August 23, 20205 yr I spent several hours testing and watching various air traffic parameters at KATL (considered to be one of the busiest airports in the world) at night so it would easier to see via their flashing strobe lights, etc. Had tags turned on, multiplayer off. 1) First test: Real Time traffic with Flight Aware open on another PC. It appears real traffic is streamed but sporadically at best. KATL in real life has planes arriving and departing every minute or few minutes, and maybe 1 in 10 of the flights were showing up in the sim, if that. There were stretches where I could go a good 15 or 20 minutes before it decided to show anything. Interestingly, there was one stretch where multiple planes did show up, and I got little, if any performance hit. Never saw any live traffic just flying over or around KATL at all, just arrivals and departures, if and when they decided to show up at all. 2) 2nd test: AI Traffic. I kept both airliner and GA traffic set to 50. This time the skies started to fill up and look like how I thought it might look. And while flights weren't landing and departing every minute or so, there were multiple AI takeoffs and landings, in addition to the planes flying above and around KATL. It felt busier and more life-like. However, of course, this came at the expense of frames, down about 20-25 fps. Now I say 'first' and 'second' test, but I performed both of these over multiple hours, just watching. I was parked in the Airbus A320neo, watching from an external elevated position, broken clouds, at night. "Parked aircraft" at 38, and ground vehicles/workers at about 20. Had AI plane models set to generic. Was averaging about 30-35 fps in the 2nd test, roughly 50-60 in the first test even during that short span of time when multiple aircraft showed up. The Real Time traffic obviously needs work. Perhaps the throttling of traffic here is purposeful so if the sim has to "take over" for ATC, go-arounds etc., it won't be overwhelmed? And I get that some users wouldn't necessarily want true real life, otherwise they'd be waiting a good bit on the taxiways, etc. depending on their airport. Maybe they could implement a slider to dictate the amount of real-life traffic desired, that is, if they can fix the fact that not all real time traffic even shows up. For the AI traffic, they either need to optimize it so it doesn't give you such a frame hit, or we need a 3rd party to implement lightweight AI models of their own. Specs: i7-8700k (stock) GTX 1080ti (slight overclock), updated to latest driver (the msfs one). 32 GB Ram 1080p Gsync monitor Settings preset to 'high', traffic, boats, etc. down to about 25 or so. I like having traffic around me, so I might have to go with AI traffic for now and dial the eye candy back a bit more to give myself some more headroom. But yeah, looking forward to some optimization or 3rd party tool to help with this. Edited August 23, 20205 yr by mikeklimek Clarity
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