Terrible performance after sim update IV

Despite the fact that it was not EXACTLY the same scenario, the performance should NOT change that much based only on the time of day. (and, in fact, the one with lower FPS has LESS clouds).

The thing is that for a good amount of users there are clear performance drops after the updates, and that is not something that can be denied. The main problem is that, if performance was bad from launch date,
then ok, I can “understand” that I have a problem on my system. But, if the low FPS problems happened AFTER the updates, then definitely something on those updates is affecting the performance. And I´m not talking about performance being worse on the areas covered under the world updates, I can understand and accept that if I got more graphical detail, my performance will go down. What I cannot understand nor accept is having performance issues on areas that have NOT being graphically updated. It is the same generic buildings, the same generic data that I had since day one. and i see no logical explanation why performance should sink on those scenarios. I see no logical explanation for dropping from 40FPS to 13 FPS when landing on a default, generic airport after the updates, unless something on those updates broke something. And yes, I tried removing EVERYTHING from the community folder and it was the same exact behavior. While landing, when I reach about 800ft AGL, the 3d objects disappear and then respawn, and during that process the GPU utilization drops like a rock, I become limited by main thread, and start getting stutters, pauses, and the horrible performance we are reporting.

I tried lowering the LOD, disabling traffic, even turned photogrametry off, basically lowering EVERYTHING and none of it corrected the issue. I even updated my CPU, (foolishly) thinking that I needed to do so. I had a Ryzen 5 3600 (that worked just fine before the last 2 updates) and I updated it to a 5600X and have the exact same issues.

So, even though I cannot test the exact same-to-the-last-detail conditions, there is definitely something wrong on those updates that has affected a number of users. Will DX12 fix it? No way to tell. But it seems to me that it not just a problem of the graphical API being used, but also of what the updates did to bring performance down.

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That is indeed the biggest problem when benchmarking MSFS.
Many settings would have to be disabled to recreate testing conditions a 2nd time - so many in fact that it creates a placebo effect. Each time you load into a flight the AI air traffic, AI ambience traffic, MP client traffic, air traffic data, weather data, MP data, cache, and even occasionally the photogrammetry/texture/elevation has changed.
Then ontop of all that you get the changes made in the updates that add more detail/physics to flight models, more weather effects, greater object rendering distances, increased visual traffic/object count, etc.

Thats not including the ongoing silent server-side updates, user system driver/software updates, and occasional performance crippling Windows updates. Might as well add fluctuating internet connection, background processes, and system temps to that list too…
Throw mods in the mix considering most users do not clear their Community folder when troubleshooting or testing MSFS itself.

Seems many assume that just because they can roughly recreate the scenario visually it makes MSFS benchmarkable… when there is much much more going on in the background of a simulation.

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Not sure if this is happening to any of you above but When I launch the game it shows up the initial load page and then goes black after that and just cuts off back to the desktop.

I have installed all latest drivers and uninstalled and I’m trying to reinstall and it’s still doing the same thing. My PC is more than powerful enough to run the game. For it I got my game on the Microsoft store.

Can someone please help???

Update, I have turned off EIST and P States in bios and am seeing some improvements, could someone else see if they can verify this?

Only issue I have had is a broken marketplace airport that causes a CTD, updated with a fix in the direct version but not updated in MSFS yet.

In most of my testing the FPS is the same or slightly better.

Example (not 100% identical scenario but pretty close):

BEFORE current patch

AFTER current patch

I am just going to say this. I cannot believe the amount of threads on this entire forum and this is still pilling on every day and many have just plane given up! I am almost there and I am late to this firestorm. I am still struggling with my rolling cash and manual cash and a bug that says I am full no matter how many times I try and delete relocate and reassign amounts of either one. I find it amazing the same people are still in charge of this and it has to be because computer manufacturers are slipping them money to sell more products to dummies thinking its going to work with a massive CPU MB Memory graphics card purchase. A bug is still a bug no mater how you spell it Gubs

5 Likes

Can you tell please location and aircraft? And your configuration?

It is the Asobo Pipistrel at Out Skerries in Scotland.

3070/9900K/32GB ram.

