If you pile on the mods… AIG, Pilot2ATC, ship traffic, airport scenery, seasons, terrain scenery, Kodiak or FBW 320… do these all impact the CPU? RAM?  Are they going to cause performance issues? What becomes the bottleneck here?

Edited July 26, 20223 yr by Virtual-Chris

2 hours ago, Virtual-Chris said:

If you pile on the mods… AIG, Pilot2ATC, ship traffic, airport scenery, seasons, terrain scenery, Kodiak or FBW 320… do these all impact the CPU? RAM?  Are they going to cause performance issues? What becomes the bottleneck here?

Well, the best answer is an obvious one, that is -- they all add up.  There isn't any free lunch, of course the more you add the more mem and other resources are used.

That said, I can pile on the add-ons and still be ok, and that's on a somewhat dated clocked 8700K, although I do have 32 gigs of ram with a 3080ti card.  I still haven't tested performance with large numbers of AI and that's next for me.

You can test performance impact yourself by enabling developer mode, and loading in 1 add-on at a time and comparing the numbers (mem usage, fps, etc.).  I've been testing with vsync off and a clean MSFS so that I know what my system's max frame rate capability is at a given location.  But note that actual flying for me is smoothest with vsync on.  I only use vsync off for testing of performance impact of add-ons.

I agree that they all add up if they are used at the same time in the same flight... so if you fly the A32NX from an add-on airport with AIG and a season add-on, you will feel the weight of them all. And unfortunately they all weigh almost exclusively on the already hammered infamous main thread.

But if you have in your community folder the A32NX, ORBX London + Dubai and you fly the C152 over Dublin, the impact is zero, as far as I could experiment in these two years.

Even the loading time, at least with SU10 beta, is almost not affected by most mods. I have about 66 GB in my community folder and the loading time difference between that and an empty community folder is only 7 seconds (2:03 VS 1:56)

Does a CPU like the 5800x3D with more cache help in these heavily modded scenarios?

37 minutes ago, MrFuzzy said:

And unfortunately they all weigh almost exclusively on the already hammered infamous main thread.

Not always, it depends how they are made. If they use an external .EXE and connect to the sim through Simconnect, they won't hammer the MSFS main tread, because by they'll have their own thread ( or threads ), since the OS will always use different threads and will even try to allocate them to different CPU cores, if available.

However, even this is not so simple because, an add-on might not do much by itself, so its own code won't affect performance but, it might command the sim to do things that affect fps. For example, an hypothetical traffic add-on that creates AI airplanes programmatically, might be quite light to run by *itself* but, it might create lots of fps-heavy AI planes so, it is affecting fps, but in an indirect way. Especially if the AI are not even supplied with that add-on, so there might be an huge variation how good/bad they are optimized. Also, AI are tricky, because their number/density can change quite a bit from airport to airport and from time to time.

57 minutes ago, Virtual-Chris said:

Does a CPU like the 5800x3D with more cache help in these heavily modded scenarios?

There is a recent thread on that cpu here, called something like "Ryzen 5800x3D - Brilliant performance" -- take a look at that thread.  The large amount of L3 cache on that cpu seems to suit our needs well.  It is one of the cpu's I'll look at when rebuilding, although the 13700K or similar will get a good looking-at as well.

I keep my mods/Addons in a separate folder

Load the Community file as required and remove Addons after use keeping as little as possible in the Community MSFS file

MSFS indigestion is fairly obvious in the MSFS performance-slow and CTDs

As an addition I find that some Addons from Flightsim.to though great to use won’t allow more complex planes to work

MSFS just behaves like all computer programmes-lean and mean works best but you need Addons to keep your flying interest up so a compromise as always!

Saying that it’s a great program-far better for me than P3Dv5 and XPlane 11

xxd09

Ha! Saw the title and thought it was a thread about the Forum Moderators. Was looking forward to a bit of the old avsim up-and-down and it turns out to be a serious thread! What a disappointment <grin>!

Some mods do and some don't.  Anything complicated or with good textures does.  E.g. a simple airport or plane has no impact but a detailed airport or plane will.  Traffic mods, weather mods may or may not depending on how well they are coded and of course how high your settings are.  In my experience, photoscenery has the greatest impact along with detailed airliners such as the great stuff PMDG produces.

If your performance drops, you just have to cull some of the addons, reduce your settings, upgrade your rig or just suck it up.

7 hours ago, cianpars said:

Some mods do and some don't.

Fly Tampa's KLAS+ hits 11.2Gb VRAM in use and that is w/ SU9/DX11.