Terrible performance with i9-10900k & RTX 4080

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I just received my new PC. Full specs below:
i9-10900K
Gainward RTX 4080
32GB 3200MHZ ram (locked at 2900)
MSI H410M-A PRO Motherboard
240MM Water cooling
850W PSU
50 - 100MBPs internet (althought i got between 10 and 70 when downloading MSFS)

I was horrified when I loaded into a game with a stock Cessna and was getting under 30FPS. I was using DX12, Frame generation, and it was consistently limited by my Main Thread. I know the stock i9-10900k is still one of the top CPU’s out there. I turned off traffic from online to off and it went up to 30 - 40, but this wasn’t even in the air, and not at a huge airport (Munich)

I’ve seen other people with 4080’s easily get 80+FPS with fame generation, and 60+ on the fenix. I got a very unstable 15 - 20 with the Fenix. This is insane, I just spent $3000 on a PC for terrible FPS, and a top of the line CPU (i9-10900K), for it to be consistently limited by the Main Thread. Interestingly, in MSFS, I noticed my CPU only goes to 4.7GHz, whereas when I was downloading some apps it went to 4.9.

I’d really, really appreciate some help here. Thanks!

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You should add details about your monitor(s) and screenshots of your settings. For reference, “limited by mainthread” simply means the CPU is working harder than the GPU. I believe the best experience is when the CPU and GPU frame times are very close. In this case you would see the FPS counter switching back and forth frequently from limited by mainthread to limited by gpu. If you are limited by mainthread you need to give more work to the GPU.
Turn off all vsync, freesync and gsync. Run at 4k. Select the High End PC preset in Graphics and keep your DLSS settings. Turn on Nvidia Reflex. Reset all your Nvidia Control Panel settings to their defaults. Let us know how it goes.

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I have a 1440P monitor. My GPU utilization is at 15 - 25%. I’m running at 1440P at 80% render scaling. Would this be a problem?

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Oh, and my settings are all Ultra except Glass refresh rate which is low, supersampling which is 4x4, and Terrain LOD which is 180 (turned down)

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higher youre render scale to 100.
this should be np with youre system.
Try Lod 150
If it does not works set all settings default and then slowly increase youre settings.
How are youre other games?

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.
Turn that back to 100%. Run at 1440p, not 4k, obviously. You should be good to go.

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Have you checked your overclocking? Some PC’s don’t come with it automatically on. A simple look at performance monitor/performance will show your CPU speed. Should be close to 5 GHz. Sometimes my reverts back to 3.7 and I have to restart the overclocking. Worth checking out.

The CPU affects the GPU.

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Get this simple tool to overclock your card. Asus Tweak III. GPU Tweak III (asus.com)

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When I’m not doing much (when MSFS is closed) my clock speed jumps as slow as 1.8GHz actually, and sometimes up to 4.5GHz, which is weird since I thought it’s not meant to drop below the base clock speed. The only thing I sacrificed on was the motherboard to not go above my budget. The motherboard was about $80. Is this normal?

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I gave it a go. High settings boosted my FPS barely (about 5 FPS), so I just turned it back to Ultra, over New York it’s still consistently displaying limited by main thread, I followed your advice and my GPU usage is up to 70%, yet my CPU is consistently 4.6 - 4.7GHZ which is weird since on other videos where it’s limited by cpu it’s constantly at 5.2GHZ.

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whats youre LOD?

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The issue sounds like a badly set up BIOS or missing / wrong / old drivers and bad windows settings to me.

Fast hardware doesn’t automatically mean high FPS. Turn off things like NVIDIA HD Audio for example, probably turn off multi threading with that CPU, check your cooling working correctly, check drivers, not only the NVDIA driver… a new computer always requires work.

