I built (and then rebuilt) Windows on my machine, in the hopes of improving performance and stability. There are a lot of topics out here about doing X or Y to solve a specific problem - I thought that, since I really started from scratch (and then again) it might offer value to talk about all the things I picked up along the way.
Call this my “Optimization Roundup” of a lot of contributions others have made over the years.
If you read nothing else, read the Takeaways section to see if any of this resonates with you, and go from there. Or don’t.
EDIT 15 Jan '24 - The performance results below were highly dependent on where I spawned and flew - I still had performance issues in a lot of places, which triggered a hardware rebuild (it was time for some component upgrades anyway), and which definitely helped. And I will probably be doing a GPU upgrade at some point. However, more to the point of this post, FPS was not my driving factor in this post, stability was, but I’m working on that now as well. My rig has been updated below.
My rig
- Core i9-10850K (not overclocked) → Core i7-14700K
- 64GB DDR4 PC-28800 RAM → 64GB DDR5 PC-51200 RAM
- Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB SSD → Samsung 990 EVO Plus 2TB SSD
- AORUS Pro AX Z490 motherboard → AORUS Pro X Z790
- Gigabyte RTX 3080 (10GB) → Not updated (yet)
- Turtle Beach Velocity One Flight Stick
- Windows 11, current patches, beta channel (not nightly)
- AORUS FI32U 4K monitor, 144Hz
The teardown
- Backed up docs to cloud and local external drive
- Put the Windows 11 installer tool on a USB drive
- Reimaged my SSD with a 1.23 TB C: and a 768GB D: drive (the latter for Flight Simulator and add-ons only)
BIOS settings (where I ended up across both rebuilds)
- Disabled Enhanced Multi-Core performance
- Disabled Speed Step
- Disabled HyperThreading
- Disabled Virtualization
- Disabled VT-d
- Enabled XMP profile for my RAM sticks
The Reinstall
- Installed Windows 11 Pro
- Installed all Windows Store updates until it had nothing left to update
- This installed an older NVIDIA driver. I left this alone here.
- Installed all Windows updates until it had nothing left to update
- Rebooted
- Installed driver (local hardware, Intel chipset) updates from GIGABYTE site
- HAGS off
- Game mode on
- Did not install ANY of the GIGABYTE mobo utilities
- Did not install any of my “usual suspects” apps
- Development Tools
- Capture One Pro (which has issues, and which I’d uninstalled before this, but didn’t fix my problems)
- In Device Manager, found the RTX 3080, and uninstalled the driver
- Verified that the adapter now read “Microsoft Basic Display Adapter”
- Downloaded and installed NVIDIA driver 546.33 from a driver search
- I did not install GeForce Experience
- Cleanup Loop
- Go to System and Application Logs in Event Viewer
- Try to run down and fix whatever causes any Warnings and Errors that you think are in your control. But if you can rule out system-level issues before you start the game setup, I think that’s useful.
- There’s a lot that isn’t. Don’t try to sweat it too much.
- There are a lot of DCOM errors, even on a fresh install - ignore them, it’s more painful to fix for a diminishing return
- Reboot
- Installed Flight Simulator 2020
- Installed application to D:\FlightSimulator
- Set packages folder to D:\FlightSimulatorContent
- Found all the FlightSimulator.exe locations I could, set to
- Disable fullscreen optimizations
- Run as administrator
- Application controls DPI scaling
- Windows Defender exclusions for my Flight Simulator install and content paths
NVIDIA Control Panel
- Apply defaults
- Limit Frame Rate to 60 (have used this as a “pivot” value for tweaking)
- No V-Sync
- G-Sync Compatible Monitor
- Power Management to Maximum Performance
Flight Simulator Graphics Settings
- ULTRA configuration
- Set Terrain LOD to 125 (also a “pivot” value for tweaking)
- V-Sync off
- HDR on
- Low Latency ON+BOOST
- DLSS Anti-Aliasing
- Quality setting
- DX11 or DX12
- Dealer’s choice. This really did not impact my configuration too much, but I will continue to evaluate.
Takeaways
- No CTDs
- I think this is a combination of more restrictive BIOS settings, fewer mobo utilities, and fewer apps
- My second rebuild included not installing GeForce Experience, and this was the only sunstantive change across the two rebuilds. I have not had a CTD since.
- Performance
- At Frame Rate Limit of 60FPS, smooth, no stuttering, and Display FPS showing much cleaner - no flickering red, spikes in thread times. Mostly Limited by GPU. No Limited by MainThread. Getting 60FPS consistently except in a few cases. Very playable. Increasing Terrain LOD worked, but frame rate not as consistent or smooth in my case.
- At Frame Rate Limit of 75FPS, smooth, no stuttering, but back to spikes in thread times, Limited by MainThread. Got 75FPS a lot of the time, but it sometimes dropped. Not bad, but to be honest it played so well at 60FPS I’ll probably leave it there.
- I originally built this rig for FS, but also for some local software development, which might include Docker, WSL, etc. Moving down to a config that excluded virtualization-related and HyperThreading features I think may have been helpful in getting more consistent results.
- If you can swing it, getting your FS install onto a drive that survives an OS reinstall is super helpful - you only have to reinstall FS, and not all of the content.
- I think, at the end of all this, that installing the fewest things you actually need presents the fewest variables and hurdles that FS 2020 has to jump through.
- I know that this reads like one of those “iPhone Battery Life optimization” blogs where you’re told “you’ll get great battery life if you just do these 20 things - all of which turn off features”. That said, getting to a real lowest common denominator config becomes truly useful. It’s certainly a useful baseline for more experimentation.
- While I don’t think it’s fair to tell anyone, “your best path to installing any game is to wipe and rebuild your machine first”, I did find that, in following a lot of the recommendations in threads here over the years, that so much changes in the overall environment that a single recommendation has a real chance of doing nothing.
- Note all of those threads where someone reports a problem, and commenters reply with "I did X - it’s documented or not documented, but it fixed my problem? I don’t doubt that it does, for them, but there are too many variables sometimes to make it globally applicable.
- Sometimes the only way to know this is to start fresh, and I think this is where I ended up.
- I absolutely know I’m not breaking new ground here, but the scale and sweep of the limitations I’ve put in place was an eye-opener for me.
I’ll try to post more as I get more hours under this configuration. I do hope that, while a giant wall of text, it offers something constructive to people who continually fight issues that others seem not to.