Most settings on ultra see video:

In this locations i have almost same result.
With clear sky 40-50fps
With broken clouds 35-40fps

I have i9900k/32GB/2080Ti
1920x1080 resolution

KSEA/KLAX and other big airport - performance 10-15fps (pre 1.16.2) 25-30fps

Sounds like the performance hit is related to airports or city objects rather than low level flight and scenery in general.

I keep getting 30 FPS limited by CPU on my 8700K @4.8Ghz, it’s really ■■■■■■■ me off, all AI (Land, sea, airport, planes) are disabled but still I just can’t get it to be higher, don’t know what else to do

Your resolution is far too low for a machine of that spec. Your GPU will pretty much be sat at idle the second the CPU is being asked to do something.

You won’t get any better performance because of DX11 and the way modern games are coded. I’m sure that when DX12 makes an appearance you’ll see a difference. I’ve got a 3900X and 2080ti and can say from experience that you will be able to get the same FPS in 4K (with 80% render scaling) as you’re getting in 1080P. I’ve got the awesome FlyTampa Vegas and I’m seeing 40-50fps with very high settings and the aforementioned resolution.

In a nutshell, you need to load up your GPU much more. You should be seeing utilisation of 85%+. The days of lower resolution & lower detail = guaranteed higher FPS are past us.

2 Likes

KLAX is default scenery. It’s strange because before 1.16.2.0 i have stable -25+ FPS, now i dont have.

I can confirm that there seems to be some kind of memory leak as outlined by many people here.

Same here, performance degradation over time (around 1 + hour), started my flight at 40 fps, by the time I was approaching my destination I was at 20-15fps with lots of stuttering, no matter what I changed in my graphics settings the FPS never improved until I closed and launched the sim again.

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Same observation here: first hour of flight is as usual, then FPS just keep degrading. And memory usage gets through the roof (I have 32Gb on my machine, it was almost full)

Seems to be time related, mine became terrible after just sitting on deck for a couple hours. I suspect a memory leak since nothing changed over those 2 hours except the passing of time.

I have the same experience, during about 1 or 2 hours my fps drops from 50-55 to abour 20-25, not sure about a memory leak tho, on this last flight the sim was using surprisingly low memory (about 3.5gb in cruise and about 5.5gb after parking, numbers by task manager process)

It really seems to be a function of time tho, I’d love for some community manager to acknowledge the issue, I hope we can get a hotfix also, I’ll lose it if we have to wait till sim update 5 in july to fix this

Same here, performance degrading over time. Started with 35 FPS gpu limited, after 2 hours only 18 FPS and stuttering once a second and limited by main thread.

Ram usage is not that high though. And none of the cores is used 100%.

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Performance degradation during long flights isn’t really a “memory leak” but rather a combination of available hardware resources and non-optimized coding. Every flight in MSFS is approximately the same. As an aircraft flies or sits on the ground, MSFS CPU has to find all of the graphics data for objects and terrain needed by the GPU to create the frames displayed on the monitor. When a user specifies all ULTRA graphics settings, the CPU has to find and process A LOT of graphics details. As the CPU collects the graphics data, it has to go into real memory to be processed. Memory utilization skyrockets while it appears the CPU and GPU are both loafing around. When memory utilization is very high, the CPU cannot process all the graphics in memory fast enough to send graphics frames to the GPU because as the aircraft continues flying, more graphics data needs to be collected and processed by the CPU to send to the GPU. FPS slowly drops as memory fills up.

Several options to fix this without hardware upgrades include:

  1. re-design MSFS to compress graphics data,
  2. reduce the demand for high/ultra quality settings,
  3. pause the flight for 10-20 minutes to allow MSFS and Windows to clear memory,
  4. have shorter flights.

For option #2:

If you want maximum FPS without stutters or pauses @ 4k or 2k or 1080p, then adjust the graphics settings lower to push graphics processing to the GPU to drive the GPU to 90-100% utilization. Start by changing LOD settings to 50 - 80.

If you want maximum quality and detail graphics frames @ 4k or 2k at 1080p, then adjust the graphics setting higher to push graphics processing to the CPU. Start by changing LOD settings to 150-200 or use a hack to set them to 400-500.

With maximum LOD settings and highest quality graphics, my flights are limited to about 90 minutes depending on location.

With medium LOD settings, there are no problems or performance issues with long duration flights >5 hours.

YMMV.