I’ve noticed a significant drop in performance and much more stuttering present on a powerful machine. Certainly needs to be fixed, as well as how intensive the hardware seems to be working. Another run at optimisation might be required.
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OK so here’s where I’m at with this, I’m not saying this is the most scientific of approaches but it’s what I did:
Chose to fly around San Diego because I’m familiar with it, and there is a good spread of sparse areas and densely populated, and some good detailed buildings. I set weather to clear, killed all live weather, live players, etc. Left Photogrammetry on. Reduced all AI to their minimums. Running in Window mode, 1920x1080 scaled to 1920x1017 while windowed. I knocked down all the sliders and other graphical options to the absolute minimum, to see where I was. I also spent time flying around the same locale so the sim isn’t constantly loading scenery. At absolute minimums, I was able to get 65-75 fps when flying in a straight line, with some minor stuttering from time to time. If I make a hard turn, FPS drops to anywhere from 30-50 with some major stuttering. Using the drone external view and swinging it around the external of the airplane gave same FPS hit.
I started increasing the graphical options one at a time, starting from the bottom of the list, and would fly around for a few minutes watching the FPS counter. Lens flare on, no hit. Light shafts to Ultra, 3-4 FPS max hit. Raymarched reflecsions, 2-3 max. Terrain shadows to 2048, 5-10 hit, 256 no hit. Waves medium another 5-6 FPS hit when near water. Texture synthesis Ultra, no hit. Texture Supersampling to 4x4, 3-4 FPS worst case. Anisotropic 16X, small hit, nearly zero. Texture Resolution Ultra, no hit after a restart. Volumetric Clouds to Ultra - 20-30 FPS hit, reduced to medium, 8-12 FPS hit. Returned clouds to low, very small hit 0-1. Object level of detail to 100 - 1-2 FPS max. To 200 3-4 FPS. Trees to ultra - surprisingly only 2-3 FPS. Terrain vector data ultra 1-2 FPS. Offscreen terrain pre-caching Ultra, no impact.
Now for the BIG one. Terrain LOD to 200 - major hit. Down to low single digit FPS. At 100, FPS is 20-30 with major stutters and if you turn, down to single digits. I have this set back to 10, and I’m between 45 and 60 FPS. It’s at least flyable. The details of ships along the San Diego harbor look awful.
Also to note when running at 50-70 FPS, GPU load is high, 90-100%. CPU load is 20-40% which seems low considering it’s telling me I’m Main Thread limited. Every 20-30 seconds it will stutter heavily, and then recover.
So the terrain is really killing it, at least on my rig. That’s not what I thought the problem would be. I figured trees and buildings would be the killers but maybe that’s outdated FSX thinking. Not sure if any of this is helpful, let me know what you think.
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One last thing, this setup, to reiterate is I7-10875H (yes its a laptop) with an RTX 2070 Super. Flying at high altitude, straight, I am seeing this as a peak FPS, and its only momentary. It spikes high for a few seconds, then goes down into the 50’s, then back up, and continues this cycle.
But still, not bad for an old outdated rig 
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lowering LOD is what we assumed/mentioned will help reduce cpu load, but not that you have to set it to 10.
These stutters while movement… may be kind of pre-loading thing and this caused while ago for some users stutters.
Just to check, I have noticed this behaviour, particularly when my Internet bandwidth is low. I can get 40-50Mbs at certain times, but at weekends when everyone is using the Internet it can reduce to 20Mbs and that seems to be where the stutters start to get worse. MSFS supposedly needs 40Mbs or more to get a smooth experience, and round here in 3rd World post Brexit rural Britain that’s still not as common as we would like.
Hi everyone… After killing myself with hopeless settings decided to reinstall Win10 (of course after back up Packages folder or you can simply rename it if located in non system drive). It was a lot of work with settings and MS updates but worth it. After installed new win10 and my all data I jus installed MSFS with no download 100GB of data again. Just copy Packages in their usual place. Didn’t belive. Everything works like before update!!! Now i have 30 FPS again after 10 hours effort. So it was not MSFS case but my operating system. Something messed up OS when updating MS windows and game itself (Microsoft again). Worth a try. Hope it helps somebody. Cheers
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Hi, I have an I7 9700K, 2070 RTX Mini-Super, 64 GB 3200 DDR4, NVME 1 TB and additional 1 TB SSD, Comcast cable 600 (actually about 400) Mbps, AOC C27G1 1080 monitor, Windows 10 … recently, since SU7, I’ve been getting FPS’s of 18-28 with stuttering (all settings on ULTRA and LOD on 400 and DX12), recent trials with the freeware R44 and Huey helicopters and Air Creation 528 - heli’s difficult installation initially and use of Airland FS … was hoping that there would be an update (like after SU5 or 6) where the computing load was shifted back from CPU to GPU, but decreasing terrain LOD to 200 has helped a lot (increasing FPS by about 10) without appreciable quality worsening … next MS/Asobo conference next week, I think … Also, my NVMe is now up to 750 GB (only MSFS 2020 and Chrome/email) on this computer, can I start installing next updates and add-on’s on my second SSD just by giving that path and no other changes? Feedback appreciated, thanks, Carl 
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For me i got back to playable on VR glasses with lowering Terrain LOD to 100 and (further testing needed) with setting offscreen Terrain precaching to low.
