All these problems sound to me like a memory leak. My system has been consistently good until the UK update when I suffered slower and slower frame rates and stutters - but only with a 3rd part Edgley Optica (aeroplane). So certain things - including traffic density by the look of it must be triggereing these memory ‘holes’.
I monitor my system resources both with Task Manager and Resource Manager. I’ve seen no evidence of system resource requirements growing over time, which one would expect with a memory leak. Whether my flight lasts 20 minutes or 5 hours, my system resource usage is always roughly the same. It goes up or down depending on the area I’m in of course, but it’s roughly the same. A memory leak would cause you to eventually run out of memory.
And it’s not paging. I have 64GB in my system. I have page file turned off in Windows. I don’t need it with that much memory. So I always see the true amount of memory being used.
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Yes, I saw that at some point earlier, and I disconnected all my bluetooth equipment from my system. Yet, the problem remains on my end.
Interestingly, I flew on my other computer with a Ryzen 3950x and a 2080 Ti, and I’m not getting the same pauses, so, I do believe it maybe some sort of driver or hardware or disk access issue, maybe?
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I reduced stutters significantly by disabling my rolling cache. I rarely get stutters in less busy areas. Typically they happen in busy urban areas. The busier the area, the worse the stutters are. With rolling cache it was unbearable.
And it can’t be disk access time. My main system drive (where MSFS if also installed) is a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO, and my secondary drive that holds the game content and cache is a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus.
well, that’s not my issue either. I’ve tried with and without rolling cache. WITHOUT it, i get even MORE stutters. I have a 4TB m.2 NDME drive attached to the main board that i run MSFS from, so I don’t think access would be the problem, either, unless there’s some weird driver issue going on…
I think most of the stutters are just due to poor optimization. People running on 10900K and RTX3090 are still experiencing stutters even when running lower graphic settings. I think trying to find that magic setting to eliminate stutters is akin to being on a unicorn hunt. Until Asobo fix it, we’re stuck with it.
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I totally agree with you.
Although I must admit that after the last update of 18th of February MSFS runs a bit better.
Locking the FPS to 30 does what it is supposed to do, LOCK THE FPS, and gives a more fluid flight
than before, even with some settings in ultra. It seems that Asobo is hearing our comments…
Still FAR AWAY from what it should be, but at least playable now, (If you don’t use the 747 or the 787)…
And I, on the other hand, lost about 10 fps over what I was getting before. Now I typically hover in the 20-25 range vs the 30-35 range I had before. And nothing I do to graphics settings changes that. I can run at 720p on all LOW settings or my regular 1440p with a mix of ultra, high and medium, and nothing changes at all. It only drops if I increase settings to all high or ultra.
If I enable V-Sync and lock to 60 fps, it doesn’t do anything I can tell. Same frame rate as without. If I lock it to 30 fps, then it drops my frame rate to below 10 fps, making it unplayable.
That said, my frame timing (according to the dev mode frame counter) is a lot more consistent now than before. Prior to the update, 20 fps would have been a choppy, painful mess. Now it’s slow, but at least it’s a smoother experience than before. But 20 fps is still not a good experience, regardless how consistent timings are. I was getting over 40 fps with my current settings before the USA World Update. I miss those days. 
What about, just for testing, setting:
Terrain LOD 50%, Building MED, Trees MED, Grass MED.
Then if this is ok, set Terrain LOD 100% and compare.
Terrain LOD definitely has an impact on my performance. I keep it at 75%. At 75 and below, I see no changes to performance. As soon as I increase above 75, I see significant performance drops.
Object LOD I can set at 200 or even 400 in the config file and it has no impact on performance.
As for other settings, it makes no difference where I set them. Like I said, I can run at 720p LOW settings. My GPU (RTX2080) is at about 15-20% usage. I still can’t break 25 fps.
The only changes I see with changing graphics settings is the workload on my GPU. And at best I only ever see it around 50-60% used. My CPU (Ryzen 2700x) main thread is near 100% at all times though.
This most likely is one of the source of the performance you’re having. FS2020 is heavily dependent on single core performance and this is why it is often best running with Intel CPUs. I might be wrong but these figures are just telling me your GPU is waiting for your CPU to process the game loop and to send the graphics data to the VRAM for rendering purposes.
I don’t know what you’re video card is either (it might be posted here but I’m sorry not scrolling it all through), but you might want to try reducing any setting which is consuming CPU time, like anything involving a lot of vertices or combined CPU/GPU processing.
I’d review and lower these first:
Terrain LOD, Object LOD, buildings, Trees, Grass, Water Waves, , Shadow Maps, and Terrain Vector Data (this one I can see any diff between off or ultra and I use MED as a consequence)
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Agreed. It’s CPU. I’m limited by main thread and I know it. I have an RTX2080, so not concerned about the GPU performance.
