I’ve been experiencing what I’d call microstutters with the terrain. No matter the altitude the terrain and scenery almost seems to pulsate by me. The plane is smooth and even the shadow of the plane on the ground is smooth. It’s the terrain that’s been the issue. Even with FPS being stable and high with my hardware.
I’m on a 4090, i912900k, 64 GB Ram, and the Varjo Aero.
All my recents settings have been at the “High” presets for both VR and PC with clouds at Ultra, TLOD at 150, and OLOD at 120. And everything has been with DLSS at various quality settings (performance, balanced etc). I’m totally vanilla except for a few add on planes from the market place and FSRealistic. FPS is not an issue.
With everything I tried the same microstutters or pulsating. Airports have been horrid. Even occurs in the backcountry on bush trips with minimal traffic and no building.
So on a whim today I tried TAA again and low and behold the terrain nearly stopped microsuttering and totally stopped pulsating. Took off from a major airport with an airliner and it was much improved.
With so many other posts about terrain stuttering in the past few weeks I think there’s something going on with the way DLSS is handling the terrain loading. I wouldn’t have expected TAA to be smoother than DLSS.
With microstuttering being a well known issue for the majority, it’s hard to say, but mate, FSRealistic most definitelly doesn’t help to be honest. It’s known to eat up performance to some degree.
the best way to eliminate stuttering is to lock FPS (using GPUTweak or similar is easy, or the GPU Native Control panel max framerate between 36-45). One Frame lower than your avg. FPS rate. This stops the GPU from bottlenecking the CPU with unnecessary work. I fly in VR, so I need about 36FPS, then the Quest2 headset uses Spacewarp (inter-frame filling tech) to give my headset 72FPS. I see crystal clear textures on houses and buildings in New York or Los Angeles looking down my 9-line (along the left wing) at 600ft doing Mach 1… while live streaming on an 8700K 4.1ghz OC on a 3090ti all water-cooled. If i turn objects up to 200, i get warp-stuttering as my Wireless network performance starts tugging on the Quest2 wireless network traffic. Stuttering using a direct RIFT cable is different than wireless. I got stuttering on my 5 year old windows 10 system on HDD, but now its butter smooth on SSD fresh OS. There are many points of failure, most being overheating. Pro tip: your CPU heatsink installation being LEVEL is important and most don’t know if theirs is OPTIMAL. Then there’s the silicon lottery. I’ve tweaked every single setting on my PC running COD, ASSETTO, DCS, FORTNITE, etc. and ensured my system idle LATENCY was low. (use a latency monitor to check) Audio exclusiveness and audio enhancements, ARGB lighting on ASUS motherboards uses software that consumes 20% of the CPU (if you have 12 fans like me). Power supply can starve the GPU, etc. etc. etc. etc. so many things. I learned that my XMP 3000mhz RAM runs optimal at 2133mhz after googling it. easiest BIOS adjustment ive made, besides telling the 95watt CPU to only run at 70watts at stock frequencies, to help track down stutters. To verify Run any video with predictable animation and bench the CPU using CPUZ, watching for stutters. LASTLY, watch the intro to MSFS closely… the loading screens will stutter if your thermal throttling or have resident background software latency issues. The Sim DLSS and other settings are showing you the door early.
I get poor performance using DLSS and LOVE TAA in VR with my Quest2, but the QuestPro is soooo clear, i have to turn OFF Antialiasing, especially at night. Daytime I like TAA at 80 percent.
P.S. my 6700K gets better performance than my 8700K because of ARGB software.
Thank you for your response. It’s not stuttering per say. It’s more pulsating.
I did have my FPS locked but found that pulsating/stuttering was much much worse. I think there is an issue with scenery loading and DLSS that Asobo might already be aware of. Many people have had issues since the smaller December update.
The sim should instantly respond to lowering object detail to 30 if you are CPU bound. I noticed DLSS dx11 sucks compared to DX12beta. When
I run CODMW2 benchmark, it showed CPU 99% GPU 1% FPS 140, but i could totally play the game. Then Locked FPS in game to 90fps and got CPU 20% and GPU 80%. I was curious if i could keep going, lock 72FPS, CPU 2% GPU 98%. It showed me how the two rely on a balance as the 7ms avg latency on GPU went up to 17ms with GPU at 99%. So i locked in 90FPS to comply with my systems optimal cooling performance and the same method applied to FS20, observing FPS, CPU/GPU load, managable tempuratures and low latency. You must use tools outside the sim to determine system limits. I can share my sim graphic settings and Nvidia control panel settings, and you having a much superior hardware than my 8700K 4.1ghz 3090ti watercooled and overclocked system. To provide a comparrison. I do this between my 6700K 1080 system, helps me see which Sim parameters SHOULD improve performance, otherwise its NOT the sim. Modern hardware freezes to protect itself. My CPU and GPU are both watercooled and the H100 Corsair waterblock logo changes to red when water temps are too high. Funny thing, my CPU hitting 100deg and starts stuttering in game, i tap on my CPU cooler and i heard the fans spin down with CPU temps now at 54 degrees and butter sim. It was the CPU unable to efficiently disipate heat. Could also be 8 year old water pump going bad. Its like the Thermal Paste i used hardends when system is turned off, and i have to warm it up and ‘tamp’ the waterblock to smooth the thin layer of paste. Like concrete tamping.
Lastly, try caching an area to determine if its HDD/Network issues. You can lower the data bandwith to 5mb to see if its your Network performance causing systemwide stuttering. If the intro animations freeze at any time, your system is a fault. If so, these Asobo and BLACKSHARK animations are testing audio and cpu instructions under maximum read/write I/O loads. For me, it will freeze in the middle of the Asobo animation and i know it thermal locked early. Lowering CPU 4.1ghz to 4.0 allow animation to almost finish before freezing. Lowered to 3.9ghz was butter through all animations.
I found that using any recording software or the experimental recording feature…it crashes. I went into safe mode and was able to land. Back to regular mode and was able to land.
Every time I had Flight Recorder, Flight Control Replay, or Flight Recorder….crashes.
Have you tried locking at 45fps? This seems to be the best option for 90hz displays. I get way smoother flight locking to 45 than to 50fps, for example. Something about exactly half the refresh rate introduces magical smoothness, at least on the G2.
I still get stuttery phases every few minutes unfortunately, but when it’s smooth it’s REALLY smooth. Am hoping an x3D chip may improve this.
A weird thing I noticed: when I’m in a stutter phase, changing the cloud detail level to any other level instantly makes it smooth again. Makes no sense but works every time. Doesn’t matter in which direction, High to Ultra, Ultra to Medium etc. It’s almost like something gets backed up and changing the clouds resets that state.
I’ve noticed the same behavior with my G2: Exactly 45fps is much smoother than anything above that. Only 90fps is (much) better again. The difference is especially noticeable when moving the head sideways.
Agreed at 45fps lock for VR headsets. My Oculus always starts default with TIMEWARP enabled, and I have to turn it off (pressing shortcut key CTRL-NUMPAD1 a couple times NOTE: CTRL_NUMPAD4 turns it back on). The advantage of using 45FPS for VR headsets, is they operate in their own FPS space… meaning, your SIM will be running at 45, but the headsets will still be at 72/90/etc. This allows your System to feed the VR headset all the Head-Movement frames while the Simulator ‘casually’ produces the necessary scene. Point being, don’t let the SIM be the Bottleneck to your headset.
