I’ve been experiencing CTDs consistently at the end of long-ish flights to scenery heavy destinations.
Could I turn my graphics settings all the way down and prevent the CTD? Sure, probably. But I’m not going to do that. I have a RTX4080, Ryzen 5900X, and 32GB of RAM.
Even if I did turn my settings down to a point where I could complete the flight, what if on my next flight I go to a destination that is 1% more scenery heavy than the last? CTD again?
If I fly somewhere fairly barren and lacking in scenery I can normally complete a flight no problem, but I don’t want to only fly in those places.
It’s pretty crazy that in 2024 this game cannot handle it’s resources properly. There is nothing more frustrating than flying for an hour or two and then crashing to desktop when you’re setting up final approach.
I don’t really see a way to avoid it besides turning my graphics settings way down and then notching them back up after each successful flight, which seems unacceptable to me for a modern piece of software. Even if I did that who’s to say my next destination won’t be a little more scenery intensive than the last, and then boom I’m crashing to desktop again.
It’s a terrible experience and has often prevented me from loading up the game since I know I will likely not be able to complete the flight I want to.
This isn’t supposed to happen and doesn’t for most people. If you bump the settings too high, you just get a slow simulator. If you’re seeing crashes, it most likely means there’s a hardware problem with your system (for instance, the power supply might be having trouble maintaining consistent voltage with the load on your system, causing random failures).
You might say “it works on other games”, but MSFS is much more CPU-heavy than most games, and does not have a typical load profile. More power is sent to the CPU, and more heat is generated on the CPU, than with most other games.
It’s also possible you have a software problem, such as bad drivers, with other parts of the system.
It’s much more rare that a bug in the actual simulator is hit on very few systems based on a rare configuration, though that is possible.
It’s moderately more likely that an add-on is causing a bug in the simulator to trigger randomly, such as an aircraft add-on that fails when used as static traffic (an actual crashing bug I saw a couple years back with a community mod for a seaplane). Double-check that things work if you remove your community mods (and also your Marketplace mods, if that doesn’t do the trick.)
Note that the Xbox release has a reputation for crashing on low-memory conditions because of the operating system – Xbox disables swap/paging which Windows normally uses to back needs for extra memory; likewise Xbox doesn’t distinguish between CPU RAM and VRAM and is unable to back up its single set of high-speed RAM with additional CPU RAM if VRAM usage goes too high. The PC versions (both Steam and MS Store) will normally survive overcomittment of both CPU RAM and VRAM, at cost of slowing down, and will not crash because of memory exhaustion in these conditions.
I use Ultra settings, millions of addons and fly full fidelity planes. I can count on one hand how many crashes I had in the last 3.5 years. Your hardware or operating system is the problem, not the game.
I realize the game is somewhat on its own in terms of its resource usage. It could be that I need better cooling on my CPU, Core Temp shows me a max of 90C and it can regularly get into the mid 80s under intense load. Maybe I shouldn’t be letting even get close to that?
I am also using the PMDG 737, latest version. I have a few various other mods, some scenery (not where I was flying when crashes occur), and some other aircraft.
The Ryzen 5xxx and 7xxxs are designed to run relatively hot; anything up to 90C should remain in spec – temps in the 80s C are normal at load and not something to worry about. (It shouldn’t go over 90C as it will throttle automatically, so if it’s hitting 90C consistently you might also be thermal-throttling. Just something to watch out for! )
It’s worth doing some tests with all mods cleared out (you can just move them to a temporary folder, then move them back) in case there’s a mod-related bug. If it is a add-on/mod-related bug then that saves you the trouble of fiddling with hardware.
I’d definitely check on the power supply – in MSFS with heavy scenery you’re loading both the CPU and the GPU heavily, so it’s going to draw more power than most games. Alas, I know swapping out the PSU is a huge pain in the posterior just to test on spec.
There’s probably an electronics tool you can get for measuring load on the PSU that’s not too weird to use but I’ve never had to attempt it myself. I do wish it were more easily reported to the software side…
For an RTX 4090, Nvidia recommends “at least” a 750W power supply; the Ryzen 5900X will also be eating more power than during most games, so you might or might not be ok with that 850W supply… if there’s any overclocking (including “stock overclocks” on the GPU made by your card manufacturer) that might be pushing you closer into the danger zone.
With luck it’s a mod problem you can upgrade or temporarily remove without fiddling with the hardware!
But if you do swap things out, consider getting a 1000W power supply for this combination to have plenty of headroom.
Appreciate it. Will do some digging. I’ve been looking into it a bit more and I’m thinking if it were truly a power supply issue wouldn’t my whole computer be crashing, not just the sim? Some reddit posts led me to this conclusion and it does make sense. A bit odd that a PSU problem would only affect a certain app.
If things are a little glitchy at the electronics level then whatever’s using the CPU the most is statistically most likely to glitch out first; a very common failure mode for “we flipped a bit somewhere” is that a corrupted pointer sends the code to work with memory at an invalid address, which will cause the program to immediately terminate due to the standard memory protection system. This would reduce the load on the power, perhaps returning you to a fully working state.
From what I hear this is common with thermal issues, overclocks, undervolts, loose memory seating, etc, but I’m not an expert on overclocking or gaming hardware beyond cobbling together my own machine.
As mentioned above its either add on community stuff or bloatware on the OS that typically causes issues. I found ASUS armour crate caused crashed for instance. Now my machine is rock solid and i can easily do an 11 hour transatlantic flight on Ultra.
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