I just completed a flight from Innsbruck to London Heathrow but on approach into London, the frame rates got so low that the sim was unusable. I was flying into inibuilds EGLL, had ORBX London landmarks and was in the Fenix A320, so pushing my system to the limit. Here are my system specs:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-9900K CPU @ 3.60GHz  
64.0 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti

Here's what my settings are currently set to in the sim...
https://imgur.com/lKGPvYy
https://imgur.com/TF1TAF0
https://imgur.com/la8VuHw

Would anyone be able to recommend some settings based on my hardware and the software I'm trying to run?

Thanks

@BWBriscoe traffic settings are also important.

Best way is to find the sweetspot yourselve. You are the only person capable to decide what is important for you and what not. Start from a preseted Global Render Quality, dial down all your traffic and work yourselve up.

17 minutes ago, BWBriscoe said:

Would anyone be able to recommend some settings based on my hardware and the software I'm trying to run?

Render Scale has the biggest effect. Change your Render Scale from 100 to 70. The visual difference will be almost imperceptible, while your FPS will improve greatly. Next, set your trees down from Ultra. (The trees is my region of the USA are more realistically represented by the Medium settings than by High or Ultra anyway.) This is why your performance was especially bad near the ground, where the trees are. I would also set my terrain level of detail to 100. My own hardware isn't nearly as good as yours. Yet I get very good performance even around huge airports. Also, change clouds from Ultra to High. Remember that some changes you make to graphics settings don't take effect until you exit and restart the sim.

22 minutes ago, BWBriscoe said:

I was flying into inibuilds EGLL

Did you buy it through Inibuilds or another channel?
EGLL is one of the busiest airports and Inibuilds has added a lot of "clutter". However, with the inibuilds manager you can disable most of them in order to save on framerates.
I am not sure the Inibuilds Manager works when you have purchased the airport through another webshop though.

15 minutes ago, David Mills said:

Render Scale has the biggest effect. Change your Render Scale from 100 to 70. The visual difference will be almost imperceptible, while your FPS will improve greatly. Next, set your trees down from Ultra. (The trees is my region of the USA are more realistically represented by the Medium settings than by High or Ultra anyway.) This is why your performance was especially bad near the ground, where the trees are. I would also set my terrain level of detail to 100. My own hardware isn't nearly as good as yours. Yet I get very good performance even around huge airports. Also, change clouds from Ultra to High. Remember that some changes you make to graphics settings don't take effect until you exit and restart the sim.

Thanks for that...I will give it a try.

14 minutes ago, orchestra_nl said:

Did you buy it through Inibuilds or another channel?
EGLL is one of the busiest airports and Inibuilds has added a lot of "clutter". However, with the inibuilds manager you can disable most of them in order to save on framerates.
I am not sure the Inibuilds Manager works when you have purchased the airport through another webshop though.

I bought it through simmarket unfortunately. Does that mean I can't change the settings?

3 hours ago, BWBriscoe said:

I bought it through simmarket unfortunately. Does that mean I can't change the settings?

I suggest you install the inibuild manager (downloadable from their site) and check whether it works. Hopefully it lets you configure the airport and otherwise you might need to check the scenery folder for a manual or readme.txt explaining how to do it. Some airports have separate files for static aircraft that can be renamed to remove these and the same method might work with EGLL to disable other features, at least temporarily to figure out which feature its your framerate the most.

Landside cars and perhaps detailed interiors might be the first things to try to remove. It's a shame of course but on the other hand this airport will still be interesting in a few years when we all have more powerful hardware.

You might be able to achieve reasonable framerates by following the suggestions others have given but these will effect all airports of course. 

You might try dropping terrain precaching back a little as well.

12 hours ago, David Mills said:

Render Scale has the biggest effect. Change your Render Scale from 100 to 70. 

What you suggest is basically reduce the resolution the sim is rendered in, so it eases almost 100% on the GPU level. However, I am pretty sure the topic starters issue is the old CPU and in and around London, he is for sure almost 100% CPU limited. Reducing rendering scale will most probably serve him nothing then... He has to take down this terrain LOD from 200 down to 100, everything else wont help him in his CPU limited scenario...

13 hours ago, BWBriscoe said:

I bought it through simmarket unfortunately. Does that mean I can't change the settings?

