ok , in short: in 2D I have a good experience, between 30-60 fps, depending on plane used, where you fly… etc… many factors which decide the final FPS.
But, as I am flying in VR 99% of the time, I am focussing on that. On takeoff, it’s usually pretty smooth, even on bigger airports. Perhaps a small stutter. Is OK, can live with that, system is OK, but not mega-high end, so all acceptable. Than a pretty smooth flight with a light stutter now and then. Fine!
But then the approach, and especially on about 1 mile final or so. Massive stutters. Back from average 25~40 fps back to 10-12. Even on smaller airports like e.g. Aarhus in Denmark.
So, I am suspecting the only 8GB memory on the card. BUT, when I go around and make another approach, stutters are way less. And a third time it’s practically smooth.
What can I do to improve this (besides buying a better card, which I will do at some point in time)?
I read somewhere here that was due, to a large extent, to road traffic. I gave it a try; I reduced road traffic to 10% and it’s definitely better, with stutters on final still happening but greatly reduced.
LOD is not named correctly. It should be called “draw distance” since that is what it does. If you reduce it too much, then it will wait until you are very close to draw countless ground objects. This usually happens right at the worst time, during the last part of the approach.
If you raise the LOD too much, then the vast number of objects being rendered in a huge sphere around your position grows far too large for the system to handle it, so you get massive drops in FPS.
The trick is to find a happy medium. Find a draw distance which will cause any stutters to occur far enough from the runway threshold so that you can handle it and then be smooth for the critical flare phase. For me this is LOD 115, but for others it will be different.
If you want to test this out, just spawn into a complex airport and fiddle with the object LOD and watch all the ground objects render and de-render as you watch them with the drone cam.
“Level of detail” is completely misleading, since it does not change the quality of the textures or the poly count in any way.
Enable dev mode and check how much vram is being used. Even with my 6800XT 16GB with Pico4, if I select DX12 I eventually get over the limit and stutters start right away…
You cannot get rid of these stutters, in my experience. The sim does something on final approach that causes this stutter, regardless of scenery CPU/GPU load and hardware.
It happens at small middle-of-nowhere airports too. I have a feeling it is related to the sim checking gates and flights. I used to think it was scenery related but scenery settings do not affect it.
I believe Asobo know about it, how couldn’t they, but like the horizon line ‘feature’, it’s embedded in the code and that isn’t a priority for them, while it is for us.
so, just for sh*t and giggles I tried 2 things that people seemed to have good experiences with:
installed the Studio driver instead of the Gameready version.
crancked up road/water/fauna settings up to 100% in VR
much to my surprise my local flying with smaller airports, which always gave me stutters on the first approach, is now almost completely smooth. I don’t know which of the 2 changes made this happen and I don’t really care to find out either, BUT it’s much more enjoyable now.
