Long Haul Performance Regression with SU12?

[Keirtt 574]

Afternoon everyone! I've posted on the official forums, but wanted to see if anyone else is seeing the same regressions with SU12 that I have. One bug that popped up pre-SU12 (Closer to SU9 if I recall) was the long haul performance degradation bug where your performance would steadily decrease throughout your flight and was exacerbated once you reached that golden 6 hour mark. Finally last night I completed my first long haul flight since SU12 and I assumed it would be fine. Running a pretty beefy machine, I was pretty disappointed to see my performance dive after crossing the Atlantic. 

The flight was from Portland to Zurich using the PMDG 737 BBJ which I've previously flown on long hauls after the bug was resolved without any issues. My flight departed out of Portland nicely and at cruise I was able to sustain around 140 fps. About 45 minutes out from Scotland I checked my fps and discovered that I had lost almost 40 fps and was down to 100fps. Like before, the closer I got to my destination (Longer the flight) and the lower I got my fps continued to drop and on touchdown I was at 68fps in Zurich. While I'm fortunate enough to have the overhead that 68fps is still amazing (We all remember p3d days where a steady 35 was phenomenal), I can see how folks without the same beefy setup may be irritated. 

Unfortunately I didn't take any screenshots on departure, but I began taking them around Scotland. You'll see in my pictures below the steady decrease. Sure enough, as I restarted my sim and went back to Zurich, my fps immediately jumped up to 130fps on the runway. Now admittedly, I'm not running an empty community folder and I most likely will not dump everything just to run another 10 hour flight to test this because it's something we've already seen and I suspect it's related to whatever issue was corrected before. I also haven't changed any of my mods that I operate with from when it was previously fixed.

Personally, I see this as something that needs immediate attention, otherwise the minute we see more long haulers come out (PMDG T7, TFDI MD11, etc..) folks are going to have a miserable experience trying to stretch their legs. I've done some researching on the official forums and it looks like I'm not alone. Others are seeing the same thing, but I also wanted to engage everyone here to see what folks are seeing. I've attached my pictures below and linked my post to the bug report. Thanks everyone!

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/long-haul-performance-degradation-back-with-su12/585814

*The numbered pics below show from Scotland to Zurich with the last one on the ground.

 

*This picture shows the sim after it was restarted and back on the ground at Zurich.

[regis9 4,022]

I flew HECA-EBBR today in the A310, about 4 hours 50 minutes.  I also saw a performance degradation, FPS were quite a bit lower and I was having stutters by the end of the flight.  

Edited April 7, 2023 by regis9

[shamrockflyer 647]

Since turning off Photogrammetry I haven't had any performance issues.

[Ricardo41 5,955]

If I read your pics correctly, you landed with around 60 fps. I fail to see the issue here. 

Secondly, your change in fps might be due to a myriad of reasons - scenery, your setup, weather, etc. Without properly isolating factors, this comparison tells us little. 

Edited April 8, 2023 by Ricardo41

[Keirtt 574]

9 hours ago, Ricardo41 said:

If I read your pics correctly, you landed with around 60 fps. I fail to see the issue here. 

Secondly, your change in fps might be due to a myriad of reasons - scenery, your setup, weather, etc. Without properly isolating factors, this comparison tells us little. 

I appreciate your reply, but I think you’re basing your entire opinion of my post around the fact that I had 60 fps when I landed, which would make me believe that it’s either A) Better performance than you receive so it must be good enough or B) You don’t do long hauls and your reply was simply a shot from the hip to debunk something you’ve never tested or C) You didn’t understand the intent of this post.

Let me be clear that this was not a flex post and has genuinely been a problem in the past and so much so, that Asobo included a fix for it in a previous SU. (See evidence of this all the way back to 2021 before it was fixed: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/decreasing-performance-throughout-long-flights-since-su5/441568)

With that said, you’re correct, there are various reasons why we could see performance degradation and it’s hard for any one person to claim that it’s a widespread issue if they’re the only ones who experienced it…. Which was the entire point of why I came on here to see if others have experienced it. The short answer is yes, it is happening to others, but I also don’t think the majority of folks are doing 6+ hour long hauls and that may limit the audience here. Long hauls can be challenging to test for obvious reasons, with the most obvious reason being it takes up 6+ hours of your time. If it’s not affecting you, that’s great! I would love to say it’s a setting on my end that I need to adjust and we can keep it simple, but I suspect it’s deeper than that. My community folder has not changed since SU11, therefor I would expect the experience to be similar. Other folks on the official forums are beginning to see the same and I’m fortunate/blessed to have a build that gives me enough overhead to still have an enjoyable experience at 60fps.

I’ll end with this… you can’t deny that landing at an airport with 60 fps after a long haul flight, and then immediately restarting the sim and getting 130fps while running a replay isn’t suspicious at a minimum. 

Edited April 8, 2023 by Keirtt

[Noel 4,507]

13 hours ago, Keirtt said:

I’ll end with this… you can’t deny that landing at an airport with 60 fps after a long haul flight, and then immediately restarting the sim and getting 130fps while running a replay isn’t suspicious at a minimum. 

I'm having severe degradation in performance post SU12 characterized most often by having ample CPU/GPU/VRAM headroom and yet see frame rate drop by 50% and onset of often severe stuttering--and this is w/ only 2h flights.  Flights start out close to the prior quality, but coming into final approach things go to heck big time.  Mostly PMDG 738.  Comm Folder cleaned out of most stuff.  DX Shader Cache cleaned, rolling cache deleted and rebuilt.  Same same, no changes to anything my side except one Win 10 update and a RealTek Audio Console update.  I uninstalled the RAC since I could not undue the  update.  I did the usual tasks try to restore normalcy but no real improvement.  By far the greater change to MSFS came from SU12, not the Win 10 update one would have to conclude, which makes me think it's probably largely up to Asobo to fix.  I should probably submit a zendesk.

Edited April 9, 2023 by Noel

[Keirtt 574]

3 minutes ago, Noel said:

I'm having severe degradation in performance post SU12 characterized most often by having ample CPU/GPU/VRAM headroom and yet see frame rate drop by 50% and onset of often severe stuttering--and this is w/ only 2h flights.  Same same, no changes to anything my side except one Win 10 update and a RealTek Audio Console update.  I uninstalled the RAC since I could not undue the  update.  I did the usual tasks try to restore normalcy but no real improvement.  I think it's in Asobo's hands at this point.

I would agree unfortunately, just like last time when we had this issue. Fingers crossed we can see a fix prior to the release of some more of these long hauls.

[joby33y 152]

@Keirtt Is this only DX12 ?   I had indeed seen this error previously circa SU9 as described, but haven’t done any long hauls since.  But this needs to be addressed.  

I’m running DX11, but I’ll run a long haul tonight & see what happens.  I will use the BBJ w/ aux tanks.  

[Keirtt 574]

1 hour ago, joby33y said:

@Keirtt Is this only DX12 ?   I had indeed seen this error previously circa SU9 as described, but haven’t done any long hauls since.  But this needs to be addressed.  

I’m running DX11, but I’ll run a long haul tonight & see what happens.  I will use the BBJ w/ aux tanks.  

Yeah, I'm running DX12, but I can't remember if this was an issue with DX11 also. Would be great to have someone test it if you have the chance and yeah, this bug was from a few SUs ago. Hoping they can fix it quickly as well.

[V1ROTA7E 718]

This topic piqued my interest and I did a flight from KRNT (DD) to EGPF (Pyreegue). Total flight time was just under 9 hours in the PMDG 737-900ER. The first half of the flight went along just fine, but the second half was full of stuttering. When checking the Task Manager, I saw that the WmiPrvSE.exe was using between 25-51% of my CPU. I'm not sure what this service does exactly, but from what Google says, it is responsible for managing tasks or something.

At about 1,000' I disconnected the autopilot, and the sim froze and resulted in a CTD. This was done for testing purposes and well, it failed the test miserably. DX12, RTX4090 - FG on, 11900K, 64GB RAM.

[hansb57 493]

I had the same problem as OP after a long flight in a the Cessna 172. The difference was that I got down from 50 fps to  4-5 FPS

Edited April 10, 2023 by hansb57
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[Rocky_53 1,581]

Guys, this issue has been around for years, maybe in FSX but certainly in P3D. I don't think it's unique to MSFS. I think the consensus is that it is some memory bug/issue that rears it's head after long flights. If I remember correctly, there was a theory that if jumping from inside and outside of the cockpit, the scenery is continuously loaded into the cache and stays there, ultimately increasing the memory size over the period of the flight until which time the sim gets slower and slower. It was not reported by everyone who were on long flight and so perhaps they simply spent their time in the VC without changing views all the time (?)

Edited April 10, 2023 by Rockliffe

[Bigt 192]

2 hours ago, Rockliffe said:

Guys, this issue has been around for years, maybe in FSX but certainly in P3D. I don't think it's unique to MSFS. I think the consensus is that it is some memory bug/issue that rears it's head after long flights. If I remember correctly, there was a theory that if jumping from inside and outside of the cockpit, the scenery is continuously loaded into the cache and stays there, ultimately increasing the memory size over the period of the flight until which time the sim gets slower and slower. It was not reported by everyone who were on long flight and so perhaps they simply spent their time in the VC without changing views all the time (?)

I actually don't remember this from P3D (4.5 in my case) at all. But it is definitely an issue now. I'm hoping this is being looked at.

[Keirtt 574]

32 minutes ago, Bigt said:

I actually don't remember this from P3D (4.5 in my case) at all. But it is definitely an issue now. I'm hoping this is being looked at.

Unfortunately it was a thing... I too recall the days of flying in p3d from SDF-OMDB, only to find the ground textures blurry. Never really lost performance, but the textures looked terrible and would pop in. Atleast with p3d that's what I experienced. 

[MarcG 3,013]

I had poor FPS today that gradually got worse in a 1hr 40min flight, noticed my GPU Mem usage was constantly rising. I had been running the TBM930 WT Enhanced mod which they did warn in the text that it may cause performance issues, so I've uninstalled that for now. Unfortunately I don't have the time (nor patience...) to fly a completely vanilla/zero mod install over a long period "just to see" if it's a problem with the base sim or a mod.
IIRC this particular issue was looked at in a Sim Update but whether they managed to fix it entirely I'm not so sure, trouble with todays MSFS is it could be a whole host of mods or programs silently killing the sim in the background, not to mention any number of Windows drivers and stuff. So if you have the patience to fly a vanilla/no mod flight for a few hours and still see the same degradation, then your only hope is to send off a Zendesk Ticket for Asobo to add to the never-ending pile of bug reports - good luck!