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First, start wit the preset graphics option from msfs…toggle that to High (not Ultra) and hit save (that will reset everything including terrain and object LOD to 100). Turn on the Dev Mode FPS graphs and report back what it is saying on the frametimes for both gpu and cpu. You want them as balance as possible and by that I mean you are looking for GPU as close to 100% used as possible with the CPU able to keep up but not having the CPU frametime be higher than GPU or you will start to see studders. If the terrain and object LOD are too high (or if you simply set everything to Ultra like many try to do) that will hammer the CPU far harder than the GPU and you will get main thread limited quickly and see lower FPS. A 10900k is a good processor for sure but it isn’t able to run Ultra settings on 1440p with LODs close to 200 from what I have seen other users post. You also did the right thing in testing to turn off AI traffic which is a CPU killer (I have mine turned down to no cars also which are CPU heavy). Turn off multiplayer and turn off live weather. Tune it from there if you are seeing good FPS and no studders but use the FPS graphs to watch for when the CPU frametimes are higher than GPU and you start to see more red than green and yellow. The visual differences between High and Ultra are not much and Ultra really hammers the CPU, so I would leave them all on High and just slowly raise the terrain LOD and object LOD above 100 in small increments and see how it performs. Also, try it with HAGS on and HAGS off as that Windows “feature” helps some folks and hurts others, it doesn’t seem to be universal in how it behaves. Also, disable anything in the background you don’t need (even things that you would not think matter like MSI afterburner, or GPU tuning software) as they are likely competing with MSFS for cpu core time. New computers that are pre-builts sometimes come with bloatware running in the background (nvidia geoforce experience is notorious for hogging resources, delete it if you are using it as it can also override MSFS settings). Another thing I found that hogged resources was the MSI software that was automatically loaded in the background when I set up my AIO cooler to have the screen show stats, in the background it was running a monitoring program that pinged the CPU multiple times per second and in Task Manager I saw it using like 5% of the entire CPU…I turned it off completely and it helped MSFS a bit).

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Curious about your ram for second, why is it locked at 2900MHz? I can’t see this being the cause of such low frame rates, but you should run it 3200MHz for best results.

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My motherboard only supports up to 2900 sadly.

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I had a go at most of these things, and while it improved a bit, there was quite a lot of stuttering on airliners. 30 - 40 FPS yet extreme stuttering. GPU usage was at 2 - 5%

I’m thinking of returning my PC, and ordering the same with an i7-13700K and 3090 instead, since I cannot overclock on this 70$ mobo and I know MSFS is mostly CPU limited. Do you think this would improve performance?

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the main hint: reduce your TLOD ( and I assume you not have a useless high rolling-cache )

there is so often a wrong understanding how the CPU turbo works ( also because most of that numbers are simple advertising and can only reach under specific conditions, eg. SingleCore execution ).

At least all of that depends on amount of cores which are currently used, the TDP , temp, mainboard, etc…

If we assume you really own the “K” version then it looks like:

Core i9-10900K
Base: 3,7 GHz
All-Core-Turbo: 4,8(9) GHz
T2 (SC): 5,1 GHz ( the good old turbo, depends on cores. so 5.1 is SingleCore )
T3 (SC): 5,2 GHz ( v3 max with awareness of current temp, tdp, … )
Thermal SC/MC: 5,3/4,9 GHz ( if is still room above the turbo )
TDP: 125W
RAM: DDR4-2933

So, with some settings ( e.g. sync-all-cores ) you can try that all cores run in the turbo, but remember that this is limited by the TDP , temp, … ( so far I remember for 4.9 was also a relativ low temp limit (70?), then it goes down to 4.7 ) and its already OC and your system can crash.

I not found quickly the Turbo-steps depends on running cores, but here’s a image for a 11900K which show what I mean: No overclocking with FS2020? - #36 by MichaMMA

Note: The non-K version is much worst !

And stop to OC your GPU. With WQHD it is not necessary to play with OC-settings on a 4080. You only risc that your system crash ( thats what the most users not want to hear, its then allways the “bad game” :wink: ).

EDIT : and… I forgot to mention… the 1.8G… of course does the cpu go lower than your base-clock if the power is not needed. Otherwise the world needs 100 nuclear power plants more :wink:

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Fair play, I just had a gander at the mobo, I’m pretty surprised to see that matched inside your set up.

Your GPU and CPU is more than adequate. You could run a stress test on the GPU (3D Mark free demo) and RAM (Windows Memory Diagnostic) to rule out faulty components, least that way they would be eliminated but it depends how much time you wish to invest into it.
I would take route OldpondGL suggested, its a good place to start.

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You definitely want to overclock using XMP and if you have a good PSU, the GPU to about 105%. I dont mess around with manual overclocking as I dobt want to blow anything.

Im running a 12900k, 64gb of ram, 3080ti on a 34" ultrawide. I found a high speed NVME drive also helped with performance.

While I still am main thread limited, im getting 50 to 60 frames, dropping to 40 in built up areas. Im running TLOD at 200 and OLOD at 150.

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The motherboard seems like it could possibly be a weak link. I would run a “whole PC” benchmark program to see how your components work together as a unit. This would also help rule out a weak or failing component.

Unless there is contrary opinion from fellow forumites here, something like:

For reference: