Some thoughts on stutters

After a day playing around with settings (a couple hours' worth of actual sim time) I've discovered something about the stuttering that's occurring for people, regardless of their specs. 

I want to make clear that this is just MY experience, and I'm not knowledgeable enough about the way the sim or the CPU and GPU work to suggest how applicable this might be, in general. But this is working for me right now. 

First, here's what I'm playing on: i9 9900, Geforce RTX 2080ti, 64 GB DDR. I play on a widescreen, 3440x1440 resolution. 

I'm finding that the sim runs very clean for me, almost regardless of settings. I have nearly everything cranked up to max, with the exception of a few sliders (water and reflections and shadows) set to high instead of ultra. 

But yes - I was getting stutters when I cranked it up this morning. Periodic ones, sometimes, and other times consistent ones. Just little hitches where the sim seemed to be "thinking" about something rather than running. 

So I started, one by one, altering the settings, and none of them seemed to make a difference. 

But then, really just on a hunch, I turned off texture supersampling, which is described in the sim as controlling fine detail like "road marks." I wasn't sure what that meant, but when I zeroed it out - voila, not a single stutter. The cost to visual quality, so far as I've been able to tell, is confined to runway markings - numbers and lines that don't appear as crisp as they did before. (I had this set to 8x8). I'm not seeing anything different, anyplace else. 

I tested this out just now on a short-ish flight from Sacramento Executive (SAC) to Tahoe Regional (TVL). I used the TBM. Short hop across the mountains, and down into the lake valley, one of my favorites for VFR. 

Not a single stutter in the entire flight. There were two hitches I noticed, when the sim was clearly loading some piece of terrain... but again, just twice. Otherwise, perfectly smooth flight, with the settings nearly at max. 

I don't know much about supersampling, other than what I've said here. Is this mayb a glitch with the setting, or is it a setting that, when jacked up, somehow interrupts the processing of the sim? I don't know. 

But I wanted to share here, in the hope that there's something in this post that helps decipher solutions. Would love to hear what others are finding. 

As an aside, I'm pretty blown away by the sim so far. Unbelievable detail, really nice, nuanced flight model and stunning weather effects. It is a GIANT leap forward in flightsimming, in my opinion. Yes, there are many many areas that need or could use improvement, and some glitches that clearly caught Microsoft by surprise, as they weren't things that seemed to report out of the beta. (For reference, my first flight simulator was Flight Simulator 4.0, in 1989, and I've recently been playing X-plane and P3D, both of which I consider outstanding sims. This one, though, on day one, is clearly the birth of another generation.) 

Edited August 19, 20205 yr by SH23