These are my PC specs:-

-Be quiet! CPU cooler fan

-CIT Professional Power Supply 700W FX Pro

-CPU Intel® Core ™ i9-9900K @3.60GHz base speed. 1 socket, 8 cores. (it is running @ 4.96GHz – that’s how it came stock. I’ve not done anything to it)

- GPU EVGA NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 XC3 ULTRA GAMING 24GB GDDR6X Ray-Tracing Graphics Card, 10496 Core, 1395MHz, 1725MHz Boost

- RAM 64GB (4x16GB) Corsair DDR4 Vengeance RGB PRO Black, PC4-25600 (3200), Non-ECC Unbuff, CAS 16-18-18-36, RGB LED, 1.35V

-Motherboard. Asus ROG STRIX Z390-E GAMING Intel Z390 ATX DDR4 WI-FI AURA Motherboard - LGA 1151

I use a 1TB SDD for windows. A 1TB SDD for P3D, MSFS and XP11 programs, and a 2TB SSD for scenery.

When I delete my cfg, and restart P3D the images below are the settings that P3D comes up with, except I have added some traffic and vehicles, and moved scenery complexity and mesh resolution to the right a bit so my airports have jetways and everything at them displays properly. I have unticked dynamic 3D vegetation. They are not massively dissimilar to the settings P3D would generate in a fresh cfg with my previous GPU, which is a 1660 6GB card from the same manufacturer. With my previous GPU, these settings would run ok at most locations, but I would generally turn down a couple of things like level of detail radius and texture resolution, especially if I was going to be flying in demanding scenery areas. Some areas, like Orbx Northern California really needed my settings reduced with the previous GPU.

I would have expected higher settings than these to run well everywhere with the new GPU.

I also have frames limited to 30 in NVidea control panel.

 

Edited July 17, 20214 yr by WestEnd

9 minutes ago, Bert Pieke said:

From what you have shown us thus far, your system appears to be running correctly.  The CPU core loads look normal.

Before spending another penny, tell us one more time what you are actually trying to achieve...

"More fps" or "higher VRAM usage" can easily become a self defeating quest.

What kind of airplanes do you like to fly? What is your real world aviation experience?

I would like to have the sim running smoothly and stutter free looking better. ie with higher settings.

99% of the time in the sim I fly the PMDG Boeings, and FSL A32X.

When I first got into FS9 15 years ago I had a couple of real life flying lessons in a Cessna. It was just too expensive to continue, and it took half a day to get to the airport, have the lesson, and get home again so I didn't continue with real life lessons.

18 minutes ago, WestEnd said:

I would like to have the sim running smoothly and stutter free looking better. ie with higher settings.

99% of the time in the sim I fly the PMDG Boeings, and FSL A32X.

OK, so you are an air transport captain..  Smooth and stutter free are good objectives to aim for, but complex airplanes + complex airports are going to push P3D to its limits.  "Looking better" is going to push the sim even further.. 

By all means, work the P3D settings to your advantage, but my guess is that you are running up against the limits of what P3D is capable of... so, to avoid frustrations, keep your expectations in check, unless you would rather be tweaking than flying..

If you are starting from scratch with your settings, try these as a starter set... they should give you smooth flight:

Graphics: FXAA=off, AA=4XSSAA. Ani=8x, TexRes=2048, Vsync=off, fps=Unlimited
          LOD=High,TessFac=High,Mesh=5m,TexRes=1m, UseHighResTex,
          Scene Comp=ExtremelyDense, AutoGen=High,Veg=Normal,BLg=Dense,DynamicVeg=off
          Water Detail=Medium, no Bath, no reflections
          SpecEff=Medium
          HDR=On (0.85/0.05/0.97), DynRef=off, LandLights=on
          Shadow qual = High, Shadow Draw Dist = Low, Casting+Rec = both for Internal and External
          Enh Atmospherics=on,  Cloud Res=Medium,  Weather: Clear Skies.   

40 minutes ago, WestEnd said:

When I delete my cfg, and restart P3D the images below are the settings that P3D comes up with

I would try my settings above, turn off Texture streaming, and turn off Mipmap panels.

44 minutes ago, WestEnd said:

Some areas, like Orbx Northern California really needed my settings reduced with the previous GPU.

