Some things to play with in the settings, as the presets are kind of wack:
The Data / Online settings can cause stutters due to connectivity, even though the app is meant to fall back gracefully. To narrow it down try switching OFF at Options / General / Data (tab) / Online Functionality. Usually it’s the ‘Live Real-World Air Traffic’ causing issues, but switch them on one by one to see.
The Aviation Traffic has a LOD bug that eats VRAM. Again, to narrow it down, try flying a Flight Set-up with no Multiplayer / AI traffic. The ‘Flight Conditions’ page should look like this:
MSFS due to the way its Rolling Cache works is really susceptible to Virus Checkers causing frame jitters. Try putting an exception in for MSFS file locations or turn it off to narrow things down.
The Rolling Cache is a bit buggy, and can cause frame drops. Try turning it off if you don’t have an internet cap. It’s here at the bottom (your data usage will grow, depending on where you fly), but you can view a tracking total number on it:
If after all the above things don’t help, knock the Options / General / Graphics / Render Scaling down to 80% - most people are hard pushed to see the difference and it helps a lot on VRAM.
(I’ve got some more of these that are just for general hardware, so will update here - Performance Tips so it hopefully gets found more easily in the future)
So I set up a flight from KJFK to CYYZ. I have 32GB of RAM and while loading the scenario my RAM usage monitor kept going up and up and up to like 22GB and then the sim just stopped working. FS2020 will gobble up ALL your RAM. I thought, “Oh no, I’m going to have to have a “Virtual memory” paging file again!”, after at least 5 years of having none! I set my NVMe M.2 page file to system managed … worked like a charm.
FS2020 is a resource hog, but in a good way … if you have the resources, it treats you nice.
Great tips, I will have to experiment with turning off the rolling cache as the sim is pretty fluid most of the time, stuttering occasionally.
Also seems Azure text-to-speech servers used for ATC voice are overwhelmed by the amount of players, you can use offline mode which uses Windows built in text-to-speech feature (bit more robotic imho).
In the meantime here’s short flight I took in the wilderness of Alaska yesterday:
Are landmarks still WIP? I was flying around Tokyo and there’s a ton of important landmarks totally missing, with a lot of it filled in with generic rectangles for buildings.
Interesting thing is that the Bing Maps app in Windows in Road mode (not in Aerial mode) does contain a simple 3D model of many of important landmarks (check for instance the Buckingham Palace) but these are missing in the sim.
Sure, many of these models are perhaps too simple, but at least from the distance, they would give the city a nice skyline
I admit I was a bit surprised/sad about Frankfurt in the same way.
The airport is handcrafted and pretty good, but what kinda ruins the immersion is that the skyline of Frankfurt (which is visible from the airport) is very wrong. If I was the one doing the airport scenery I would include mediocre quality models for the five most important skyscrapers near the airport, even if they are technically not part of it.
You can even leave most of them generic, but you need the one with the pyramid on top and one or two others, and people will say “yep, that’s Frankfurt”.
Edit: this stock photo shows it nicely. It is about the general shape of a few buildings. They can be relatively low poly.
I tried @fearlessfrog 's suggested settings changes tonight, but performance is still terrible. Even the menus are running at 1-2 fps. I tried the first ab-initio training and at times i was getting 5 seconds per frame. Big stops and slow-downs and unplayably jerky. It’s a mystery. Something not right in my rig or summat.
I can play IL2 and DCS in VR no probs at pretty high settings, but this…
I double-checked my specs - my i5 2500k is running at 4 Ghz, my 16 gb of ram is DDR3 at 1333 Mhz.
Cheers. i might try pushing it to 4.5. I moved the sim to my SSD (thanks Steam for making that easy) and it was a somewhat smoother experience. Dropped to medium and with V-Sync on (seemed to perform better this way) it would start out reasonably smooth, but within a minute would stutter and develop hangs of up to 5 seconds or more.
I don’t have any XMP profiles running - I’ll check that out.
I’ve been planning to pull the trigger on a new PC for a while now - this may make it a necessity.
Look at the LOD’s for terrain and objects. Dropping them low and then slowly incrementing them to an acceptable level seems to work for me! XMP profiles help optimize your memory with your CPU. The 2500K is very overclockable, many people run them at 4.6ghz plus depending on cooler.
It looks like MSFS2020 likes threading quite a bit, someone with a threadripper CPU did some testing by disableing threads and cores and performance dropped down a lot. I think that is why you see a lot of complaints performance wise with 6000 and 7000 series intel i core CPU’s, they barely had any change in architecture or core count since the 2000 series and then AMD busted on the scene with ryzen.
Appreciate all your help. I pushed the CPU up to 4.5. Couldn’t enable XMP on my board - didn’t have any options to choose a profile, only Manual and Auto. Still strange performance. Sometimes smooth, sometimes slow and constant stutters and hangs. Even between reboots with the same settings performance will be bewilderingly different. Stumped.
It also never exits to desktop cleanly, always stops working and has the be closed. Just not meant to be for my old system I think.
Out of morbid curiosity:
How does the live weather look right now if you fly over California? Did they use fog to replicate the smoke from the forest fires?
So San Jose (KSJC) is skies clear in the sim right now…but that matches the METAR…so unless they have some surrounding area METARs that have smoke/obscuration in them, I’m not sure they will show up…
MSFS wasn’t displaying the smokey skies yesterday. But I’ll ya. I live in San Jose, right between the fires. The sky has been overcast, with an orange glow from the sun. The air quality is horrible. Like walking around a chimney. Outdoor activities are on hold.
As now of KSJC is reporting clear skies, but the tower is closed for another hour so it’s automated weather and probably not as accurate. Yesterday was 3SM and FU. KSJC 201153Z AUTO 33003KT 10SM CLR 17/12 A2991 RMK AO2 SLP128 T01670122 10222 20167 53002
Yeah I’ve seen pictures.
Thats why I wondered if FS2020’s weather system allows to replicate that.
Would also be interesting for stuff like the Eyjafjallajokull ash clouds in 2010.
I thought, “Oh no, I’m going to have to have a “Virtual memory” paging file again!”, after at least 5 years of having none! I set my NVMe M.2 page file to system managed … worked like a charm.
