So big news as SU5 will supposedly have big performance gains. But will these performance gains be for folks that have low-mid range gpu’s or will people with 2080 and 3080 cards see massive improvements too?
I currently run a 3080 with i10900kf.
I get around 35-40 fps with the fbw A320NX while on ground and 45-55 fps while on air.
I’m not really looking for more fps, but rather get more smoothness. We still get tiny stutters that is due to the glass cockpit.
The CPU bottleneck is improved (see latest Dev Q&A), and you’re most likely CPU bottlenecked with that config, especially if you play at less than 4K. I would expect you to see improvements.
Glass cockpits in particular are improved as they have moved the rendering to a separate thread (also in a Dev Q&A I believe).
Yeah i run at 4k and get cominations of limited by main thread and limited by gpu
You are almost certainly going to see large performance increases whether you were CPU or GPU bound before. The Dev Q&A video showed that they have managed to reduce drawcalls by over 50%, at least while flying over New York as shown in the video.
Drawcalls are not often discussed so I’ll try and explain why it’s such a big deal to reduce them so much. Very simply, the CPU has to generate drawcalls which it sends to the GPU to tell it what it needs to draw. These are expensive for the CPU to calculate and then for the GPU to draw.
Reducing drawcalls is a big factor when it comes to improving a game’s performance. Generally, the more a game can reduce drawcalls the more performance will increase. The latest dev Q&A showed that they had reduced draw calls from over 3500 in SU4 to just over 1500 in SU5. (while flying over New York). That is a massive difference.
This is where the bulk of their performance increases have come from, but they have also reduced the number of polys being drawn significantly too to help achieve this.
I’m a gamedev btw and have plenty of experience with how much of an impact drawcall reduction can have on performance. I think we can all expect at least a 20% performance boost, and some of us may benefit by up to 40% in certain scenarios.
I hope this helps to answer your query, but of course, I only have the evidence in the Q&A video to go on. It might be that this level of performance increase only occurs where photogrammetry is involved as the examples of the improvements were shown over New York.
We’ll have to wait and see but I’d bet we are all going to see significant performance increases regardless of whether we were CPU or GPU bottlenecked before.
Here’s a decent article on drawcalls if you are interested to learn more: Draw calls in a nutshell. While not the only thing that has… | by Tonči Jukić | Medium
You might want to consider Air Manager. You can run panels on a separate laptop that does not even need to be that beefy and then turn your glass instruments to low in the main sim.
I do this in the C172G. I have a small lap top connect through my home network under my main monitor that is running a six pack of steam gauges and turn the glass down in the main sim which should improve your FPS. Another benefit is you can just set you cockpit view out the front window and when you need to scan gauges look down at the laptop. I am not a tube liner guy so I don’t know how well this will translate to the that.
Hi there. I am wondering what the new performance enhancements will bring to someone like myself? What i want to say is… Right now flying in SU4, I find that my CPU is not maxed out at all, but my GPU is at, or around 100% already. I will try to include a taskbar performace image. please excuse the washed out color, i am flying in HDR.
I wonder if we can approximate our % gain by looking at current GPU utilization vs. 100% (assuming no CPU bottleneck anymore)
In their video, the GPU utilization was ~70% in SU4 and 100% in SU5 so the improvement is 100/70 - 1 = ~40%, which seems to align well with their demo.
Of course, I do not think the CPU bottleneck would be fully eliminated in the cockpit or for unbalanced CPU/GPU combos (e.g. i3 + GTX3090), but for well balanced ones we may see GPU utilization close to 100% (hopefully)
Your 70% GPU utilization before was likely due to the excessive drawcalls in SU4. The GPU can’t really do anything until the CPU has finished calculating all the data for the next drawcall so the GPU can often sit around doing nothing but waiting for the CPU to send it the next drawcall.
Now that they have massively reduced drawcalls the CPU should be able to keep up with the GPU and give you the performance increase you suggest. But things will likely be even better than that because they have reduced the number of polys being drawn by about 25% too. So not only will your GPU be able to stay busy all the time, but it needs to also draw less than before to get the same final image too.
We won’t know for sure until SU5 drops, but the evidence of how they have improved performance is good news for everyone. I can’t imagine a single PC setup that won’t see at least a decent uptick in performance. I’m confident that some will get huge improvements.
hi there, Just saw your response to last post here. I am just mystified as to why my CPU/GPU is totally opposite right now. as in Low CPU Usage v’s Very GPU? Also, is around 75 Degree kinda hot for any gpu?
