I'm going to try the suggestion with two dedicated power cables going to the card. I appreciate everyone's input. The box is properly cooled. If I can't get this resolved, maybe I should send this card back to NVIDIA, I don't know...

2 hours ago, wthomas33065 said:

There is always a "bottleneck" even when there is no actual bottleneck.  According to the snapshot, the GPU is the one that takes the longest to complete (13.2ms).  Thus it is the limiter, If you hit an area where main thread momentarily had the highest number than it would say "limited by CPU". Limited by GPU is a good thing especially if your GPU is greenbar.    If you are limited by CPU, it means your GPU is sitting around waiting for content.  

Do you know of any other software that is monitoring the same data?

Because I don't have those issues with other software (either to say that is limited by GPU or CPU) leads me to believe that something is not right here.

I'm monitoring my PC with MSI afterburner and RTSS and from what I see other more demanding software, P3D or XP11 are solid on performance without being momentarily limited by either CPU or GPU.

You see, I have no knowledge in this area but when I see and compare data I incline to believe that either their monitoring software is not good (I cant use it against the other software I have) or just that the MSFS2020 is not properly optimized.

So this is my problem. I remember the P3D was going nuts on CPU before they optimized their code and now is OK.

The XP11 was previously going crazy on CPU and GPU and from the last 2 updates they fixed it. 

Very interesting and confusing, at least for me.

Thank you.     

2 minutes ago, killthespam said:

Do you know of any other software that is monitoring the same data?

I think you are confused by the tool itself.  The FPS counter is a developer tool designed for MSFS exclusively.  Other games have development tools, but they are rarely exposed to the public.  Sometime you can get a console on an FPS or something similar, but this is as complex as I've seen.

The FPS analyzer is simply a tool that is monitoring what is the limiting factor in frames per second.  Something has to be.  You can't have infinite FPS.  So the counter tells you what the currently limiting piece of hardware is.  It's the GPU.  In fact most of the time it WILL be the GPU.  The GPU is what renders the final output the the screen.  The other components are upstream.  If the GPU is NOT limited, then it means the GPU is sitting around idle waiting for work.

They also added green yellow and red tints to everything.  These counters tell you when certain limits are being reached.  For example if you get into an area that requires more VRAM to render than RAM, you'll see the VRAM budget be greater than the available RAM which means the system is using slower DDR memory to store some of the rendering.  That will usually cause the GPU portion to turn yellow or red.  If the CPU is at 100%, such as a lower end CPU, then you'll often see if you expand the LOD sliders out too far, the CPU become limited because it has to take time to place all the autogen before it sends the frame to the GPU, and that is the limiting factor.  

The bottom line is, in THIS tool, something will ALWAYS be the limiter.  The important thing to keep in mind is to make sure the bars representing Main Thread, GPU etc. stay either in the green or the yellow.  If you have constant red, then that is an indication of real issues.

16 minutes ago, wthomas33065 said:

I think you are confused by the tool itself.

I'm afraid so.

Anyhow thanks for taking the time, I do appreciate it.