Weirdly bad performance over New York with RTX 3090

I’m really struggling to get decent FPS in New York and other high-density urban areas with my new Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3090 GAMING OC. My CPU is an Intel Core i9-9900KF running at just below 5GHz, I have 32 GB RAM, and an Intel 660p 2TB M.2 SSD disk.

With 4K Ultra settings (scaling at 80) I am lucky to get 25fps (more like 16-20), and even with everything set to Low/off (scaling at 30) it barely creeps above 30fps.

In lower-density areas I typically get 45-60fps, so this problem is definitely most noticeable in high-density urban areas.

Here is a video demonstrating the issue (note that capturing the video drops the framerate by an additional 20% or so):

Now, if this was just “the way it is” for everyone (until we get DX12 or whatever), that would be one thing - I could live with that. But I see others getting totally different results with similar or even lower-spec’ed setups. For example, in this Digital Foundry video he gets 65fps over New York with 4K, High preset and scaling at 80 - with a 2080Ti !

What can be the cause of this massive difference? These scenarios are typically CPU bound, yes, but why should the DF guy get more than twice the FPS with a slightly higher-spec’ed CPU?

I downloaded Control, the game, yesterday, just to confirm that there’s nothing wrong with any of my hardware, and with every settings maxed out I couldn’t get the FPS counter below 60 once, so it seems everything works, hardware-wise.

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Hi, you telling me you get when lucky 25 Fps at 2160p with low settings and 80 Scaling. Well then something is really messed up.
If not i suggest a complete fresh install of MSFS.

I also have a RTX 3090 and have 48-60 fps on Ultra settings with 100% scale at 2160p
I duno what GPU you had before and what your fps was like with an old card.
But thats pretty strange behaviour indeed.
Since you dont encounter fps issues with other games i wont try talking about driver, psu, or other hardware issues.
btw the video you uploaded is very bad quality and i can barely see the performance numbers.

In those dense areas, what FPS do you get in the external view (outside of the cockpit)?

All the Digital Foundry footage is taken from the external view.

good morning,

my Specs: i7 9900k, 32GB RAM, MSI RTX 2080ti, Game on M2 !

my Settings:


Snapshots:


Nvida-Settings:

Yeah, seems very strange. About the video, I believe you should be able to see it better if you download it from Dropbox instead of streaming it. Note that most of the graininess in the actual flight footage is because everything is sett to Low/Off/Scaling at 30.

That manipulators number seems quite high (compare to other post below where it is about 25% of yours). Not sure where it is used, but I see it spike when it processes data eg like loading textures.

Edit: Maybe the rolling/manual cache is too big?

Hi, we have been discussing display drivers here …

The latest Nvidia driver has further optimisations for your GPU.

Can you try uninstalling your current display drivers, use the DDU driver uninstaller tool following these instructions to ensure you have the cleanest environment for installing your drivers. The instructions are here …

The link to DDU tool is here too. Make sure that Windows does not try to roll back your display drivers during your re-install. I get much better performance than you on an old computer, there is definitely something awry on your system. I re-installed my sound drivers last night because I had lost a lot of performance since this Japan update. I have now regained that performance.

Let us know how you get on. BRGDS. Charles

There’s no improvement when using the external view, it’s still around 25 (20-28).

■■■■■■■■■■■ mate, my system would equate to about 30% of yours…ie a 1080, i5 6600 3.4 Ghz and 16Gb ram…the only software I use is a cache clearing one that clears the cache every 5 minutes…has helped a lot on P3D v5 as well…very stable now…(touch wood)…I’m running on a 4K TV…whilst I don’t worry to much about frame rate, the sim is FPS is acceptable to my eyes over the new Japan cities at High settings. Not silky smooth, but acceptable. It’s interesting how many posts are saying that these new 3000 cards don’t appear to be living up to their hype…probably a bit like MSFS. :disappointed: :duck:

Thank you for posting your setup! I’ll take a look at those Nvidia settings, but no amount of tweaking the sim settings make a significant different (it’s still terrible with everything set to Low/Off).

Hmm, could be - I hadn’t considered that. I have mine set to 100GB, any thoughts on what I might try changing it to?

All settings Ultra/100% scale
nothing changed in Nvidia control Panel. 46-53 fps
Japan update. i dont use rolling cache. nvidia driver 456.55

What overlay are you using here?

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If the manual cache, just move it somewhere else in Explorer, then run MSFS, it will see there is none.

In theory, you should be able to just move it back if it didnt make any difference.

Thanks for all your suggestions!

I’ve tried several of them, including a full uninstall/reinstall of the Nvidia drivers/software, as suggested by @TheAviator3506, but I could not see any difference.

However, seeing how you were all in agreement that something was wrong about the framerate I was seeing, I adopted a more methodical approach. Long story short, after going through pretty much every non-graphics option in the menus, I discovered that it was the setting for AI airline traffic that was causing most of the slowdown.

Once I dialed that down to 0, I got 45+ FPS pretty much in every high-density city I’ve tested so far, with 4K, scaling to 100 and all settings to Ultra/max/on. I can do aerobatics between the buildings on Manhatten and not dip below 30fps, which was something of a goal when buying a new GPU :slight_smile:

I’d still like to get 60fps everywhere with such a monster GPU, but this will do nicely while I wait for driver/software improvements that hopefully can make that a reality in the future.

Thanks for all your help!

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Yea! Well done, such a fundamental cause. We can all learn something from this. Take care. BRGDS. Charles

Some additional things a long those lines I have done to score some more FPS:

  1. Turn off the VFR map: In the mouseover toolbar at the top of the screen, click the custom toolbar button (a cog) and disable VFR map.
  2. Enable generic planes for both both the AI and Players in the graphics options.
  3. My first flight when just opening MSFS is my best performing flight, FPS seems to decrease each additional flight until I close and re-open MSFS.