Orbx California is never going to run smoothly, in my experience.. Southern worse than Northern.. just the way it is..

On the first page, you wrote (and showed) that your frames were around 30. Later you added that you limit FPS to 30 in the Nvidia control panel. In that case, what's the problem?

OK, one thing I see right away that could be getting in the way is that you are using Hyperthreading without an appropriate affinity mask.  Either turn HT off in the BIOS, or add these two lines in the prepar3D.cfg file:

[JOBSCHEDULER]
AffinityMask=65493

This is the equivalent of binary 1111111111010101, which prevents multiple virtual processors from being tasked by P3D on cores 0-1-2.

I recommend you try it both ways...I've found that with six or more physical cores, running with HT off is smoother.  If HT is disabled in the BIOS, the AffinityMask setting is not used.

If your display is capable of operating at a hardware refresh rate of 30 Hz (most 4K TVs are), setting frame rate to unlimited, VSync and triple buffering on in the sim, and refresh rate set to 30Hz on the Nvidia Control Panel -> Change Resolution page will reduce CPU utilization by preventing P3D from trying to draw unnecessary lookahead frames.  That's how I run here, and it's the smoothest configuration I've ever had.

Orbx SoCal is a performance pig--it requires every ounce of performance you can throw at it--an overclocked 8+ core CPU, fast memory (yours is average), and a powerful GPU.  I can make it work with a 10900K overclocked to 5.2GHz, a 3090, and 8.3ns RAM, but even then just barely.  A good alternative is to just use OpenLC NA and disable the SoCal regional scenery when operating complex airliners into the western LA basin.  It's a 90% solution that still looks good without the performance hit.

3 hours ago, Afterburner said:

On the first page, you wrote (and showed) that your frames were around 30. Later you added that you limit FPS to 30 in the Nvidia control panel. In that case, what's the problem?

I have been constantly tinkering with my settings to try and get things working well. In my OP frames were unlimited and most sliders were at the right hand side. As the aircraft started moving along the runway after the photo, frames dropped to 16 or 17 and the sim was far from smooth.

After Ray, I think, asked after about my settings, and I then took the the images above of my P3D settings, that was just after a fresh generation of a cfg by P3D with me making a few changes, and limiting frames to 30 in the Nvidea control panel. Sorry if that wasn't clear, but as well as trying to find a solution online I have been playing around with the sim trying to find a resolution myself.

2 hours ago, w6kd said:

OK, one thing I see right away that could be getting in the way is that you are using Hyperthreading without an appropriate affinity mask.  Either turn HT off in the BIOS, or add these two lines in the prepar3D.cfg file:

[JOBSCHEDULER]
AffinityMask=65493

This is the equivalent of binary 1111111111010101, which prevents multiple virtual processors from being tasked by P3D on cores 0-1-2.

I recommend you try it both ways...I've found that with six or more physical cores, running with HT off is smoother.  If HT is disabled in the BIOS, the AffinityMask setting is not used.

If your display is capable of operating at a hardware refresh rate of 30 Hz (most 4K TVs are), setting frame rate to unlimited, VSync and triple buffering on in the sim, and refresh rate set to 30Hz on the Nvidia Control Panel -> Change Resolution page will reduce CPU utilization by preventing P3D from trying to draw unnecessary lookahead frames.  That's how I run here, and it's the smoothest configuration I've ever had.

Orbx SoCal is a performance pig--it requires every ounce of performance you can throw at it--an overclocked 8+ core CPU, fast memory (yours is average), and a powerful GPU.  I can make it work with a 10900K overclocked to 5.2GHz, a 3090, and 8.3ns RAM, but even then just barely.  A good alternative is to just use OpenLC NA and disable the SoCal regional scenery when operating complex airliners into the western LA basin.  It's a 90% solution that still looks good without the performance hit.

Thanks,

I have been reading threads on here about affinity masks, and I was keen to try one, but I had no idea how to come up with the figure for the cfg. 

Is the cut and paste above for the cfg tailored for my CPU?

I have tried HT on and off a couple of times over the last 2 days after installing the new GPU.

