Stutter before touchdown.. anywhere from 300ft to the moment of touchdown

User Support Hub Install, Performance & Graphics
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@AndyCYXU

If I’m understanding correctly- in your first post. You mention that playing back a replay recorded ahead of time of you hanging out at the airport you intend to land at will preload the scenery before you actually take a flight there? Am I getting that right?

I’m at my wits end. I have that 10-300agl stutter on my 13900k RTX4090 NVME SSD machine. Smooth as butter then a hitch while flaring.

If I have to make a replay ahead of my flight of me just sitting at the gate of the arrival airport, I’ll do it.

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maybe I didn’t word it right, “doing a replay” , you don’t have to record anything but, yes loading at arrival airport and maybe pan around a bit then move to departure airport might just help with that pesky stutter during the flare, as if the preloading of destination does take place and helps, I hate it with the passion LOL

Do you use FSRealistic I read it might also be a culprit, but again I see it happen the most at more complex airport poorly designed airports.

I sadly now with 10850K and 4090 in VR still have this from time to time but it seems to have moved to final approach phase as oppose to below 100ft AGL as before.

Let me know if it works for you, not too many people complain about it, not sure if it is a VR only problem or what. Also it does not happen with small GA aircraft, not really, I mostly fly PMDG and also on their forums there are people who claim to have this abysmal performance either at final or during take off, yet not with other aircraft they tried like Fenix for example. I do not have a Fenix since I have a whole HomeCockpit model of 737 which I use in VR and I had enough of FBW A320 so I don’t really care for Fenix, maybe if they made a A330 aside from that I am a Boeing FanBoy :smiley:

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I’m planning on getting FSRealistic maybe once I get my VR issues sorted as well as this landing stutter problem.. I’ve read that FSR can be taxing bit of software, that’s why I haven’t run it yet.

I mainly run PMDG 738/9 only as well- I’ve seen this stutter issue with other airliners as well, so I know it’s more a sim issue.

So far I’ve started what’ll be an ongoing experiment.. I’ve turned on Replay option under experimental and then loaded up my departure parked at KPAE and created a short 5 second replay of just being parked and I saved it “KPAEgateXX”. Then I went back to main menu/world map and loaded my plane onto the runway I intend to arrive at, 16R KSEA. Once on runway, I switched to drone cam and just flew it around to try and load everything into cache. I gave it a moment for good measure. Back in the cockpit, I went back to the replay box and loaded “KPAEgateXX” file and hit play- it teleports me back to parking at KPAE.. I immediately stop the playback and the nature of msfs replay tool is that when you finish playing back a replay it doesn’t teleport you back to where you were before you started playback.. So I basically just used replay as a teleport tool to hopefully keep scenery loaded in cache without risk of unloading by going back to main menu. At this point I did the short hop flight from KPAE to KSEA, ILS 16R. Lo and behold… no stutter on flare or final- it just still seemed to mildly stutter after touchdown, on rollout. Still not fixed, but definitely preferable.

Anyways, of course just this one instance doesn’t say much. But I will continue to experiment doing short A to B hops in different places with different scenery and will report back. Ultimately at the end of all of this I’ll have replay scenarios at most of the airports I tend to fly out of and if this all works, it’ll be how I load scenarios until Asobo decides to fix.

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I love FS Realistic, even in VR just have to set it up right so that it doesn’t feel like you are in a boat.

I am kinda sad to hear you are NOT using it as that means FSRealistic is likely NOT the cause “probably”.

Yeah its something to do with the preloading LOD’s or something not the first time where I can see either at go around or replay landing “second attempt” from recording as I explained in first post landing is much much smoother well, pretty much there is no stutter at all.

I tried today a short circle flight today around EPWA (without FSR) and had a super smooth performance, but that was a circle flight.. anyways… sadly not enough people have this issue so hard to say if anything ever will be done, also it is rather hard to preproduce, for that reason s well.

Definitely looking forward to see your experience with the preloading of arrival airport when you do more flights. :slight_smile:

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My guess is that this stuttering issue on approach and touchdown is caused by scenery objects being loaded late. This could be caused either by you having slow internet or having MSFS and/or addons installed on a HDD or on a slow SSD.

In that case, there’s not much to go on. If you have slow internet, upgrade to a faster one or try using rolling cache, and if you have a slow HDD or SSD, buy a good quality SSD.

It’s also possible that a large amount of addons you have, mainly scenery, could be the cause of these stutterings. If you have a large amount of addons, do the following: Empty the community folder, transferring your addons folders to a backup folder and do a flight with default aircraft and scenery. If you don’t have stutterings, progressively add your addons back in the community folder, first aircraft, then utilities and then sceneries.

If emptying the community folder doesn’t solve your problem, it’s possible to use a workaround, adapting a workaround found by @AdrianKSFO in using the drone camera to force scenery objects to be loaded before the touchdown.

Instead of starting the flight at the destination airport and using a replay tool to teleport to the origin airport, start the flight at the origin airport and fly normally to the destination airport. When you are on approach for landing, between 2000-1000 ft AGL on the glideslope, hit the Active Pause button and then use the drone camera to simulate the approach you are going to make with your aircraft.

Take the drone to the touchdown point on the runway. You can increase drone speed on settings, so it shouldn’t take more than a few seconds on full speed. It’s very important that you leave the drone as close to the ground as possible, as there are scenery objects that only load when you are on the ground, but be careful that the drone can sometimes go under the ground. You may notice that you may experience stuttering when using the drone in this process. This is actually good. It means the objects have been loaded and you probably won’t have these stutterings when you continue the approach with the aircraft.

It’s not really necessary to fly the drone over the airport afterwards. Once you reach the runway touchdown point with the drone, pan around for a few seconds and that’s it. Click on External/Cockpit camera, disable Active Pause and continue the approach with the aircraft. This should probably solve 90% of stuttering on aproach, especially the stutter before touchdown. If it doesn’t work the first time, try again when you’re closer to the runway, like 500ft AGL.

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That is the only reasonable suggestion, so it is up to Asobo to fix this, if this is actually the case.

First of all I use Add-on linker so I only load what I need.

Second you really think that someone with 4090 still uses plates HDDs LOL, both MSFS and addons are on m.2

3rd it has nothing to do with internet speed which btw mine is perfectly fine including actual connection to Microsoft servers.

Do you own VR? can you test landing LGAV in at least PMDG small GA low poly ac need not apply, let me know how it works for you preferably a flight from another airport.

Also I might add this work around is a pain and cannot really do it on vatsim for example.

anyway as I mentioned these have reduced since upgrading to 4090 from 3080, maybe when I pull the trigger on new 13900ks it will help more yet

for now it is acceptable except for really screwed up airports like LGAV by fly Tampa total ■■■■ performance

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Clear the cache from FS and let the cache rebuild. It might help

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Just updating about my replay tool teleport workaround, where I load at destination, fly the drone, then teleport via replay to my origin airport… it seems like it’s a hit or miss. Not much any better. So I’ll just say that it doesn’t work.

Since then I had tried clearing my rollingcache and setting up a larger file- 100gb. Also, I created a .bat file to clear my AppData/Local/NVIDIA/DXCache folder before starting msfs. I’m getting a much lower instance of stuttering before touchdown now, and better performance to boot.

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yeah its a mysterious one, as I wrote before my situation is much better since upgrading to 4090, still on a slower cpu 10850K even though it is humming at 5.1GHz, and i also cleared all the caches etc.. I actually use Google Maps Mod and my rolling cache in MSFS i think is disabled I use Google Mod’s Cache .

Anyhow it is hard to replicate it so hard to get someone to do something about it, bet certainly at better dsighned airports this situation is less common.

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Stutters on final is the most annoying thing! (After a CTD…) I find the biggest cause of stutters and performance loss is the SIM loading ground objects such as airport vehicles and particularly AI traffic.

I had a landing at KDFW turn into a slide show the other day ( with a 12900 and 3090ti) and that was almost entirely down to FSLTL injected AI traffic. Reducing my screen refresh to 50% to lock FPS at 30 has been the most beneficial fix here. Much smoother. Not using FSLTL is even better…but I do like the mod😢

As well as flying a drone beforehand, another solution is to create a manual cache for your most popular complex airports. Not sure if this will load all of the custom scenery objects, but it should help. Turning all traffic to less than 10% also helps.

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its not solved at the moment, right?

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I’ve experienced this short final stutter many many times, in pancake mode but very rarely in VR (will get to that in a sec).

The bigger the airport the worse it is usually. I suspect it’s being caused by the taxiway sign generation. These seem to be created by the sim during run time as needed and not stored as finished textures as part of the scenery itself to save space (though some 3rd party airports may do this). I think it tries to generate all of the signs on the airport at once, instead of small slices of that work per frame as it should. Those signs always appear for me at around 100-300 agl on short final.

At 60 fps in pancake this process seems to take more than 16ms, producing a very noticeable stutter, but in VR I run at 30fps locked with motion reprojection, and it usually seems to fit just fine into a 32 ms window.

The main reason I suggest this is that I have never experienced these stutters at airports without taxiway signs, ie default or more complex 3rd party grass strip airports.

It’s a perfectly reasonable way to handle something that almost every airport has, and which is unique to each airport, but the sim is handling it very badly process wise at run time I think.

If any of you have 3rd party hard surface airports with completely custom taxiway signs it would make for a good test. I don’t have any of those myself.

Cheers.

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No, I don’t think we can call it solved. There are things we can do to minimise it, but if the underlying SIM process cause bottlenecks even on powerful CPU and GPU sets ups, then no. Not solved.

It’s definitely gotten worse in the more recent builds. I never used to get stutters at all on my old 2080 Omen15. Now they are common even running the SIM in complete vanilla.

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well yesterday I had a flight to LGAV, which is by far the worst airport in terms of performance that I have had a pleasure to land at , but it was recently updated somewhat and most of all my PC got updated, from being
10850K+3080 (unusable airport stutter fest at touch down),
10850k+4090 (somewhat better)
13900KS+4090 (updated airport, higher in sim settings, landing had a stutter but it was short and small that it was almost non existent)

I do not use AI traffic, only vatsim and yesterday there was 2 aircraft around, when I went there before there were none and performance was worst.

I have to say that since I upgraded to what is pretty much the best PC a mortal can have my stutters at final are pretty much done. I say pretty much because they can still be detected like last nights flight to LGAV by FlyTampa, but it was so super short it was a non issue, hardly can call it a micro stutter even. my frames during landing were above 40+ (all in VR) I have MSFS locked at 90FPS through NvidiaPanel.

Issue IMO is far from being solved, not to say that it is a fault of MSFS (Asobo) but the scenery developers themselves, like I probably mentioned in previous post I have CYYZ and I can’t say I had a stutter at final there, nothing significant anyways that I recall.

For now I am enjoying the sim with this PC and in the last two weeks I have not experienced any stutter at final that would warrant me complaining the worst was as I said earlier at LGAV landing last night but it was so minimal that it had and impact of 2 on a scale of 0-100 for my flight sim experience.

I should also mention that my settings in sim in VR are on a high side, with many set to ultra, LOD’s are both objectLOD and TerrainLOD on 100, I seriously see very little benefit of them being above 100 in VR

I think Asobo getting some royalty payments from hardware manufacturers LMAO, well they sure should :smiley:

Only answer could be your settings are too high for your PC, but then again
“WHY ONLY AT TOUCHDOWN ?”

I will add some gasoline to the fire it was also happening to me during take off sometimes, all gone now.

So I can say that maybe 80% settings are too high for the your PC and 20% is scenery design something loading, maybe the taxi signs as mentioned by @Ramasurinen , very well might be, and/or other objects loading at the airport in the vicinity of your landing, and going back to LGAV there is a ton of junk there when you approach 03R.

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That’s been my argument all along, we all want the ultimate graphics at high LOD but at the end of the day there’s nothing better than a balanced system. Interesting about the taxi signs as probably over a year ago they were causing stutters in even vanilla MSFS so I wonder if there’s airports or addons (can also be marketplace) still using the old code/textures?

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I get this too , just as i touch down it stutter a bit, i dont notice it as much if i fly GA Aircraft but i do with the FBW A20N, i use an I7 8700K and GTX1080 with settings a mix of Ultra and high with both LOD sliders on 100 at 1080p on sadly a HDD not SSD

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I’d say you are asking too much of your hardware, if you don’t get 40fps plus in the cruise then you will almost certainly struggle near the ground. Reducing LOD and traffic can help but HDD’s certainly won’t so make sure they get defragged regularly.

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Hi all, I just wanted to report in that all these stutter problems disappeared when I switched from an HDD to an SDD for my MSFS install location. And I mean, disappeared. So there is that :flushed:.

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Users should not have to result to spending extra on an SSD to fix this . In this time of high costs etc, … Xplane 11 and 12 is fine … But something is loading or being written to disk on landing in MSFS to cause this , if i do a go around and 2nd approach the landing its fine so something is causing this , my PC runs this Sim fine and ive been simming since Flight simulator on the Sinclair spectrum so im not new to the hobby .

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I bet you still drive a model T :wink: and surely you don’t expect MSFS to be mired in the past? Fact is there are 500GB SSDs available for less than $20

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