- Experiment method
I used Process Monitor Process Monitor - Sysinternals | Microsoft Learn with a filter for process name and with only file operations and thread creation displayed. This is excellent because you can see what MSFS is doing and what is slow. Importantly you can see to the second very clearly when the loading of the sim started and finished even if not watching it, which makes it a lot easier. I saved the traces so I could double check unusual results.
Times are from process start to ready at the initial menu screen.
Cold starts were after a reboot then a 30-60s pause at the desktop to let the machine idle. Warm starts were after quitting the previous start and waiting 30s before starting again, without a reboot.
Many times were measured twice but always they were very consistent, within 4s, and so some combinations were only taken once. I’m only giving the lowest of any measurement pairs here.
Changes of configuration were managed using addons linker for both Community and Onestore folders. After each configuration change an untimed start was done to ensure that any cached startup work was completed before the measurement run.
System is 7800X3D X670E 64GB 3060 12GB Samsung 980 Pro 2TB 40% free space. 16GB empty rolling cache on ramdisk.
R is the current pre beta general release. B is the current SU13 beta x.14. Times in M:SS
- Results
- Base installation, only mandatory packages.
Cold R 1:55 B 1:46
Warm R 1:31 B 1:23
- Base installation plus world and city updates only.
Cold R 2:07 B 1:58
- All marketplace content installed. Includes c.120 packages extra with a mix of aircraft, scenery, airports, etc.
Cold R 3:40 B 3:30
- All marketplace + all Community content of c.450 packages. Includes navigraph and many aircraft (Fenix, Comanche+more) and a lot of airports and some scenery and utilities.
Cold R 5:49 B 5:24
- Everything plus also GSX with all services enabled but all jetways disabled.
Cold R 7:38 B 7:08
Warm R 5:09 B 4:35
- Conclusion
Beta x.14 provides a small but appreciated reduction in load times under all conditions with my configuration. The saving is roughly proportional to the total load time and is 30s in full configuration.
Also GSX is expensive in load time. From process monitor on the release version I could see that just loading all of the GSX services overrides took exactly 60s.