Thanks

@WestEnd. Calum, yes, copy and paste that entry from Bob into your prepar3d.cfg. Yours is a classic case of the first core of your CPU being overloaded with commands from P3D.

After saving the cfg load P3D and try a flight. It should be transformed. Open Task Manager and choose the performance tab. You’ll see core 0 close to 100% but crucially core 1 will be much lower. That makes a big difference.

I just installed a new 3080Ti into my image generator PC - which drives two views but nothing much else. The 3080Ti is basically a 3090 (same chip, very similar specs) except for 12GB VRAM, which in many ways I think could be the sweet spot for a lot of simmers who might otherwise buy the 3090. I'd still like to see an NVidia option with 16GB like AMD has... 

I didn't buy the GPU to get any kind of FPS boost. I mostly did it because I want to put the 1080Ti that was in there in another machine. But the GPU performance uplift has let me go to 4K textures, EA clouds on High and a few other higher settings while still getting the same FPS. So I'm happy with it. I'm unhappy about paying over the odds, of course. RRP on this card is £900 and I paid £1600. But that's far from the most insane markup on GPUs these days (3090 is still going at around £2600 when you can get it), and just getting the stock was a bit of a miracle. I reasoned I would probably have to wait until the end of the year or beginning of next year for the price to drop significantly, and that's too long to wait for my other project that needs a better (but not super-high-end) GPU in another PC that has a decidedly mediocre one in it right now. But I'd certainly be annoyed if I'd bought it expecting to see significant performance increases and then not doing so. 

I've been in the game for long enough to know that more GPU is not generally an FPS improver - it's a visual quality improver, or a bottleneck unblocker. I often see people posting that they expect a faster GPU will speed up their sim, or that they want their sim to 'use all the cores', as in somehow dividing the rendering load between cores and getting n x the performance. We experienced hands know that this simply isn't possible, and we know why, but it's a common enough assumption - why doesn't having more cores speed up any given task? 

Perhaps we need some kind of P3D Hardware & Performance FAQ here? I know there's a hardware forum but it's 'sim-agnostic' (which really means it's mostly MSFS-related questions these days). 

Edited July 18, 20214 yr by neilhewitt

7 hours ago, neilhewitt said:

RRP on this card is £900 and I paid £1600. But that's far from the most insane markup on GPUs these days (3090 is still going at around £2600 when you can get it), and just getting the stock was a bit of a miracle

I had been keeping an eye out for GPUs for a while. I eventually pulled the trigger on this one last week from scan.co.uk for £1800. 

@Ray Proudfoot and @w6kd, I wonder if I could prevail on you to have a look at the below images, to make sure I have done things right with the affinity mask, and to see that it is having the expected results.

The first 2 images are with no affinity mark. The first just before takeoff roll, and the second in flight.

The 3rd image is just before take off roll with the affinity mask added, and the 4th is in flight with the affinity mask.

Hopefully I can forget about settings for a while now, and just enjoy some flying. After I had been obsessing with settings for a couple of days because the GPU hadn't added the expected performance increaes, I suddenly got terrible screen tearing, and the last 24 hours has been spent trying to fix that. I must have tried every possible solution I could find online or think of myself. Thankfully they seem to have finally gone away again after moving the cable to a different slot in the GPU.

By the way, thanks to everyone for their help here. It is much appreciated.

Edited July 18, 20214 yr by WestEnd

@WestEnd, the third and fourth images look better. CPU0 is no longer maxed out so the takeoff run and flight should be a lot smoother.

You didn’t say how different flying was with and without an AM setting. Better I trust.

Screen tearing can be caused by VSync not being enabled. Was it?

51 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

@WestEnd, the third and fourth images look better. CPU0 is no longer maxed out so the takeoff run and flight should be a lot smoother.

You didn’t say how different flying was with and without an AM setting. Better I trust.

Screen tearing can be caused by VSync not being enabled. Was it?

To be honest, I have only done that one circuit with the AM set, and the settings were modest with and without AM, so I didn't really notice any difference, but then I was more looking to see if the screen tearing was away. So now I will forget about settings and just enjoy flying for a couple of days with maybe small settings increases at a time.

I tried so many things for the screen tearing including VSynch and/or  triple buffering being enabled through either P3D or Nvidea control panel.