Terrain LOD unplayable stuttering&lags

Tested on
5800X
6900XT
Aorus B550 Elite V2
SN850
[edit :] 32GB G.Skill Flare X 4000Mhz
Windows 11 22000.376
Radeon 21.10.2

and on

5950X
6900XT
Rog Strix B550-F
SN850
[edit] 64GB Crucial Ballistix 3800Mhz
Windows 11 22000.376
Radeon 21.12.1

Are you on Steam or Microsoft Store version?
Steam

Are you using Developer Mode or made changes in it?
No

Brief description of the issue:
Getting horrible lags & stutter on almost ANY LOD terrain level. No matter if I use ultra/high/middle/low settings as soon as I turn LOD higher than <30, Ill get them lags and stutter big time, from the very exact same angle, every time I look at the specific direction.
The only way this game wont stutter, is to turn LOD to “10-30” or turn it off, otherwise this game isnt playable.
This will ONLY OCCUR ON THE GROUND, not in the air. Even if I use a LOD of 400.

I chose a small airport and the FIRST TUTORIAL mission, so you guys can get a hunch/idea of my problem. It gets worse on bigger airports to a point, that the picture will freeze for 1-2 seconds.

Ultra settings with LOD 400

High settings with LOD 200

Middle settings with LOD 300

Middle settings with LOD 200

High settings with LOD 100

What I tried :

  • low/middle settings with everything off (even the weather-whatchamacallit&Live support&Offline mode etc.)
  • Reinstalled Flight Simulator on both systems (Im desperate)
  • Stock settings on Hardware
  • Deactivated AMD SAM

Build Version # when you first started experiencing this issue:
Since I bought the Flight-Sim, a few days ago. Its updated to the newest version and Vanilla.

Since Ive tested this on different systems and all other games/software run smooth like silk with the highest possible settings (RDR2, Cyberpunk, etc.), and the fact that I found a ton of other threads with the same exact problem,
should indicate a problem with this game, am I right ?

Any ideas when this will be fixed ? Its literally unplayable and I refuse to accept that Ive to disable LOD to get a smooth gaming experience on my HighEnd system , while people with hardware from 10 years ago run this game without any problems.

Any help is highly appreciated.

Best regards and a blessed holiday season.

same problem lag lag lag…since 2 days

2 Likes

Yeah, were definitely not alone, which makes you wonder why this hasnt been fixed yet…Ive found similar threads since the last update. I just own this game since a few days so I cant speak for those people.
Lets hope for a fix or at least a recognition from the devs.

edit : Its a shame, it really is. Such a beautiful game…

Drop Terrain LOD to 200 and keep raising renderscale till the stuttering stops. From there you can possibly tweak both a little more.

1 Like

@DensestSnail693
Thanks for your input. I see what you tried there. Putting more load on the GPU and less on the CPU and with less FPS the lag drops are not as high as they were before at higher framerates which makes it appear more “fluent” than before.
I appreciate your effort and it really does smooth it out a tad and I had this in mind, but “200 LOD” without lags is not remotely possible without scaling the resolution up to 200%.
Im able to get “100 LOD” with a renderscale of 130%. Even a slithly higher value than “100” would force me to put the renderscale up to at least 160%.

The downside to this whole idea is, youre sacrificing GPU power for more or less nothing. A 1080p monitor cant display 1440p, and 1440p cant display 4K, and 4K cant display 8K and so on. So Im basically running a higher resolution which Im not even benefitting from.
But its at least a bit more smooth.

Really looking forward to an update…Not being able to use a higher terrain value than 100 on a 6900XT is a joke…

3 Likes

Not entirely true as the higher renderscales substantially improve quality but of course at an fps penalty some of which can be offset by lowering other graphics settings. Nonetheless when the beta goes live I think your setup will benefit considerably as cpu use gets a little more leeway and thus mainthread limited doesn’t necessarily mean instant stutters as has been the case so far.

1 Like

Be it as it may, Im just glad your suggestions works more or less.
Absolutely fine as a temporary fix until they patch this issue.

Im just glad my GPU is liquid cooled. Otherwise, temperatures wouldnt be bearable since its running constantly on 99% workload with upscaling.

My air cooled 3060 runs at 100% with max 79°C hotspot temps … however I am virtually open case as mine has 4 sides mesh (a DIY conversion)

DX12 puts more load on the GPU, and less on the CPU.
I tried DX12 and it does work much smoother on my low end system.
The only drawback I have found is some payware, which will not work with DX12

Well, unfortunately DX12 doesn’t change anything for me. Works even worse.

1 Like

Hello,
I hope I do not disturb you, I have exactly the same problem since few weeks. since 2021 I find that ca date, but obviously it is still the case, since the time how is your problem solved? I have exactly the same, no matter my settings I constantly run at 100FPS even in full ultra, but on the other hand when the LOD exceeds 30/40 it is unplayable, stutters, freeze, drop of fps etc . And this happens ONLY on the ground.
Thank you very much, to take the time to answer me, I wish you an exclente evening

Same issue. Was running really well and then a few days ago it went sideways.
Same PC settings, same graphics settings, same game settings.

People, it has nothing to do with us and everything to do with whatever voodo they keep doing to this thing.

Hi @Foxa1760 ,
There appear to be many causes of stuttering in the sim. Trying to diagnose a specific cause for a specific user is very difficult due to variations in hardware, software, MSFS addons, MSFS game settings, GPU software settings, network conditions, flight characteristics, etc.

There is no “silver bullet” that fixes this issue.

If you do a search for:
“stuttering in:title”
in the forum you will get many results.

All I can suggest - other than the standard recommendation to remove all addons & 3rd-party content to see if any are causing the issue - is that you read through the list of search results to see if any posts match what you are seeing, and if there was a solution to that post that you could apply.

I’d also suggest that you keep a manual log that records what you were doing when stuttering occurred:

  • MSFS Game settings (all)
  • GPU software settings
  • The aircraft being used
  • The location of the aircraft (If possible, use an app like LittleNavMap with aircraft tracks enabled, and take a screenshot of where the aircraft is on the map).

Over time, see if there are any similarities that can be consistently repeated if you repeat the flight, following the flight plan or flight tracks in LittleNavMap.

Random stutters are almost impossible to resolve. Repeatable stutters can provide clues as to possible culprits, and forum users can try to reproduce them given the specific information that you have been collecting in your manual log files.

1 Like