5 FPS increase and drop respectively.