Looks for me they worked on LOD behaviour, or there is a bug with this setting as it now sets a higher value than before, because even lower values like 75 are looking good now.
Pre SU7 i could fly with Terrain LOD on 200 without seeing a big FPS drop.
I’d like to start distributing some of MSFS big stuff to the other SSD … Can I just move a large file, eg One Store 200 GB, to my second hard drive, and have MSFS know how to access it?
Yes, if you are on a PC.
You need to move the entire official one store, and the community folder to your selected location.
They need to be put in one folder in the new location.
Then you need to go to the UserCfg.opt file.
It is in the sim’s Local Cache folder.
You need to change InstalledPackagesPath to your new location.
Thanks! Cuz I just simply moved it, then on starting MSFS, it updated me with Premium Upgrade 115 GB, as it sensed it was missing (and didn’t know where it was) …
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What is really the difference between 60 fps and 30 fps in what you experience visually? I don’t start seeing issues until I get down below 20 (separate from the stuttering ie) …
The point from the users in this topic is, that they get lower fps than in former releases with the same settings as before ( and some of the users are in such kind angry, that they speak about to leave the game ).
Related to your question ( hope we come not off-topic with that ): there is a difference noticable, but like you, I have not an issue playing a flight-simulator with my 35fps vsync setting. In my personal opinion all users should close all of these monitoring tools and enjoy the game. For me exist a issue only, if my eyes told me something is wrong and then I try to adapt the settings ( but I have also no wrong expectations what my hardware is able to do ). If we follow this topic we can notice, that e.g. seemingly some users must decrease the LOD from 400 back to 200, otherwise they get less fps… ( and of course we should not wonder if we use a beta feature like dx12-beta, why ever this is included within the stable release anyway ).
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I certainly agree with that point! I don’t like that I had 48-64 fps previously, and now have 18-28 (in some environments) unless I turn down scenery LOD from 400 to 200 … that does set an ominous precedent, BUT before they were able to shift part of load from CPU to GPU, seemingly without degradation … will we have a “correction” like this? … the MS/Asobo video-conference is this week …
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Yes as others have said there is a noticeable increase in CPU load since SU7, having to go from LOD 400 to at most 200.
This is not asking too much of Asobo, we are simply and rightly stating that that we should be able to achieve the same results as before. This not just a 1 or 2 ms increase in CPU thread timing but a significant increase.
Given it is likely that more complex airliners will require more CPU computations I hope this will be addressed with haste
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Can someone remember when the Terrain precaching offloading option came? It was one of the last updates iirc. And i guess it has something to do with this and Terrain LOD.
Set both to high levels and your framerate will die, maybe caused by a cache overload or so.
I advise everyone to try Terrain precaching offloading with the lowest level, best off. You dont get a direct visual downgrading because this option is only framerate and Memory related.
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Having originally thought performance had tanked after this update I think it worth noting though that settings of 200 & 400 post SU7 are not the same as they were before.
Personal opinion, but I would estimate that a setting of around 230 draws trees and buildings out to the same distance as 350-400 before the last update.
A setting of 400 is beyond virtually every CPU currently available, certainly under DX11. My 5900x is boosting to 5ghz and I’m main thread limited virtually all of the time with a setting of 230.
In a nutshell, the number is irrelevant. The picture is all that matters.
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it depends on the expectation you have… I have all at ultra , near 4K and I’am in a fps range which is okay for me… can be better, but it is possible 
( see image )
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I don’t see how you can run LOD 400 on that CPU without being debilitatingly MainThread limited.
Even on my 2080ti with Ultra & 4K pushing the TerrainLOD beyond 230 you immediately become MainThread limited in almost every circumstance.
Hopefully when DX12 is up and running properly LOD400 and a decent fps might actually be achieveable 
but for now, I just can’t see how it can be the case.
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I not sayd that I’am not limited by main thread in all situations… 
As you can see in my shot I have my GPU at 100% and the one core is at 100%… currently best we can get and I assume more cores will not help in this situation. But of course there are other in-game situations which are not so optimal. But It is just that I have no other expectation related to the fps I get: I have all settings at Ultra and I can play this game with an out-dated hardware in near 4K with mostly 35fps, sometime more but also sometime in 2x fps range. Normaly we can not set Ultra for at least two or three future hardware generations ( and thats good so ).
For users with a newer GPU it might be a different situation, because the main thread more often limiting the usage of full GPU potential.
But yes… I also hope for more optimizations and that we all get a beneffit from the DX12 implemention
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