I’m sorry but the question was was directed to you, I’m interested to understand is the forum member has bottleneck issues with their 12900. Thanks
I know.
But, I think they already provided you with your answer before you even asked your question by writing this:
“Stutters” IME are always CPU bottlenecks. And they are most common on ground or near airports. Slow FPS can be indicative of a GPU bottleneck, but the whole sim doesn’t stutter when this happens.
Had they not already said that, I wouldn’t have chimed in to reiterate.
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I get your point in the greater scheme of things and I totally agree with you. I think people miss this point the most. The game don’t care what kind of hardware you got, if you’re flying a 747 at JFK on a saturday afternoon at 4K resolution and all the graphics settings cranked up: It will chug.
Not only that, they try to compare other games as if FS2020 is on the same level. No, this is a complex game with more moving parts than one can imagine. It will be a hot minute before we can fly to any corner of the world without any sort of performance issues
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There really aren’t a lot of CPU heavy games these days. Especially in real time.
Usually in games, the GPU does most of the work. This is partly because console CPUs drive the industry and last generation’s consoles had notoriously slow CPUs.
CPU issues mess with time.
Often, near the end of a console generation, a game like Cyberpunk 2077 comes out and brings the last generation consoles to their knees. And if it is too much for the CPU, the whole game stutters. Cyberpunk had all kinds of stuttering issues on the old consoles. You are walking around in the game, then time just stops for a while, the whole game pauses, stutters… before the CPU can catch up with things again.
Another example of CPU use in games is turn based gaming. You will notice early turns in Civilization happen very quickly. Late game turns take minutes. That’s your CPU working too hard, and slowing down time in game. We accept this in turn based games because it makes sense to give the computer a turn to think, too.
But in a sim, you want miles to feel like miles, minutes to feel like minutes, and your landing approach to be smooth. Stutters kill immersion because time in sim gets momentarily stopped when real life never has such stutters. And this sim can use too much CPU on anyone’s home PC these days if it is not configured correctly. To keep time flowing properly in sim, you gotta at the very least dial that TLOD back and keep the CPU from becoming a bottleneck. The best graphics card in the world cannot help you. A GPU is not a CPU.
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Yes. As good as the 12900k is (and it is great!) - there are still limitations on how much data it can process at LOD400 on the ground especially near airports - especially given the fact it’s mostly single core limited at the moment
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Curious, the best I can tell, the 3090 can eat through any GPU related task MSFS can throw at it, at least up to 4K. How has your experience been with it? Can you make it a bottleneck without throwing 8 or 12k resolution at it?
the 3090 is a beast 
Definitely handles anything I’ve thrown at it but I only game at 2k…
I had issues with the EVGA hitting the power limit and it was running mad hot as stock. I’ve been playing around with voltage reduction with very positive results. Runs with 100w less power, is more stable and generates less heat. Win Win 
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You are right. High fps does not make smooth try for 25-30.
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I believe one other aspect of this equation are VR users who like to use WMR based Motion Reprojection. Motion Reprojection is also very taxing on the CPU and one will need to lower the OXR Tools render scale accordingly based on CPU.
I have an i7 10700K CPU. Not a barn burner, but no slouch either. If found that I need to set OXR render scale to 60 - 65% for my G2 to get locked into 22.5 FPS when sitting at high fidelity airports near big photometry cities. This is true even when my VR graphics settings are set very low / off with both LOD sliders at 10. With my GPU (RTX 3070) doing next to nothing, my CPU still can’t keep up with motion reprojection enabled and OXR render = 100.
To find the right settings for my system, I left graphics settings very low to remove my GPU from the equation. I then lowered the OXR render scale incrementally until I observed MSFS dev tools FPS counter no longer showing itself as being limited by the main thread. I needed to get the CPU frame time under 44ms to lock into 22.5 FPS motion reprojection. Once I found this happy place, I was then able to bump up graphics settings to much higher levels until the GPU frame time was up around 32ms (30 FPS). This then sets me up for really nice and smooth 22.5 FPS motion reprojection while on the ground, and 30FPS motion reprojection once off the ground and away from the busy scenery.
Moral of the story: Even if I were to jam a 3090ti into my PC (which isn’t possible with its feeble power supply), my i7 10700K still wouldn’t be able to keep up with what I’m asking it to do. 
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Great post and you seem a little more educated in our hobby than I however I have to ask if you have tried disabling hyper threading on you CPU?
I have an a 9900k and the logic to me is if the sim is limited to the main thread why not give the main thread the most processing power you can?
As in in hyper thread mode your actual CPU cores are split in half so your CPU0 or 1 is maxed at half of it’s ability on the main thread while the rest is distributed.
