Servers make no difference, the sim would put you offline otherwise.
And if SU7 don’t you think we’d all be suffering? I personally have no increased usage.
I suggest it’s time to start testing your addons
Ah yes… “I’ve never been observant enough to knowingly experience it, so it must be something else”
Give this thread a close read, my friend: Stutters/Lags Coming Back (sighss...) - #41 by ksrq7430
Flight Simulator 2020 streams several things from their servers, and any one of them being degraded will absolutely throw MainThread for a loop as it sits and waits for data. This is objectively observable and has been observed by myself, and many others.
Please stop gaslighting other users with opinions based on your clear lack of attention to detail. Thanks.
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You say yourself you are constantly limited by mainthread … this indicates a completely different problem to that of the thread and IMO has nothing to do with the servers. Have you even tried completely offline?
Exactly! I have been having similar issues even on a clean install and he is insisting addons? Seriously what is this dude on about?
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Yes, yes I have. This thread was made before the first ~4KB update (of two) on the SU7 Beta just before end of the year 2021.
The worst of the threading issues were fixed with that stealth update, though performance is not back to where it was prior to SU7, and I remain largely mainthread limited in areas with dense scenery (and especially in areas of photogrammetry). While things are better, there is still more work to be done with the CPU’s threading performance in DX11 mode.
That said, the main issue that I created this thread for is fixed for the most part (by the 4KB patch, which was rolled into the public release recently). If mods would like to close this thread, go ahead, please.
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For what it’s worth I’ve gained a good chunk or performance back by reducing my TerrainLOD to way below what it was prior to SU7.
It seems counter intuitive to me…why should Terrain quality have such a detrimental effect on the main thread. Surely the GPU ought to be taking the hit?
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The CPU still has to feed all of that data to the GPU to churn out frames, and there is some point where, (with how threading is set up currently), too much of any one particular type of data, starts to logjam MainThread as it tries to dish out frames for the GPU, and the GPU just sits and waits.
You’re right in that it’s gotten MUCH better starting with SU5, and the hotfix for SU7 has returned most of the performance regression that we saw with SU7, but there’s still room for improvement it feels like. In time…
Albuquerque, Gate 18, is a fun spot to test this with photogrammetry on and off, if you’re curious at the performance difference.
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I’ll take a look next time I get chance.
We sit and wait in hope then 
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Yeah I get the same stutters especially on final and near photogrammetry the only thing that really helps is turning down terrain LOD to below 50. But c’mon I have an i7-9750h and an RTX 2060… should I really have to turn down TLOD that much to eliminate stuttering??
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I run an rtx 2060 super i7 10700k and have to turn it off.
ATM only turning on photogrammetry for ga fights.
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Same issues here. Have to turn off photogrammetry to get above 25 fps.
i9-9900K, RTX 2080 Ti, 64 GB RAM, Ultra preset, 1440p
I had a 10700k and experienced the same, limited by main thread. I moved to 12700k and I‘m now mainly GPU limited. FPS increased by 10 fps. Still some hiccups, but much less. It again shows that the CPU dictates the ultimate performance ceiling of the simulator whilst the GPU must be capable of matching the framerate at the desired settings. It requires a CPU with the highest individual core speed possible and highest IPC available.
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I don’t know much about Intel CPU’s as I’ve always had Ryzen since I got back into PC’s.
There is no question you’re right though. The 5900x was released well after the sim itself and was/is lauded as one of, if not the, best gaming CPU out there. Without overclock it will happily boost to 5ghz and sit there, yet FS2020 is constantly Mainthread limited, even with a 2080ti with settings ‘beyond’ Ultra. When I first upgraded from the 3900x this wasn’t the case so something must have changed in the sim.
I can’t help but feel that software developers and hardware manufacturers are out of whack. The CPU manufacturers are making CPUs with evermore cores and threads, yet virtually every game in existence is thumping one core and leaving the rest largely unused. I do begin to wonder exactly what is the point of it…willy waving about Cinebench scores maybe? In the real world all these cores and threads don’t actually do a great deal.
Surely a sim like this should be eating up every ounce of CPU performance available, yet I see my clock speed maxed out but the overall CPU usage sat at 10-20% because only one core is being flogged. It’s bonkers when you think of it.
We can but hope that Asobo get this DX12 integration right and the full capacity of modern tech actually gets used like it was designed to be.
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Indeed. My hope is that DX12 with DLSS will remove some of these constraints and will allow for a smooth experience.
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I don’t think DLSS will bring much improvement. If the bottleneck is not the GPU, introduce various techniques to just make the GPU go from idle to more idle.
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That is why DX12 is paired with DLSS.DX12 will hopefully help on the CPU side. What you mentioned won’t happen.
I agree with @HenixK in that, so long as the game exists in its current state in DX11 and DX12, throwing more GPU at the issue won’t help. Intel does have the slight edge here with 12th gen as @DesignerClock63 noticed, but the solution is not “more CPU”, the solution is more optimization.
DX11 is limited in how much more it can be improved over its current state, given how DX11 is designed.
At the same time, DX12 is not panacea in and of itself, DX12 opens the door, Asobo will have to optimize the game engine, and optimize it properly, to utilize more than the four threads that DX11 is limited to, before we see improvement.
Only then, once the CPU bottleneck is alleviated, will DLSS make any difference. I say this objectively, as my setup is CPU limited, and averages about the same framerate at 1080p, 1440p, and 4k, in areas of heavy photogrammetry.
Outside of those areas, the CPU has less work to do, and thus can feed the GPU more frames, so GPU horsepower then becomes the limiting factor for maximum FPS at each resolution.
I game at 4k native resolution on a 4k120hz panel using a 5800x and RX 6900 XT, both on a custom water loop.
“The CPU manufacturers are making CPUs with evermore cores and threads, yet virtually every game in existence is thumping one core and leaving the rest largely unused. I do begin to wonder exactly what is the point of it…”
This is how DX11 is designed. One thread to rule them all, coordinate all of the work, and hand that work out to the other three worker threads. This is a gross over-generalization, but it’s good enough to get the point across in this thread’s context.
DX12 has many fewer layers between it and the hardware, and can operate with “n” number of threads, and much more efficiently get things done. But as I said in my example above, DX12 only opens that door, the developers have to take the time and effort to utilize the resources available to them for DX12 to make any difference in performance (we see exactly this with current DX12 performance in FS2020: Asobo admit that they have not worked to optimize the game for DX12’s features yet, only ported the game engine into DX12 itself. In my experience on several PC’s, DX12 runs about the same as DX11 right now).
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I just hope that the development team has started to work on improving the kernel code to support more threads. This issue has become more and more urgent. With more and more photogrammetric areas and complex scenes, I have to lower the LOD and monitor the VRAM load to make the SIM work.
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Indeed. The CPU bottleneck is one of the major issues. However, in the last Q&A DEV mentioned that they had very good and unexpected results with DX12 together with the first implementation of DLSS. There is hope…
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