Got a new build (12700/3070/36 gb 3600) working last week, which I am beyond thrilled with, and am slowly upping my settings from my last system (6700/1070Ti/32) which were decent, a combination of ultra, high and a few medium. I had been running render scale at 100 and LOD at 200. After upping several settings to ultra (clouds are glorious!, texture synthesis, etc) I’m now at render scale of 110 and LOD at 325. I still have a nice chunk of headroom for more increases on these settings and curious what you guys are seeing as the “sweet spot.” Appreciate any suggestions.

Enjoy the new rig. It also depends on what screen size and resolution you are running at...

BTW, if you want to squeeze out more performance, here are a couple more resources:

All versions - How to improve the performance – Microsoft Flight Simulator Support (zendesk.com)

[MSFS] How to get a SMOOTH experience in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 - YouTube

 

With a 5600X and an RTX3070 I could run everything in ultra with a render scale of 120 and LOD at 400 with loads of headroom for demanding addons wirh a 1080 monitor.

With my new 1440 monitor render scale of 100 and LOD at 300 is the maximum I can get away with, without getting ocassional CTDs.

Those are the 2 main settings that have most impact on stability in my experience.  I've not seen much in the way of gains dropping anything else down from ultra, though have read that a few others gain benefits from dropping volumetric clouds down a little.

Edited February 13, 20224 yr by cianpars

1 hour ago, DylanM said:

Enjoy the new rig. It also depends on what screen size and resolution you are running at...

BTW, if you want to squeeze out more performance, here are a couple more resources:

All versions - How to improve the performance – Microsoft Flight Simulator Support (zendesk.com)

[MSFS] How to get a SMOOTH experience in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 - YouTube

 

Appreciate those links! Should have mentioned in my original post, using a 34” 1440p monitor with gsync up to 120hz. Alienware AW3418. 

1 hour ago, cianpars said:

With a 5600X and an RTX3070 I could run everything in ultra with a render scale of 120 and LOD at 400 with loads of headroom for demanding addons wirh a 1080 monitor.

With my new 1440 monitor render scale of 100 and LOD at 300 is the maximum I can get away with, without getting ocassional CTDs.

Those are the 2 main settings that have most impact on stability in my experience.  I've not seen much in the way of gains dropping anything else down from ultra, though have read that a few others gain benefits from dropping volumetric clouds down a little.

Interesting…looks like we’re pretty close with those settings at 1440. 100/300 and 110/325 for render scale/LOD, so I’m in the ballpark. I just moved clouds to ultra the other day, flying the Gold Coast in Australia in partly cloudy skies and the clouds are fantastic! Can’t see myself dropping that setting.   Before I changed these, I had 70+ FPS just taking off from LAX looking back at the city and was floored. And most importantly, MSFS is running as smoothly as you would ever want to see, everywhere, including on the ground at demanding airports. Off to finally check out  my home town, Vegas, and can now get the FlyTampa scenery which I didn’t even consider before. 

Edited February 13, 20224 yr by NismoRR

Just another thing Nismo. I just noticed that you were running your monitor at 120 hz.  Mine will run at that or even higher, but I found switching to 60 hz and capping framerates at 30 fps with V sync rather than G sync made things run a bit smoother and took some of the strain off of the GPU.  Up to you of course, but it's working ok for me at the moment. Of course not everyone is happy at 30 fps, but I would rather have a smooth stable 30 fps than have fps going up and down like a yoyo and inducing stutters.

I really don't think msfs likes g sync much.

It also depends on what aircraft you are flying, there is a big difference in performance between a simple GA and an Airliner, especially at well-trafficked large add-on airports.

^^ This is VERY true.

2 hours ago, cianpars said:

Just another thing Nismo. I just noticed that you were running your monitor at 120 hz.  Mine will run at that or even higher, but I found switching to 60 hz and capping framerates at 30 fps with V sync rather than G sync made things run a bit smoother and took some of the strain off of the GPU.  Up to you of course, but it's working ok for me at the moment. Of course not everyone is happy at 30 fps, but I would rather have a smooth stable 30 fps than have fps going up and down like a yoyo and inducing stutters.

I really don't think msfs likes g sync much.

This is the next thing I’ll take a look at. I’ve seen others around here that have mentioned exactly this, Noel comes to mind. I’m usually not much of a frame rate capper, but in MSFS I’m going to consider it. Just did a flight in my test area, KSBA-KBUR (both ORBX) and was averaging 60-64 FPS with a these settings. Thrilled! Though KBUR did hit my system a little with FPS just under 30 when looking east only, otherwise all good.  I think the render scale increase hurt there in particular, though overall over 100 looks great! 

I’m flying the Kodiak and Turbo Arrow mostly, with some c170 too. Also will finally get into the CRJ soon. 
 

 

Edited February 13, 20224 yr by NismoRR

3 hours ago, NismoRR said:

Interesting…looks like we’re pretty close with those settings at 1440.

Keep in mind you are actually running a higher resolution than true 1440p since you have an ultra wide monitor  (3440 X 1440 WQHD) so you should expect lower performance than a native 2560x1440 monitor with the sane hardware.

3 hours ago, cianpars said:

Just another thing Nismo. I just noticed that you were running your monitor at 120 hz.  Mine will run at that or even higher, but I found switching to 60 hz and capping framerates at 30 fps with V sync rather than G sync made things run a bit smoother and took some of the strain off of the GPU.  Up to you of course, but it's working ok for me at the moment. Of course not everyone is happy at 30 fps, but I would rather have a smooth stable 30 fps than have fps going up and down like a yoyo and inducing stutters.

I really don't think msfs likes g sync much.

Interesting - my smoothest setting so far is the monitor at 120Hz with the Frames set at 20, so 40fps in sim.  I have G-sync and Vsync turned on.

If I had a shiny new system I'd max everything and slowly back it off.  Or I'd back off the settings I don't care about.

I experimented a bit with render scaling.

On my system (9900K, 3070ti, 1440p)  increasing render scale above 100 had minimal effect on the scenery but getting render scale up around 140 or so DID have a noticeable effect on cockpit graphics, particularly steam gauges and also reading text labels on the panel.

The thing I found increasing render scaling did for me Glenn is that it reduced a twinkling effect around built up areas, a bit like increasing antialiasing.  It does come with a huge performance impact though, so I've had to scale back to 100, though that does give me a little more headroom to increase LOD a little.

I may have to scale back a bit when I use more complex aircraft/scenery though.

In my case, I use render scale at 130 simply to move the load of the sim to the GPU instead of the CPU. Sounds silly, but since I switched my 1080Ti for a 6900XT which provides almost double FPS in GPU-limited scenarios within MSFS, I suddenly moved my limit from a mostly GPU limited situation to a mostly CPU limited situation (running a 8700K@5GHz along with the GPU). And, obviously a CPU limitation results in quiet an amount of stutters in MSFS, so the only solution for me was to use the render scale slider in a way to get the CPU/GPU limitation balanced out. 

For the TS with his brand new CPU, I guess he wont run into much CPU limitation using 1440p with a 3070. However, to fine balance things, render scale slider could still be valuable as well.