I see a lot written about “stuttering” in MSFS graphics. But I’m still not sure what exactly this looks like on-screen. For the most part my graphics are fluid (4090, i9-13900K). But I do occasionally have what I would refer to as “pauses”. That is 1/2 to 1 sec pauses where the screen just stops briefly as if the data flow is trying to catch-up to one of the system components. In the past, I would attribute these to time needed for the sim to read HDD data like scenery. But in my system everything runs off of NVME SSDs (EVO pro 980’s) so I don’t think that’s it. Plus it can happen over just water too. Is this considered “stuttering” or something else? Thx.
This is a stuttering demo:
As you see the images movement is not fluid.
The short pauses you see are caused by main thread freezes (the whole simulation freezes), so they are a different thing. Asobo needs to optimize their code as too many things run on the same thread and it just gets worse as time passes by when they add more features, like the recent avionics updates. Those freezes can also be caused by big data swaps from/to memory. However you can also see that such data swaps result in a temporal decrease to 20fps during some seconds until all data is moved. Both things are possible as far as I have seen and that has been the pattern for several months.
SU13 is the worst patch I have seen so far in terms of those freezes and overall performance. Both memory management and main thread are simply broken and as a result performance is terrible even at situations where it shouldn´t, like regular areas with few details and no traffic nearby. I have a similar setup (12900ks instead but also 4090 and NVMe disks) and I also see those few seconds freezes.
Cheers
3 Likes
Thank you! That explains a lot and makes me feel better (I guess). It’s definitely more noticeable in SU13 but I was hoping it would just be server-side issues (I’m on a gigabyte fiber network at 780-900Mbps)
1 Like