Do not upgrade your CPU !!

[roi1862 611]

15 minutes ago, joeym4130 said:

One of the best optimizations I've made for stuttering was disabling the automatic cache completely. I would get momentary stutters with that on, despite cache being written to it's own dedicated SSD drive I installed just for that purpose. If you haven't experimented with that maybe give it a shot. 

The rolling cache in-game ? 

[DylanM 1,069]

3 hours ago, wthomas33065 said:

I have some brief stutters, it's worse when I have everything up at Ultra or LOD at 200.  I think at this point it's due to I/O.  I have 32GB RAM, a i7 7700 hyperthreaded and a GTX 1660 Super locked at 30fps.  I can run Ultra locked at 30fps very easily.  However, when I have LOD at 200, it runs fine until it has to update the new area I am flying in.  Then pauses or freezes.  Then continues.  If I lower LOD, the length of the pause obviously decreases.  

I have settled on everything on High End except clouds which are Ultra. and I only dip down below 30 if I'm flying rooftop level in Manhattan.  

If I want to get rid of those other pauses, I'm afraid I'll either have to move to an SDD or lower LOD even further.  Maybe 80 will make it just a little less noticable.  Trying to limit disk I/O now as I believe that's the bottleneck 

Based on testing, the LOD settings are dependent on fast storage I/O (SSD or M.2) and as much available VRAM as possible. An SSD would would be a good idea to start because it'll make your whole system feel a whole lot snappier... 

[wthomas33065 994]

7 minutes ago, DylanM said:

Based on testing, the LOD settings are dependent on fast storage I/O (SSD or M.2) and as much available VRAM as possible. An SSD would would be a good idea to start because it'll make your whole system feel a whole lot snappier...

Yeah, but it's starting to feel like a money pit.  Upgrading from 4 core i5 to i7 did a lot.  Upgrading from 8GB to 32GB did it's share (though I could have probably stuck with 16GB).  And going from 4GB AMD RX580 to 6GB GTX1660 Super did wonders. 

Getting an SSD is extra money (not as much as the GPU or CPU, granted) and then a whole new reinstall onto the SSD.  I may try to trim down some settings to optimize what I have now.   

The fact that I can run all High with Clouds at Ultra with minimum impact on my enjoyment is beyond my expectations, to be frank.  I'll see what trimming LOD 20 to 25 will do. 
Small adjustments make big differences  (area of a circle and all that....)

 

Edited September 21, 2020 by wthomas33065

[joeym4130 3]

13 minutes ago, roi1862 said:

The rolling cache in-game ? 

Yup. There is a large thread on the official forums with a lot of people having the same results.

[roi1862 611]

1 hour ago, w6kd said:

It's not "cpu15", it's LP (logical processor) 15.  Keep in mind that with HT on, one physical CPU core is running both LP 14 and 15, so the load on that core is the combined load on the two LPs plus some overhead for shuttling between the two.

I run MSFS on a 10-core 10900K with HT off.  I also limit frame rate to 30 fps thru VSync and a 30Hz hardware refresh rate on my 4K TV.  With patch #2 (v1.8.3.0) I see about 40-50% utilization on the last core, and the other nine cores are very lightly tasked at around 10-15% each.  With HT on, if your CPU load on those last two LPs *combined* is at/near 100%, then you are hitting the wall on your last physical core, and that very well may cause stutters.  If you're running a 10th Gen CPU (e.g. 10700K or 10900K) you might try using the per-core HT capability and turn off HT at least on that last core to give the thread(s) running on that last LP a dedicated core.  It might also be that trying to push out the max possible frame rate is driving the load up on the main thread(s) too high, and limiting to 30 as I am doing may be what keeps that final core from being overtasked.  Maintaining headroom--the ability to absorb spikes in processor load without hitting the limit--is critical to smoothness.

Thanks for the details ! ill try HT off.

[roi1862 611]

1 hour ago, w6kd said:

It's not "cpu15", it's LP (logical processor) 15.  Keep in mind that with HT on, one physical CPU core is running both LP 14 and 15, so the load on that core is the combined load on the two LPs plus some overhead for shuttling between the two.

I run MSFS on a 10-core 10900K with HT off.  I also limit frame rate to 30 fps thru VSync and a 30Hz hardware refresh rate on my 4K TV.  With patch #2 (v1.8.3.0) I see about 40-50% utilization on the last core, and the other nine cores are very lightly tasked at around 10-15% each.  With HT on, if your CPU load on those last two LPs *combined* is at/near 100%, then you are hitting the wall on your last physical core, and that very well may cause stutters.  If you're running a 10th Gen CPU (e.g. 10700K or 10900K) you might try using the per-core HT capability and turn off HT at least on that last core to give the thread(s) running on that last LP a dedicated core.  It might also be that trying to push out the max possible frame rate is driving the load up on the main thread(s) too high, and limiting to 30 as I am doing may be what keeps that final core from being overtasked.  Maintaining headroom--the ability to absorb spikes in processor load without hitting the limit--is critical to smoothness.

