I’ve been dialing in my new AM5 system. I’m posting test results in another thread. I need help understanding this strange phenomenon.
I’m repeating the same short flight over and over, capturing the metrics with CapFrameX. Results vary wildly, even when I don’t change anything. I noticed that if FPS and frametimes are much worse than the last test, restarting the flight restores the decent performance I was getting.
Here are two screenshots of the results of a 5 minute CapFrameX capture. Everything is the same: Bonanza G36 Improvement Project flying into and over NYC. These are the settings that give me the best results, and they are unchanged in the two screenshots below:
Xbox Game Bar disabled, Windows Game Mode OFF, HAGS OFF, Core Parking disabled, HPET disabled and ISLC enabled, Rbar and ‘Above 4GB’ enabled in BIOS. Undervolt set per core after much testing. A lot of work setting up Process Lasso.
I’d been seeing 50-55 FPS with 22ms frametimes, then the next flight would suddenly look like this:
Yeah I noticed the same. It’s just such a fragile, frustrating and irrational engine underneath. I guess rooted in the fact there is a LOT going on that it needs to put together at runtime to make the game (yes, game) work. This is just one of those symptoms. I can’t possibly say what is happening behind the scenes to make it this way but it is. It’s like a memory leak, or a bad initialisation, or WASM triggering wrongly and getting stuck in a loop that doesn’t crash the sim, but makes it less efficient. Really no idea. Basically it’s not very good at cleaning up after itself and as we know has very little in the way of redundancy or graceful failures.
Let’s see if they have learned anything to make this all more robust and reliable in v2024!? I have my doubts
Yesterday all of a sudden I had really high RAM usage until I rebooted the sim. Loaded into the exact same place and aircraft and it was OK again. Very very odd behaviour that changes from day to day and flight to flight.
I’ve been testing again this morning, and this seems to be pretty repeatable. I’d say about 75% of the time retarting a flight results in much better performance.
On a side note, I tried changing to 2K resolution in order to reduce GPU load, and it didn’t seem to make much difference in performance, or GPU temps. I think this tells me that my GPU isn’t limiting things all that much. It did however make a big difference in how crisp and detailed the world looked. 4K for me.
At least I’ve got a metric now: If I’m getting 35 FPS and 35ms latency in a difficult area I’ll need to restart the flight. If after that I get 50-55 FPS and 22ms latency, the restart fixed the weirdness, and the performance is acceptable.
I’m also thinking maybe the cache has something to do with. But since I’m flying the exact same route under the same conditions, I’m not sure.
I do have Rolling Cache enabled and stored on a RAMdrive.
I have the nVidia Shader Cache set to use 100GB.
I’ve never deleted any of the scenery .dat files.
Yesterday, while the online servers were troublesome in the UK, my 7800X3D temps were hitting 90 degrees plus in flight over the PG areas in Germany and the FPS was awful. Today, no problems with temps or FPS on the same flight in the same aircraft but the servers running normally.
Typically my temps are in the 50s with only a big temporary increase as it loads the flight.
Something similar I think sometimes happens when switching between VR and and normal. Occasionally it’s just 10fps or so less than it should be. Toggling back and forth again usually fixes it.
It’s like the engine gets hung up sometimes
Since large parts of this have been rewritten for 2024 hopefully things will improve a lot in this area
May I ask which cpu cooler, gpu, and computer case you have? I know, not really relevant to this post – but very relevant to to my personal quest at the moment! Thanks!
Oddly, I get the missing Ready to Fly button almost every flight, which I interpret as the sim failing to load all the way. Home,Start Again works every time.
this is very interesting
quite a few times i got the impression that the sim wasn’t performing as usual (even in routine flights) and the next day it goes back to its usual self… without me changing anything
i blamed it on the fact that i’m cutting down on caffeine this year
what i did experience (once) was a drop in scenery graphics, again without me changing anything… which lasted a few months
that resolved itself with one of those mysterious mandatory updates that one is never clear on what it is they do…
yeah sure but… i mean… memory leaks, race conditions, garbage collecting, exception handling, these are all basic (and i mean basic!) building blocks of coding, and are as old as coding itself
i think this is a typical case of too many hands on the plate, its hard to get robustness that way
@BegottenPoet228 Very good topic, good observation, accurate test result.
I have this problem too. I’ve been experiencing a drop in performance for a year, which disappears after restarting the simulator.
For me, the decrease in performance occurs after 15-20 minutes of flight. As time increases, the decrease in performance becomes more and more intense. I have FPS loss and stuttering, the degree of stuttering is getting stronger as time goes on.
In the first 15 minutes of the flight, the performance is flawless, there are no stutters. All my settings are Ultra or High, 4k resolution.
My system:
Asus Prime Z690-P D4
Arctic Liquid Freezer II 360 CPU
Intel Core i7-12700K
Samsung 1TB 980 Pro M.2 PCIeNVMe SSD
Corsair 32GB /3600 Vengeance DDR4 RAM
RTX 3080TI
It would be good if the error was reported to the developer so that they know about the problem or say something about it.
You have rolling cache enabled and wonder why performance is better when you fly the exact same route a second time? It is exactly why there is a rolling cache… try without and I bet performance will be similar for both runs…
That’s not why there is a rolling cache. The reason for the rolling cache is to reduce server load, bandwith use and sim loading times. It shouldn’t have any effect on fps once you are flying.
I have to agree with all that has been mentioned. Its kind of been getting on my nerves a bit lately. The frustration is that when i have dialed my “exact” settings in for as smooth a flight as possible, and stable performance, i would once in a while just like to enjoy the sim for a week at least. But the sim is so wildly fluctuating in both performance and graphics, that i spend 50% of my time re-honing settings. I have to dial my settings in “tight” because the way i have my VR set-up, any wild swings above or below 36-38fps and i start getting stutter/flutter.
One day its amazing, next day a loss of FPS, next day a graphics downgrade, next day the FPS goes too high (out of range), and i have to lower my settings again. Its wild. This is without any other changes elsewhere on the PC.
Other things ive noticed:
Re-start of entire game gets fps stable and reduces stutters.
30% of the flights start with no “ready to fly” button.
VR and PC graphics settings sometimes take on each others pre-sets.
Graphics better one day/worst the next.
A blue haze/tint in game some days.
Although i now have a 1gb connection, i still get pop in of trees and scenery some days. Birmingham in UK is avoided, as its a total melt-fest.
When the game works, it works stunningly well, which is proven by how much tinkering i have to put up with. But i’m getting to the point where i realize all my tinkering and growing obsession with getting things to work top notch, are not good for my health
All i ask for in 2024, is a stable, stutter free, minimal tinker free experience. With dare i say - a minimum of 20% performance increase. Is that too much to expect, time will tell.
It’s not cooling or rolling cache. This is a bug that’s been around MSFS for a long time.
Every once in a while, I load up and see terrible performance, 20-40 fps. I press the “toggle VR” button I have programmed on my joystick two times to turn VR on and off, and boom, back to 60-90 fps.
i resort to dialing my settings a notch lower (as in worse quality) than the absolute maximum that my rig can handle so that i have some headroom for the day that expected performance loss hits me… that way i get more stable fps from day to day… albeit at a lower quality