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Hmmmm… that’s not a bad idea. Worth looking into!
I’ve also wondered if disabling hyperthreading would help. I’ve just disabled it on my PC and will do some VR tests tonight. I’m currently running a Cinebench test can definitely see that my CPU is running much cooler and not thermally throttling like it does when hyperthreading is enabled. We’ll see…
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I will get to test this soon on my potato laptop.
Ugh, I am running a Mac via Bootcamp and I guess I just don’t have access to Bios to adjust this setting. I may be stuck. Trying to find alternate ways to change the hyper threading settings without accessing Bios.
there’s definitely a few games out there that are CPU dependent (certain RTS games, DCS is CPU and RAM heavy and more). These particular games are also pushing the 5-8+ year old mark. Multi-threading definitely is a staple of newer games but there’s a fine balance of being able to “handle” all the scenery and planes and what not and straight up mob physics (a la UEBS). Of course, the latter is GPU dependent as most CPUs would be completely overwhelmed by tens of thousands of units on the screen at once. So i understand some games are better optimized than others.
I Agree that turning down terrain LOD will make an impact on how well the game runs and understand how the game “handles” displaying all the scenery and ground vehicles, special structures and player/AI planes. It will only improve with time
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I don’t see any benefit gained by disabling hyperthreading.
I tried disabling Hyperthreading on my Ryzen 5600x (for AMD it’s SMT). The processor works with higher load and temperature but I don’t see any difference in terms of performance
Ok, now I also have to give my opinion … 
I’m really pedantic when it comes to fluid simulations. I have driven racing simulations for many years and any kind of micro stuttering bothered me. Since half a year the flight simulator has fascinated me and since then I regularly try to get the best out of my PC and have made some compromises.
Due to my triple screen configuration (3x FHD displays @75Hz = 5760x1080), which is currently not officially supported by MSFS and optimized, I have the displays running via Nvidia Surround.
Until recently, I had had an RTX 2080 Super in my Intel (i9-10850K) PC and there the frame rate limit was always on my GPU. On average, these were between 40 and 56 FPS. However, when you get right down to it, the image was not smooth. VSYNC was not active. And I’d like to emphasize that here, that it’s actually only really smooth when the simulation on 75Hz displays also runs synchronously at 75 FPS via activated VSYNC. Perhaps the image is smooth even on a 60Hz monitor with VSYNC enabled and 60 FPS, but anything less than that should not appear smooth to the human eye.
Please do not misunderstand, but nobody can tell me that a simulation with 20 FPS runs smoothly on a standard display with 60Hz. Otherwise we would have to agree on what is meant by smooth. 
(But maybe I’m wrong and it looks completely different on a single screen. I have not been able to test this yet) Anyone who has flown or driven a sim with 75 or more frames and VSYNC active will understand.
I have now had an RTX 3080 Ti stuck in my PC for a few days. And what can I say? The bottleneck is now the CPU. 
In the missions, such as the landing challenges on Helgoland, my system now manages 95 FPS, but there is also no traffic that could push the frames. In normal flights I get values between 50 and 70 FPS on the ground, in the air it is then constantly 75 FPS with activated VSYNC.
I played around a lot with the settings of the NVIDIA Console until I had a reasonably stutter free, but not fluid image on the ground, because constantly 75 FPS does not create my PC.
InSim, I set the graphics options to a mixture of Middle, High and Ultra, depending on the option, and found a good compromise, until hopefully at some point the problem with the load on the CPU is fixed.
I have Live Traffic active, which I also don’t want to miss. If I were to reduce at this point, then I would certainly get higher frame rates.
I prefer to do without Ultra settings, which often also make no difference to High, than to have a jerky picture with 30 FPS.
I find 25 to 30 fps smooth.
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Re Vsync, in game, just be aware that the 20, 30, 60 ‘FPS’ in the in game VSync graphics option relates to frame rate at refresh rate(RR) of 60Hz. They actually should be labelled 1/3 RR, 1/2 RR, 1xRR instead.
So with a 75Hz monitor, turning on in game VSync of ‘20’ would yield 25FPS (1/3 of 75Hz) locked,
‘30’ would yield 37.5 FPS (1/2 of 75Hz) locked and ‘60’ would yields as high as your graphics card could keep up with but with a very likely unachievable target of 75 FPS.
Once again though I will reiterate that in FS higher FPS does not guarantee smoothness in this sim. I have the smoothest experience going with 30FPS/60Hz locked FPS. It feels way higher than 30FPS. Higher FPS is a bogus target for FS in my view. (minus some special cases like head tracking which apparently need higher fps)
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