I’m generally not happy with the performance on Series X. It’s very inconsistent.
The game hiccups and pauses like crazy in heavily populated cities with large busy airports. I don’t have add-ons installed other than the improved runway and taxiway textures.
I clear my roling cache from time to time, don’t use it at all mostly or sometimes set it up to 16-32 GB. That hasn’t made much of a difference on performance or texture loading.
Many of the buildings look like they’ve been nuked, this happens in cities with photogrammetry only. Also, of there’s too many weather effects and dense clouds… Dear me the fps take a poo, especially when flying over large busy airports! Lag Central!
I have aircraft add-ons installed such as some of the jets by Deimos and SC/DC Designs and IFT. That’s it.
How can I enjoy a seamless hiccup-free “no pause” gameplay experience in Flight Simulator? Seriously it’s getting on my nerves now and I regret buying this game. Should have stuck to Gamepass!
My internet is 100mbps fiber optic up/down and it’s not shared. Wired.
Interesting observations. I am on series X as well, and the only differences between my set up and yours is:
I don’t use improved runway and taxiway textures.
I don’t use a rolling cache.
I mostly fly third party piston and turboprops.
My experience is vastly different from yours. I don’t have hiccups or pauses almost no matter where I go. The first time I saw a hiccup was last week at one of the new airports in the Caribbean. It was noteworthy to me because it was pretty much the first one I noticed in two years of playing (600+ flight hours).
Do you use quick resume? That can mess up games pretty bad. I usually fully quit every game before I open any game.
I would recommend trying out my set up and seeing if it’s any better. If you take out the textures and the rolling cache and it’s still this bad, then there’s something wrong with the sim. If it’s better, then the problem is with one of those.
As far as buildings looking nuked, here is a screenshot I took the other day. Not because it was a particularly nice shot, but because my friend’s helicopter was presenting as a generic GA plane and I wanted to take a picture to show him. I think this looks alright, but if this looks nuked to you then it could be a matter of expectations.
For me, on PC, rolling cache causes stutters and hiccups. Or it did a while back. When I discovered turning it off solved the problem I was quite happy and haven’t tried it since.
I’m not willing to turn off rolling cache because buildings load too slowly in cities with photogrammetry.
I think it may be the third party fighter jets causing the hiccups. Not sure.
Also, the game will crash randomly to desktop only when loading a flight or returning to the world map after a flight. Happens rarely and very randomly.
I never leave any games in Quick Resume.
Also, the preflight loading and post flight loading screen can sometimes take forever or not load at all. I have to quit the game and relaunch!
It fascinates me to no end how people on identical hardware can have such different experiences. I haven’t run rolling cache since the very very beginning and I never notice buildings loading in at all. Just two days ago in Los Angeles I was marvelling how I could see multiple skylines at the same time all the way into the distance.
I hope you can take the time to run without the jets and runways and see what happens. I wonder if the problem is caused by some combination of factors. How do the runway textures work? Do they change the textures of all the runways nearby? I’m wondering if it’s a set texture quality for all runways that has to load in every time, maybe that’s what’s causing your cities to pop in (i.e. the memory that would have been allocated to the buildings are instead going to all the runways in the area). There tend to be more airports and hence runways in urban areas so maybe that explains the particularly poor performance in cities? Maybe it has nothing to do with rolling cache at all.
Maybe load a vanilla set up and then try with cache on and cache off. Then add things back in one by one until the problems return (if, indeed they go away at all). I don’t know why jets would be harder on the systems than an in depth turboprop, but it’ll be interesting to see if they are causing memory leaks or something.
I wonder if to test properly you need to just not use them or if you need to uninstall them from the content manager. My preflight loading screen always takes about the same amount of time to load (around 30 seconds plus or minus 15) and I literally never have crashes to desktop after a flight going back to the main menu. Since we have the same hardware and software I have to think the culprit is in one of the few differences we have.
Please report back if you do any testing.
Edit: Just another thought. Do you think flying faster makes a difference? Could it be because I’m going <200 knots and you may be going mach 2 the system can’t keep up with drawing objects? Like it has to draw stuff and then dump it more quickly leading to more obvious pop in and the like?
Everything you said makes total sense, thanks for taking the time to write that out
I’ll do some testing. It could be the runway textures, could be the more complex physics simulation of the fighter jets manoeuvring and flying at high speeds … and yeah I rarely fly below 500 kts at low altitudes, in fact, mostly doing mach 1+ flybys
I am on Series X as well and I recommend trying with rolling cache turned off. I used to think the rolling cache is supposed to help performance but I decided to turn it off one day and the bad stuttering in busy airports and cities pretty much stopped. Will still get fps drops in some instances but I can get pretty smooth fps even flying over add-on cities. But, luckily Sim Update 15 next month sounds like systems with low RAM, including XBox, could see a big performance improvement.
Live traffic and live weather are two of the biggest culprits I think.
Also, the game needs better optimization. Things are looking overall good for me right now but once the performance hiccups hit, it’s not so much fun. I do mostly high speed runs in fighter jets so that could be causing it too.
Don’t enjoy sightseeing in slow aircraft much but the game runs extra smoothly, interestingly.