You dont show how many cores your CPU has in the screenshot. Generally, game’s will push one core to 100%. This is the main thread which deals with all the sequential processing in the game. So many things MUST be done in order and so we end up with a single thread that is doing all the heavy lifting of keeping everything in order. This happens in FS2020.
If you expand the CPU window in Task Manager to show all of your cores, you will find that at least one core is at 100%. You could then have 7 other cores only running at 50% doing other jobs that can happen in parallel with the main thread. Audio is an example of a job that can be done in parallel. So if some cores are only running at 50%, and many others are much less, your end CPU utilization could easily be like 25%. The more cores you have, the more likely you are going to have very low overall CPU utilization. Either way, the game’s framerate is going to be limited by the time it takes the main thread to complete it’s tasks.
That is why the best CPU’s for games are usually the ones with the highest single core speed. This let’s that one core running the main thread do it’s job as fast as possible.
Don’t worry, it’s not your fault. It’s the way games work. Asobo have worked on improving this dramatically for SU5. The massive reduction in drawcalls will free up lots of work that the main thread used to have to do. You will almost certainly see much better overall CPU utilization after SU5 is released.
Ahh Yes! I have already read all cores, and their usages, I have 10 cores (20) hyperthreaded. My main concern now is, my GPU high usage , and (possibly) high temps at aropund 75 degrees, or orange/yellow band when viewed in ASC (Advanced system care) monitoring.
75 degrees is perfectly fine for a GPU. Obviously lower temps are nice, but 75 degrees is nothing to worry about. If you really want to control your GPU temps, you can use MSI Afterburner which allows you to set a maximum temp and it will then reduce performance where necessary to never go above that temp. It will also let you easily control your GPU fan speed to be louder but cooler if you prefer that option. But really, 75 degrees is not a big concern.
I use MSAI Afterburner, and released “Auto” to use fans at higher speeds… BUT, If these temps are nominal, i can relax 
thank you for this input ;D
Computer noise for me is no factor, usually i have my (sim/Monotor) volume up a lot anyway.
I wouldn’t expect a big improvement especially for high end rtx gpus.
Very possible, we all need to see what we see
GPU temps and MSI Afterburner are an interesting topic right now, especially with so many places experiencing extremely high weather temps. Using the temp limiter of MSI Afterburner is a great way to ensure that we don’t suddenly find ourselves overcooking our GPU’s during extreme weather.
Another interesting performance related topic is that we should all prepare ourselves for the possibility of some really poor performance and stuttering around the release of SU5. FS2020 is suddenly going to have hundreds of thousands of new Xbox players eating up server bandwidth. We all know what it’s like when big multiplayer game’s release. Servers get hammered. We’ve all seen it with FS2020 too after each update. Performance can suck at peak times for the week after updates, especially if flying in newly updated areas.
Even if FS2020 doesn’t appeal to all Xbox gamers, there is a huge number of them with GamePass that are going to download and try the game anyway.
I think it’s a very real possiblity that we may all have to wait a week or two after SU5 to know for sure just how much of a performance improvement it really brings. Imagine how many people are going to descend on places like New York to test their performance increases. It could easily cause server instability and therefore data streaming problems and therefore stuttering for us in game. Let’s hope not, but it’s worth keeping it in mind.
High end GPU’s and low end CPU’s will see the most benefit … unfortunately I am exactly the opposite
I have already anticipated many many more playes/simmers coming to MS servers from there also… I am already thinking about limiting multiplayer, or even stoppi8ng that at all in all cases… (I just wonder how many non mature people might get here on these servers anyway). Yes so, to add? I certainly know how the MS servers may get more bogged down too.
System Specs:
Intel Core i9-9900X 10 Core HT @ 3.5GHz, and @ 4.40GHz Turbo.
MSI X299 Raider Ultimate Force Motherboard
64GB Ram DDR4 @ 3600 Quad Channel
2 x MSI GeForce RTX 2080Ti (sli)
M2SSD 1TB 3400Mb/s (for X Plane 11)
Hyper Liquid II medium kit (Rigid)
Corsair AX 1200i 1200W 80+ Power unit
Extra custom fans
Thrustmaster Warthog A-10C Replica
Logitek Rudder/Pedals set
On the picture you posted, where it shows your CPU at 25%, that is the “overall usage” taking all cores into account. , does not represents what MSAFS is using. When you look at “by core usage” you will see that MSFS is running a couple of cores at 100% That is the thing that kills the sim, but with future app updates, they will increase the number of cores the Sim uses to take advantage of our CPUs. Right now is like you buying a Ferrari sports cars and can only use 2 out of the 8 cylinders in the car.
On the GPU temp, it is normal for the majority of modern GPUs. I have a Strix 3090OC and that temp is perfectly fine.
