This game has terrible frame pacing, and it causes the game to feel unsmooth even at high frame rates

I just wanted to mention this as its not been mentioned on the forum before, in comparison to P3D and X-Plane, Microsoft Flight Simulator has a serious problem with frame pacing. If they resolved this issue the game would feel much better, especially at lower frame rates.

What is frame pacing?
Its the time between each frame which is displayed on the monitor.

For example for 30FPS you should get a new frame every 33.333333ms, On a 60Hz Monitor this means your getting 2 frames displayed every second if your sim is running at 30fps.

An example of good frame pacing:

1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5

An example of what I sometimes see in this game:

1 1 1 2 3 3 4 5 5 5

In some cases when this is real bad you may get this happen

1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 5 5 5 

Which is what we call a micro stutter

What is the problem?
This game is spitting out frames at vastly different rates and I almost think at this stage its a bug in its own right or something is wrong in the rendering engine

Usually game engines do all their logic in a sequential order everytime they want to draw a frame, some game engines try and draw frames, 1, 2 or sometimes more ahead of what your seeing to solve this, however in this game I’m not sure if they are doing this at all or they are but something is going wrong causing some frames to skip or sometimes drop themselves or the algorithm for displaying them is not great and its causing some frames to show in the wrong order.

How can I see this problem myself?
If you load up in a place where you get lowish FPS, say Heathrow in the A320. Look from the left to right very slowly and move your mouse slowly, you’ll notice the camera almost jitters a bit when you do this, as the frames are sometimes being delivered in the wrong order.

Higher frame rates still suffer with this issue but its much harder to see because the time between frames is shorter.

make sure to enable any of the 60fps video modes Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 mouse stutter - YouTube
this is a example of that said stutter you can expirience, especially noticable on slower movement (which always is the smoothes mousemovement humanly possible). After a minute it switches to headtracking movment, which is affected aswell, since it’s all coming down to the frametimes. Besides spikes and coastline glitches is this by far the most gamekilling bug.

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I’d say that another way of seeing this is by watching the clock timer ticking over - you may see the seconds displaying at irregular rates of your frame-rate is paced badly. I get it often because my PC spec is quite moderate, especially over complex scenery.

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