Hi all, some weeks ago I have purchased a new machine (Alienware Area 51 | Intel Core Ultra 9 285K | Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 | 64 GB DDR5-RAM) and switched from MSFS 2020 to 2024. I was overwhelmed by the performance I experienced with all setting to the limit. I started to install my favourite addons as PMDG 737-800/777, Fenix A320, BeyondATC, Chaseplane etc. I continued to have a butter smooth performance. But from one day to the other that changed in a very strange way: When switching to external view, the FPS drops dramatically. In internal view itās fine again. It doesnāt matter if on ground or at CRZ level. 20 FPS is here the maximum combined with severe sound stutters. Itās fine at the beginning of the session and gets worse after ~ 10 minutes. Before, I was not staring all the time on the FPS, but when I checked it was always >40 at any situations (without FG).
I activated now 4x FG to make the sim playable but this cannot be the final solution as there must be a reason why the performance dropped suddenly so severe.
Iāve checked that all drivers are updated, switched to current DLSS version, deleted Rolling- and Nvidia Caches, tried to fly without the 3rd party addons (the FPS were a little better here as expected but not what a system like mine should deliver and the drop in external persists) and so on and so on as I am in that ābusinessā since FS98 and know the typical bugs and tricks where to look at first, but in this case I am completely puzzled. I know that many buying a highend PC are disappointed when they experience average FPS with MSFS2024 only but in this case I know that my system could be better as I have witnessed it.
As I have not yet installed so many addons I am willing to reinstall MSFS2024 but I wonder if this will help or if there is something from āoutsideā outbraking my system.
Any advise how to investigate or what to do next?
You could try to disable resize bar. I have almost the same setup as you except with a 5080. On Msfs 2024 is butter smooth performance. However Iām on FS2020 more. Howās your internet connection? A reinstall of 2024 could be worth it.
Please, what is āresize barā?
Thereās a lot of things you can do but with that PC you should be getting better performance for sure.
- Turn down frame generation to 2x and not 4x. FG has a performance cost on both the cpu and GPU and you donāt need 4x to make it playable. I have a 5090 GPU and 9950x3d and run triple 4k screens at 60 fps using 2x FG and itās smooth and no stutters.
- Turn down BATC traffic a bit. Traffic injection is very hard on the cpu and likely is maxing out your cpu which then causes stutters and audio popping and low fps. I actually switched to SayIntentions for traffic and that has help me a bit but I still have traffic there on 3 out of a 10 point scale. Anything higher and I get low fps and stutters.
- Use dynamic graphics settings in msfs to manage terrain and object LODs or one of the aftermarket programs (set it to 30 fps and then with 2x FG youāll get 60 fps which is perfectly playable). LOD is the largest impact on performance and lowering it when close to the ground has a large helpful impact on performance and near or on the ground you donāt need long distance LOD anyhow.
Start there and also posting more of your other settings will help too to diagnose Things like multiplayer also hit performance as do using ultra presets on some of the other graphics settings. And for now donāt mess with resizable bar or other bios settings unless you know what you are doing as bios changes help some situations but arenāt a one size fits all thing and can make things worse if you arenāt careful.
Thanks for the advise so far, but keep in mind that I had already great performance with the current settings before incl. BATC traffic max and so on. So tuning the MSFS settings cannot be the way forward IMHO. I need to find out what happend respectively what have been changed causing such a sudden drop of performance.
IMHO, there are 3 possibilities:
- Something changed in or around MSFS I am not aware of ā can be find out by reinstalling MSFS what I will do the next days
- Win11 has changed or installed something which affects MSFS. Unfortunately, I had not set up the restoration function of Win before the change happend.
- There is an issue with the hardware (unlikely, testing had no negative results)
I donāt know if them removing a server in the US and one in N Europe has anything to do with performance 
. Iām getting loads of stutters now which I never had before
Me too horrible perfomance since two days. Its like we never had SU 4..! Dont understand why they killed servers, we need every resource for a streaming platform like that!
I found the solution by coincidence: Seated Passengers of GSX caused the dropdown. Since disabling them, all is fine. As I use GSX from the beginning on in MSFS2020 and never had issues with it, I believe there must be something wrong with my GSX installation. Will check and seek advise at FSDT if necessary but most important I can have fun again with the sim. Happy flying to all and many thanks!
Thanks a lot for sharing this solution - it might help someone in the future with a similar problem and maybe even me, since I also use GSX. Once again, it turns out it wasnāt Asobo or the game servers.
Fly safe mate.
I do not have GSX and certainly do not have it in PS5. So performance for this is still bad which could still implicate the servers or Asobo.
I do not have stutters on my PC which is a much better build than PS5 of course.
Question for my own curiosity (as I have not purchased GSX yetā¦)
In MSFS > Graphics > there are 3 options related to characters: Quantity, Variety, and Quality. Are these applied to just the pilot and co-pilot avatars, or to all visible characters like ground crew, or GSX passengers, etc?
If so, if you keep GSX seated passengers, but lower the Quality / Variety settings in MSFS, does it help, or are the settings unrelated?
