On 2/22/2021 at 7:55 AM, ThomseN_inc said:

If stuttering occurs open up the VFR map and pan around it a bit and zoom in and out. Fixed my stutters for the rest of the flight. Don't ask me how or why it works, but it does at least for me and some others.

Good luck!

hmmm.... i'll try this next time. Thanks!

To this point, I will usually shut off "Online Functionality" for 2-3 minutes, then turn it back on and it's all good. But I will try this because it's easier!

Thanks!

Quote

But, the second I turned off "Online Functionality," my sim returned to my normal fps

Same result on my system.

Edited February 26, 20215 yr by solwell1
typo

So, I am getting this now.  30fps really smooth, then I get terrible pauses (this is not stuttering).  I thought it was scenery loading, but i experimented and I can turn off all online fictionality, and it persists.
I have no data caches set up, and the sim runs fine in complex areas such as London.  Also, all photogrammetry off - I find it to be not very good for me (melted buildings etc.)

I can reproduce it on a flight to Salzburg from Zell-am-See every time.  Just as I approach Salzburg, and if I do a touch and go, particularly to the east of the airport.  

I do this flight a lot and I never noticed it before the last update.  I notice the scenery spikes to the north of Salzburg are gone now though, so they flattened those ones!

When I get the pauses, they are about 0.5 to 2 seconds in length, and happen every few seconds.

I opened up some graphs and temp monitoring apps.  CPU cores are mainly below 30%, except one thread at about 60%, but temps are all well below 60C (water cooled 8086k). All normal for me.

GPU, 80-90% utilisation, and about 74C.  Vsync at 30 in sim, ultra smooth on fps!

One thing I notice, when the pauses happen, the GPU usage plummets to zero.  It's a 1080Ti and has been eating the sim for breakfast lately on my settings - really smooth!  

When I went into dev mode and opened up the graph, when normal all blocks in the history tape are solid green except 'limited by GPU' is flickering from green to yellow.
I think this is normal and the sim runs along nice and smooth when it does this anyway.

When the pauses start I notice 'manipulators' drops to zero (a blue U shape in the tape), and this then makes the CPU and GPU completely stop for the duration of the pause (also at zero), like they are waiting for the 'manipulators' to come back.

We really need to solve this.  I think the situation might be fairly new, or at least worse since the update.  I haven't tried the VFR map thing and pan around trick yet, but we shouldn't have to do this.
I was trying to demonstrate how good MSFS was to someone when this happened - embarrassing!

First of all, does anyone know what 'manipulators' do or what they are affected by?  

PS.  This seems like it might be related to certain areas.  Maybe faults in the scenery?  I notice there are persistent complaints about the Prague/Czech, and Slovakia scenery areas.

Edited March 4, 20215 yr by bobcat999

40 minutes ago, bobcat999 said:

So, I am getting this now.  30fps really smooth, then I get terrible pauses (this is not stuttering).  I thought it was scenery loading, but i experimented and I can turn off all online fictionality, and it persists.

...

Do you happen to have the Navigraph Navdata installed?

I've experienced the same as you describe before, but it hasn't happened again so far since I uninstalled the Navigraph Navdata. Too early to say that really was the cause for my stutters, but maybe worth a try.

 

Interesting!  I'm not sure Ralf.  I certainly never installed it knowingly.

I did try little nav map a while ago and it had to process/update some nav data before starting, but I haven't used little nav map since.

19 hours ago, RALF9636 said:

Do you happen to have the Navigraph Navdata installed?

I've experienced the same as you describe before, but it hasn't happened again so far since I uninstalled the Navigraph Navdata. Too early to say that really was the cause for my stutters, but maybe worth a try.

 

Navigraph nav data is NOT the cause. Last night I uninstalled Navigraph nav data and repeated a flight I had done previously in which I'd experienced slowdowns (fps drop from 35 to 10 or so with low gpu and cpu usage). I experienced identical performance issues without Navigraph installed. I'm convinced it is online data related, which is why turning off "online functionality" immediately eliminates the symptom.

In order to eliminate another possible cause I'm going to test the same flight with a "clean" content.xml. I had been having a problem with a specific scenery not looking correct, and learned through the forums the issue is related to incorrect entries in content.xml. Sure enough once I cleaned up some duplicates of the problem scenery the problem was gone. Anyway, the whole point of that is I wonder if slowdowns could be related to content.xml problems. My new content.xml file has 130 entries, not including opening and closing tags, and the old file has 250 entries. I didn't remove or delete any addons, so the old file had 120 invalid entries! I am assuming content.xml is not updated when addons are removed/deleted, and it appears the only time it's updated is when adding addons.

Will report back tonight after testing.

On 2/22/2021 at 1:55 PM, ThomseN_inc said:

I have found a fix that works for me on the official Forum:

If stuttering occurs open up the VFR map and pan around it a bit and zoom in and out. Fixed my stutters for the rest of the flight. Don't ask me how or why it works, but it does at least for me and some others.

Good luck!

Cheer's for sharing this as it cured my fps issues since the World update, where it would just drop suddenly to like 13-19fps. Did as you suggested and that was it no more since. Infact i'm going to keep that vfr map closed most of the time now. more trouble than it's worth.

Edited March 5, 20215 yr by Car147

On 2/22/2021 at 1:55 PM, ThomseN_inc said:

I have found a fix that works for me on the official Forum:

If stuttering occurs open up the VFR map and pan around it a bit and zoom in and out. Fixed my stutters for the rest of the flight. Don't ask me how or why it works, but it does at least for me and some others.

Good luck!