Soooo HT off, load spread more evenly, no core is maxing out, the stutter is almost completely gone. 

Thank you very much Bob ! 

[Stoopy 1,587]

Never underestimate the importance that memory speed plays. It's not all about CPU and GPU.  If data isn't moving fast enough, stutters and FPS issues also occur.   

 

 

[marsman2020 1,310]

I was listening to a podcast with the MS and Asobo team and they mentioned that SSDs were one of the enabling technologies for this game.  A WD Blue 256 GB SATA SSD is about $50 now.  It won't be as fast as the latest NVME hotness but will still have random reads and sequential transfer way faster than a spinning disk.

[FlyIce 354]

Agree. Today's SSD so cheap there is absolutely no reason to stick with mechanic harddrives unless you must have sth >>1TB for cheap.

[devgrp 1,233]

4 hours ago, roi1862 said:

Is you last core also maxed out ? "CPU15" IS maxed while overall usage is of the CPU is 18%

My cpu is usually at 40-45%

[roi1862 611]

3 minutes ago, devgrp said:

My cpu is usually at 40-45%

Mine also in this area now after turning HT off. 

 

48 minutes ago, marsman2020 said:

I was listening to a podcast with the MS and Asobo team and they mentioned that SSDs were one of the enabling technologies for this game.  A WD Blue 256 GB SATA SSD is about $50 now.  It won't be as fast as the latest NVME hotness but will still have random reads and sequential transfer way faster than a spinning disk.

I would love to see some actual testing between SSD and NVME.

[devgrp 1,233]

1 minute ago, roi1862 said:

Mine also in this area now after turning HT off. 

I never turn off ht since I do more than gaming on this pc

Edited September 21, 2020 by devgrp

[stefbuik 7]

HT on, 32gig RAM  @  3300 , i7 5820, 1080GTX. Running from 1tb Samsung EVO 860 Pro SSD. All threads at about 60% with the last two dipping to 40% every now&then. And no stutters if I keep rendering scale at 70 and fps locked  at 30. ( all on a 3440x1440 20:1 display at 100hz) with most settings on high-end and trees, houses and shrubs maxxed-out ( oh.. how that would KILL fps in FSX.. 😛 )

Key seems to be the locking of fps. Unlike FSX, in FS2020 it àctually seems to work. At least for me it does. With vsync off and frames unlocked, it went wildly from 20 fps to 60 fps ( over water) Locked, it stays between 28 and 31 fps without the ‘stutters’ we knew all too well in FSX.
 

However, when flying for a longer time it clearly hiccups for a tiiny bit when the new tiles and their trees, houses and assorted flotsam and jetsam get streamed. But that smoothes out really quickly. Probably down to my 1.8 mb max internet speed.

Have to try without the Bing data streaming. Mebbe that eliminates it completely..

 

soo.. in retrospect, sòmething is momentarily stealing cycles and/or threads. Usually it’s a bad behaving virisscanner tthat misses a specific ‘game’ setting. Buuut.. It could also be a printer driver that’s polling in the background. Or something inconspicuous like an USB3-card, or WiFi card.

Edited September 21, 2020 by stefbuik

[marsman2020 1,310]

1 hour ago, devgrp said:

I never turn off ht since I do more than gaming on this pc

Keep in mind hyperthreading does not create additional CPU cores, it just lets multiple threads run better *if* there are extra unused CPU clock cycles.  Many workloads don't actually get better with Hyperthreading on.

I do think because of the way that Windows Task Manager reports CPU useage - it does show HT as creating magical complete CPU cores in its % math - it's likely that the % use for a constant "MSFS load" will double turning hyperthreading off, without actually increasing the physical use of the CPU at all.  It's just showing 1/2 the cores, so the % goes up.  I suspect Task Manager doesn't properly account for the fact that the 2 hyperthreading logical cores on a single 1 physical core can't both be at actual 100% use at the same time.

The big drawnback I could see to Hyperthreading with this game is if the Windows scheduler is dumb (which it is sometimes) and assigns 2 MSFS threads to the 2 logical hyperthreading "cores" on 1 physical CPU core.  Instead of assigning each thread to its own physical CPU core.  Turning hyperthreading off would guarantee this does not occur.

[Dreamflight767 314]

Not sure if I'm supposed to ask and if not, please delete but...

But I have an i77700K, 32GB ram (16x2), 1080ti.  Now that folks have had time to play around, how would my computer hold up?

Thanks.