It’s just a bit discouraging when from one update to the next, their “optimization” ends up hurting performance vs helping it.
It depends, like I’ve reported in the VR forums I’ve better perf in VR with the Index since WU3, not much more but definitely a little more, not worse. I’d very much like you let me know if my suggestion above is helping you though.
My regular settings:
Terrain LOD: 75
Buildings: Medium
Trees: Medium
Grass: Low
It’s not a graphics bottleneck. I keep buildings at Medium. I could run them on high most of the time, but in busy areas like LA, NYC, etc, that starts kicking the ■■■■ out of my performance. Medium is a good compromise.
The other settings have no effect from low to high.
The only one that has an effect is Terrain LOD. I keep it at 75. Any lower, and I see no increase. If I raise it up from there, I see a decrease in performance.
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Are you running with photogrammetry off?. Buildings will only affect your performance if there is custom azure autogen outside the surrounding photogrammetry area like London.
All my online Bing settings are on. My settings have pretty much been the same since launch to be honest. Originally I was getting 40-45-ish fps. As subsequent updates come out, that performance is slowly being chipped away. This last update was the biggest performance hit I’ve had in a single update yet.
It is recomended to have installed the game and the content like comunity folder and oficial folder in another drive? i have installed both in the same drive, it is worth for the stutters?
A quick update:
Yesterday I was flying over Ireland and I spotted something different indeed in VR (didn’t try in 3D).
I’ve noticed anytime I was on the ground rolling on the taxiways and runway, and depending on the direction I was mostly looking at, up to around 500ft to 1000ft AGL, there was something taxing the perf. I could see this indirectly in the form of a little bit more (sometimes some much more) wobbles with motion smoothing enabled. Once above a certain height it was not longer exhibiting this but “normal” motion smoothing wobbles (meaning as expected but no more). When landing, all of a sudden again, maybe about below the same height AGL, wobbles where back down to the ground up to the parking spot.
The only way to lessen or nearly to eliminate these was to lower Terrain LOD down to less than 50%. I believe there is indeed something amiss with the rendering engine when below a certain height. It could be Pixel/Vertex Shader maths based on height having a bug causing extra loss of perf, it could be rendering engine sending some data only below a certain height and causing extra load, I don’t know, but the link to the Terrain LOD makes me think it relates to the same perf limitations I was noticing when I started “My VR” topics:
- When flying over Photogrammetry areas, I needed to reduce TLOD to 50% as well (for my test hardware of course)
- When flying over Sparse areas, it was fine with TLOD 100%.
- When flying over London more recently, the same TLOD was affecting the outcome.
My limited understanding of the FS2020 rendering engine makes me think there is a problem in the CPU/GPU sync when streaming large amount of vertex buffer data, and this could be one contention point causing the perf issues. In effect, TLOD is not only affecting ground texture LOD ring distances, but it is also affecting buildings and trees LOD ring distances (they multiply each other, for example: building_lod * terrain_lod).
This means the higher the TLOD, the more geometry to stream to VRAM, not just the more textures. I can sense Trees are less taxing in general and I believe it is because there are less different models to render and therefore it makes an effective use of geometry instancing. However buildings are more varied and with photogrammetry, the mesh complexity inherently translates in even more geometry to stream (and I’ve posted somewhere lately in these forums a screenshot showing the unnecessary and unoptimized mesh complexity over London).
Having said this, I’ve also seen WU3 oversubscribing VRAM when flying over London and this leads me to think the PG mesh is either too complex for the amount of VRAM, but given performance issues are reported from many other places since WU3, I rather think there is a bug in the vertex buffer handling and the rendering engine might just be allocating new buffers while previous ones are not free yet, and/or there is a bug in the CPU/GPU fencing when updating the data in the existing buffers.
NB: It might have been there already in my previous flights but I didn’t pay much attention either. I might be entirely wrong as well in my analysis, otherwise this might give some pointers to a solution for the devs.
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There’s no recommendation to do this. I did it because it physically separates my OS and main game files from the sim content / cache locations. Plus it prevents my main OS drive from getting filled up as quickly.
Theoretically, you can read data much faster from 2 separate NVMe drives than you can from a single drive. In all honesty though, I’m not sure how much of a difference it makes, if any at all. Once the main sim is loaded, Resource Manager really only shows the sim accessing the drive with the content.
A few months back someone experienced exactly the same in Tokyo (RJTT). I could not repro. Was in an Icon. (I am not going to search ;p )
Edit: Tried to search, but guess you cant search on closed posts… Anyways, the FPS would drop by about 15 when 700ft was reached, then at 1500 or 2000ft it would go back to normal. The user even posted a few videos.
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