Thanks, will try this.  It seems to be related to online functionality.  I get the drop even with photogrammetry off, and just bing maps on.  Not too nice if it happens in a key stage of flight.  Will try this as well.

2 hours ago, somiller said:

Navigraph nav data is NOT the cause. Last night I uninstalled Navigraph nav data and repeated a flight I had done previously in which I'd experienced slowdowns (fps drop from 35 to 10 or so with low gpu and cpu usage). I experienced identical performance issues without Navigraph installed. I'm convinced it is online data related, which is why turning off "online functionality" immediately eliminates the symptom.

In order to eliminate another possible cause I'm going to test the same flight with a "clean" content.xml. I had been having a problem with a specific scenery not looking correct, and learned through the forums the issue is related to incorrect entries in content.xml. Sure enough once I cleaned up some duplicates of the problem scenery the problem was gone. Anyway, the whole point of that is I wonder if slowdowns could be related to content.xml problems. My new content.xml file has 130 entries, not including opening and closing tags, and the old file has 250 entries. I didn't remove or delete any addons, so the old file had 120 invalid entries! I am assuming content.xml is not updated when addons are removed/deleted, and it appears the only time it's updated is when adding addons.

Will report back tonight after testing.

Interesting observation. I will take a look at that as well.

 

I think there are two different issues people are talking about in this thread, which should be distinguished from each other:

 

1. The FPS drop to around 15, where the FPS stay quite steady at this value and the sim remains quite smooth (as smooth as 15 FPS can be). 

The trick with the VFR Map seems to cure this issue, at least for some users.

The fact that the FPS stay quite steady in this case makes me wonder if it is some kind of Vsync issue, where the FPS get limited to a wrong value.

 

2. Pauses, where the sim totally freezes for about a second every few seconds for a while, making it barely usable. 

 

I was referring to the latter issue earlier with my Navigraph assumption (it still is just an assumption).

 

It seems some users have either one of these issues or even both - or none. I have seen both on my system.

 

3 hours ago, RALF9636 said:

2. Pauses, where the sim totally freezes for about a second every few seconds for a while, making it barely usable. 

I was referring to the latter issue earlier with my Navigraph assumption (it still is just an assumption).

It seems some users have either one of these issues or even both - or none. I have seen both on my system.

 

Ralf,

My mistake, I see now that you were referring to the repeating pause symptom. I'm certain I have experienced it, and I have also experienced all phases of flight perfectly smooth performance until aircraft touches down, then a drop in fps to about 20-25, and a steady skip or hiccup once every second that usually stops as soon as aircraft leaves the runway surface to a taxiway.

I suspect the symptoms described by bobcat share a cause with the severe drop in fps symptom, as both are accompanied by low, or no gpu utilization. To me it appears the gpu is waiting for something, and is not getting anything to render.

4 hours ago, somiller said:

I suspect the symptoms described by bobcat share a cause with the severe drop in fps symptom, as both are accompanied by low, or no gpu utilization. To me it appears the gpu is waiting for something, and is not getting anything to render.

I agree. And it isnt waiting for the cpu either as that also drops to zero utilisation at the same time (along with 'manipulators' - I really wish I knew what this meant!)

I have tested this with ALL online data off, and flying over the same scenery areas multiple times in about a 2 mile turn, and it still occurs.  What I am saying is that after the first pass, the scenery should be loaded, but it still pauses on repeated overlays within a matter of minutes.

I really am beginning to think it is scenery related, because I flew to Flagstaff and Bradenton airports after the recent update and they were fixed (mesh) and perfectly smooth (regarding fps and pauses).  Before the update, they both had those black lines or steps across the runway (big enough to flip the C152!) and performance was terrible and got worse as you got closer, with massive pauses after touchdown.  Now with the fixed mesh, they are great!

Edited March 6, 20215 yr by bobcat999

Well my hopes have been dashed. I was hoping I stumbled onto a solution by running a clean (new) content.xml that was free of scenery entries I no longer have installed. I repeated my test flight and had multiple instances of fps drops from 30-35 down to 11-14 that typically lasted a minute or two.

Something I found interesting - I kept task manager running the entire flight and found several instances of MSFS sucking in online data up to 40-60 Mb/s. The last 6-8 minutes of the flight the data downloading was sustained above 10-25 Mb/s and frequently over 40 Mb/s. At that rate it would've d/l upwards of 500 MB over the time. Makes me wonder how long the sim had been waiting on it to need that much data.

Oh well, it will all be fixed in sim update 3.

32 minutes ago, somiller said:

Oh well, it will all be fixed in sim update 3.

I love your optimism.

Just found this...

https://www.flightsimulator.blog/2021/03/06/dramatic-fps-drop-issues/

On 2/22/2021 at 1:55 PM, ThomseN_inc said:

I have found a fix that works for me on the official Forum:

If stuttering occurs open up the VFR map and pan around it a bit and zoom in and out. Fixed my stutters for the rest of the flight. Don't ask me how or why it works, but it does at least for me and some others.

Good luck!

So, I turned off photogrammetry and was only using bing data to see if that would help this issue since WU3.  Having less of the 30+ sec fps drops with photogrammetry off, but still have had them to 19 fps or so even with while running vsync at 30hz now. It can happen every other flight and can happen on approach, which really sucks even with only Bing Data on 😧

I tried the map fix above and it seemed to stop the fps lag today on climb out and the fps resumed back to the normal.  So I will keep the map avail and use it for this.  I never used the map before and had it off the short cut launch thing on the screen prior to this.  

Edit: This is for issue 1) in this thread, the FPS drops, not problem 2.

 

Edited March 6, 20215 yr by simon747