I have the exact same setup as you, I just got my Area 51 a few weeks ago and it seemed to work quite well in the beginning however I also am suddenly having horrid performance. Iām able to maintain a constant 120 FPS to match my monitor refresh using a cap of 40 and 3x FG, however no matter what aircraft Iām in or where Iām flying, I keep having horrible hitching as a result of massive CPU latency spikes, regardless if I change views, am actively flying or simply sitting stationary. Ive also tested this with various FPS caps and refresh rates and no matter if I cap to 30 or leave it completely uncapped I get the same latency spikes, Iāve tried practically everything, Iāve tried all variations of:
Bios: (updated to latest from Dell)
-SpeedShift On and off
-SpeedStep On and Off
-C-states enabled and disabled
-Rebar on and off (including verifying in profile inspector)
-Iāve tested every overclock profile available including not overlocking
-Memory is set to XMP
Windows:
-Game mode on and off
-Optimization for windowed and borderless on and off
Nvidia:
-Iāve tried every combination of V-sync and G-sync with both native MSFS FPS cap and RTSS
-Iāve tested all new presets for DLSS 4.5 (even though yes I use TAA)
-Iāve cleared all caches, WASM folder and scenery indexes as well as test various cache file sizes.
-Iāve tested fresh installs as well as using an empty community folder.
And basically every setting and trick in the book. Iāve been simming for many years and I swear Iāve never had more of an issue with optimization as I am right now with this new rig. Iām using a 32ā Alienware 4K monitor. If youāre able to provide your bios settings/ point me in the right direction as to what the magic tweak is to keep the CPU latency on this rig stable. Iāve also tried all these settings with GSX enabled and uninstalled as well as all my LOD sliders as low as they will go so Iām at a loss as to what could be causing the issue. Any help would be much appreciated and I can post videos of my sessions if it helps.
Hi, I have to disappoint you as I am also facing random performance issues still. Not so severe in the way you describe it, but there are. Currently Iām struggling with a flight Iāve done 3 days ago: EHAM to LOWI with PMDG 738. As I see acceptable FPS and stutter free behaviour on the ground (FlyTampa EHAM and FSTL and BATC on) the nightmare starts after TO. Until I pass the german border, I experience severe sound stutters. After a while it gets better, but I have them until landing. Didnāt see that before with that plane. I will use the weekend to do other testflights same route with other aircraft and other route with same aircraft. Yesterday I made also another puzzling experience: After watching one of IslandSimPilot last VIDEO (which I really appreciate since a long time) I rechecked my settings. I randomly put the HPG H160 at Emden (EDWE by Aviationsimdesign), a medium complexe aircraft on a medium complexe airport. Initially settings were FG x2 Nvidia DLSS, DLAA on. Both upper windows in DevMode FPS Display red permanently. I switched FG off and tried different settings (even TLOD and OLD down to the minimum, still deep red. I changed Vsync to āhalf of monitor rateā and both green. I switched FG on again (not having in mind that this switches Vsync automaticall off), but it remained green even if it was now the same as initially.
Tried the same with my flight from EHAM, but after takeoff all red again. According to IslandSimPilot I should achieve with my monitor @ 165Hz around 6ms, but no matter what I do in the sim settings, I cannot achieve it.
Like others I have currently the suspicion that the internet connection could cause this as mostly I see download rates not above 4 MBit/s where my connection can deliver up to 15 MBit/s, but than I should experience everywhere the same symptoms which is not the case.
I have no more idea where to investigate and I am under the impression that the sim is not yet stable and reliable and it could be a good idea to return temporarily to 2020. What I will try the next weeks is to install other performance consuming games to see if they perform better. As I was very happy the first weeks of flying I am meanwhile frustrated that with such a monster machine for such a high price I struggle more than over all the past years, so same as you.
BTW, I have nothing touched at the BIOS except disabling rBAR, but as this had no effect, I enabled it again.
Sorry to have no better answer to you, but let us keeping ourselves updated if one finds coincidentally a solution.
After testing some other performance demanding games, I realize what I have expected: they are running like hell with all settings to the max. So I can exclude there is a general problem with my hardware.
@bloodymasacre19 Even if Iām not a fan of AI, I found a good solution with ChatGPT. Just ask it what to do to achieve a constant good framerate. Iāve made some adjustments to the windows settings, installed a tool which may not be mentioned here in this forum and did some finetuning with the help of ChatGPT. I now reach good and stable framerates and the stutters are gone, especially on the before mentioned reference flight. As it is in cooperation with dynamic adjustment of MSFS, the only disturbing fact is that some city and landscape lights are sometimes popping in suddenly, but I can live with that.
Iām disappointed (but not surprised) that even with a highend machine MSFS still requires an investment of many, many hours to achieve an acceptable result while other games just run from the very first moment, but whom Iām telling this! 
I just got home from being gone for work so Iām able to resume my testing using some more advice Iāve received as I still havenāt been able to fix my performance issues. Iāve resorted to a complete clean reinstall to try and start from scratch to see if this does any sort of good as I agree this PC should not be having these troubles. Iāll keep you posted on my results and let me know if you get any miracle breakthroughs!
And the option āairport walkersā (passengers in the building) in GSX. At EHAM it caused huge stutters everytime when panning from fmc upwards looking at the terminal.
Thank you so much for pointing this out as it helped me greatly, I didnāt realize I had this setting enabled after doing a complete reinstall, it somehow slipped my attention. I am still having hitching especially during takeoff and climb out and when I initially move my camera, however my FPS immediately stabilize at 120 as soon as the initial hitch is done which I know has been a problem since 2020. The camera hitch is present even after turning down texture quality, LODs, turning up and/or down the cache limit, etc so I truly donāt know what could be causing the issue (I also dont use any sort of traffic injection default or 3rd party). I really think my overall issue is somehow related to V-sync/g-sync, scenery streaming (despite having everything installed that is able to be installed), and/or the current cache system in msfs thatās known to be bugged. 95% of the time Iām able to get a beautifully fluid experience but the hitching when initially panning the camera and also the random stutters still make it an overall negative experience that I never recall having in 2020 especially after the sim got very stable a few years after its release.