Without breaking the NDA this was brought up quite a lot in the beta forums. One of the beta patch notes explicitly said to expect a drop in FPS during panning as assets are loaded in/out of view (or words to that effect) so it is clearly done by design.
I’m hoping that the SU5 update is just to get Xbox and PC working off the same code, then future updates can allow for greater visual fidelity for PC.
Well said and thanks for creating this thread.
This absolutely needs to be fixed.
Got It. Thanks for clarifying…
Is this effect also apparent on the Xbox (Series X) version?
I tried to spot it on some streams on youtube but could not really spot it (but it might also be difficult to see with the compression).
I looked at this one for example (ignore the thumbnail picture):
Sometimes flat screen, sometimes VR user. No visible effect on 2d screen; the effect is visible in VR but doesn’t bother me so far. I’m happy to accept it for improved performance, especially in VR where smooth performance is vital.
Here’s an example VR screen recording at low altitude in the Los Angeles area; when looking over to the left there is some pop-in effect as the buildings at medium distance fill in, whereas on the right side there’s much less visible effect. It’s pretty subtle, but particular types of features like tall buildings can become more distracting I’m sure!
Speaking to someone does not necessarily mean that you are heard and understood.
I noticed it fairly often in last week’s pre-release footage, a little more on the Series S.
I voted on this thread, its gotten pretty bad on PC, i’ve never played a game from a big studio that has culling this bad and noticable. It feels like the scene is rendered infront of my eyes when i look out of the other window.
surely must be a bug… they wouldnt make it like this on purpose right…
Rumors say, that this (of course) was discussed and criticized by the beta testers but it was deemed as a necessary mechanic to get the higher fps. But that’s just hearsay, so we have to see. I certainly hope that it can be optimized.
At the moment, I don’t really understand what is happening. Stuff is not rendered when it is not in view, that makes perfect sense. But this second(s) long delay lets me conclude that it really has to be loaded back into memory from the disc. This would fit to the massive improvement in memory consumption. Before the update, the sim used 10-16GB RAM (of my 32) and about everything off the VRAM (8GB). Now it’s 4GB RAM and maybe 6GB VRAM. While it is nice to save memory, I fail to understand the advantage of saving so much RAM when there is plenty available…? I’m sure this is oversimplified at best, so I would be happy to hear the opinion of someone with more knowledge about the technicalities.
Personally I think that this unloading of assets was completely intended. At times the default simulator could use 24GB or more memory, and this wouldn’t allow it to fit into the Xbox without cutting back on the visible LOD massively. The culling also reduces disk swapping for users with 16GB (or less) RAM, which has been the most popular amount on gaming PCs for quite some time.
They said that these performance improvements would not come with a visible visual degradation however, and I think it’s simply a case of them underestimating many PC users’ tolerance towards LOD artifacts. After all, they introduced a serious case of terrain morphing when they changed the LOD distances with the USA World Update, and not many seemed bothered by this.
I think it would be interesting if the RAM allocation was dynamically adjusted based on the installed amount, which could effectively reduce this pop-in for those who have 32GB or more RAM. However, such an implementation could require DirectX 12 to work, which gives developers much more direct control of memory handling. Perhaps they introduced this culling technique with DirectX 12 in mind, which is not ready for PC yet.
I don’t know a whole lot on these matters so I’m only speculating here. I really want to hear what Asobo have to say about these optimisations, and I wish they were less vague in their last Q&A where they just said they’re rewriting the engine’s architecture with no real explanation.
I would hope this will be hotfixed and we dont have to wait 2 months for the the next sim update.
Trackir user here, can’t play this game anymore
I too wish we could get this very soon, but unfortunately only major bugs are usually hotfixed. I think we’ll be lucky if we got a slider or similar option within the next two months.
The next Q&A should be in the next two to three weeks, hopefully we’ll know what to expect then.
sadly in the next Q&A there won’t be any talks about bugs or anything like that lol
In a few weeks we will be celebrating our 1-year anniversary, and with that we have a really fun schedule of events coming (that will be announced later). We though it would also be a fun time to have some Asobo Flight Team Members that you don’t see too often face-to-face to say hi and answer a few questions from you!
this is what the next one will be about and while this might have sounded good before the community needs answers about what is going on with the bugs and the downgrade of the sim after the latest sim update.
It says that they will have a series of events going on, so I presume they will still hold a Developer Q&A sometime in August. I recall that last time they said the next one will be a little later than usual so that they can discuss how Sim Update 5 went with the community, but I might not be remembering correctly. I will check it out again.
If we have to wait like two months for the next one it would feel horrible indeed.
i do remember about something like that as well but idk now we will see lol
ok so i went back and saw the ending of the last dev Q&A and it was mentioned that one week after sim update 5 there would a Q&A on how sim update 5 went and stuff .
I believe it is generally agreed (although not universally; there is never consensus on anything) that smoothness is vastly more important than framerates for a simulator. Therefore introducing stutter to improve framerates does not seem like a good tradeoff.
For me the new scenery reload stuttering is very noticeable. Before the update I got occasional stutters when something in the scenery loaded, and I could adjust scenery settings to get the framerates I needed for what I was doing at the time. Now it stutters every time I look around (which I do constantly when flying VFR, using TrackIR), and there does not seem to be anything I can do about it except turning various scenery settings all the way down to Medium or Low.
Net result is that to get similar performance (smoothness and fps) with SU5 as I had before I would need to use much lower scenery settings. SU5 is a step back for me.
A slider or even a culling enable/disable switch would be much appreciated.
EDIT: The following link shows a fix that solves the issue as well, but using a program called Process Lasso. It gives you the ability to disable Windows Dynamic Thread Priority Boost, only for the MSFS executable. So other programs are unaffected by this change and the fix has exactly the same effect as the tweak I suggested below. Reducing panning stutter a lot on my end! Have a go :
Alright so I investigated a bit the stutter issue occuring when panning the view and I think I found a fix that might work for some of you.
On my end, the issue would occur only when the game window is focused, with the mainthread going straight RED, dropping my frame down if I panned my view too fast (headtracking user here).
The issue didn’t happen when the game was out of focus.
If this if also your case, I have to say I have no idea what this fix really does in terms of CPU management, all I can say is that it worked for me, and that now my view panning isn’t causing ANY stutter, so you might wanna try this:
Press Win+Pause, it’ll open up the About your PC window, scroll all the way down and click on Advanced System Setting, a System Property window should appear
Within that window, go to Advanced
Under the Performance area, go to Settings, then select the Advanced tab
Under the Processor Scheduling area, select Background services instead of Programs
Click Apply
After doing this, the panning view stutter should be gone, wether the game’s window is focused or not.
I hope this helps some of you, it worked for me!
Reddit post where I found the trick: https://www.reddit.com/r/flightsim/comments/idmdqq/update_msfs_2020_stuttering_when_window_focused/