There are some interior clutter and cars and buses bgl´s in the scenery folder of the airport. By removing those the scenery might become lighter. Have not tried myself though.

I thought that the Microsoft Flight Simulator rendering engine was supposed to be a lot faster than previous sims? I can get acceptable framerates at London Heathrow in P3Dv4.5HF2 with masses of detail being displayed around London, and also a full AI environment running @ 100%. Granted I do not have any weather to worry about, but then I am running all of this on an i5 7600k @ 4.5Ghz/32GB DDR4-3600 RAM/6GB GTX 980Ti powered system.

I appreciate that the OP is running MSFS at higher resolution than I am (3840x2160 compared to my 1920x1080), and the IniBuilds version of Heathrow is more complex than the SimWings one that I use, but I would still expect an i9 9900k/RTX 2080Ti combo to get the job done. Maybe that CPU needs to be significantly overclocked, or the resolution needs to be lowered?

45 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

I thought that the Microsoft Flight Simulator rendering engine was supposed to be a lot faster than previous sims? I can get acceptable framerates at London Heathrow in P3Dv4.5HF2 with masses of detail being displayed around London, and also a full AI environment running @ 100%. Granted I do not have any weather to worry about, but then I am running all of this on an i5 7600k @ 4.5Ghz/32GB DDR4-3600 RAM/6GB GTX 980Ti powered system.

I appreciate that the OP is running MSFS at higher resolution than I am (3840x2160 compared to my 1920x1080), and the IniBuilds version of Heathrow is more complex than the SimWings one that I use, but I would still expect an i9 9900k/RTX 2080Ti combo to get the job done. Maybe that CPU needs to be significantly overclocked, or the resolution needs to be lowered?

MSFS is a lot more efficiënt. I am getting better FPS on higher resolutions than in my FSX days, with better flightmodeling, better sound and graphics, better weather and more AI aircraft. I could go on but the increased efficiency of MSFS allows us to have more going on at the same time and still maintain decent (and smooth) framerates.

But sometimes we are demanding more than can be delivered and large commercial airports are the most prominent example of this. I think the main thread is the limiting factor because no matter how many cores are being used to do all the work; all these threads need to interact with each other and be coördinated by a single thread. Without a new understanding how to do this differently we willl need ever faster CPU's if we want to have more realism.

1 hour ago, Christopher Low said:

I thought that the Microsoft Flight Simulator rendering engine was supposed to be a lot faster than previous sims?

Well, if you would reduce the MSFS settings down to what you have in P3Dv5.x, then yes, you would for sure have better FPS in MSFS using the identical hardware. But as it is, MSFS provides some novel eye-candy and stuff you would not like to miss (otherwise switching to MSFS would not make any sense, no?). And all comes at a cost...

A Render Scaling of 100 with TAA in 4k resolution most definetly is too much for the 2080ti. It depends on the size and distance of the screen but I was always quite ok with a render scaling of 80. But DLSS will be much faster, even in quality setting. The other thing is the Terrain LOD of 200. Near big cities you really should scale that down, maybe to 120 or 150 max. This is a compromise, of course but absolutely unavoidabnle with medium spec hardware like this. Some people here say that over London he will be CPU bound so that scaling down the render scaling would have no effect. Of course it has. I have over 40 fps with a small plane over London with DLSS or RS 70 and LOD of 130. If I use higher settings, fps drop dramatically. With the Fenix you will never get more than maybe 35 fps, especially if you have a traffic addon running. But scaling down LOD almost always helps a lot.

Conclusion:
- lower Terrain LOD!
- lower Render Scaling!
- better: DLSS. With the Fenix, DLSS looks very good in my opinion.

Additional thoughts:
- Clouds from Ultra to High always gives some additional frames.
- Trees from Ultra to High depends a bit on the scenery but can help
- Windshield effects ALWAYS on ULTRA becaus ot looks much mor realistic in my opinion and doesn't cost frames.
- Water waves always on ULTRA in my opinion, because water looks much better on ultra.
- Object LOD does not harm the framerate much. So 200 is almost always ok.

Edited January 16, 20233 yr by crimplene

Your graphic card is not for 4k resolution. So you should reduce your render scaling. And also your cpu is not strong enough for tlod 200 and above, may be max 150 for big cities.