I'm at my wits end with lousy MSFS performance

[MauBen 82]

I am very fortunate to have a very high end system with an I9-13900K and an RTX 4090 and somehow, I am getting very crappy performance in MSFS with mostly medium settings. This screenshot is in KJFK and the task manager shows that both the CPU and GPU are barely working, and yet, according to MSFS, I am still limited by MainThread. 

Somehow, I must have done something bad somewhere since I used to get much better performance in the past, although never as good as I expected with such hardware. I am thinking that maybe now is the time to format my C: drive and start all over again 😢, or wait for MSFS 2024 😁.

I'm open to  any suggestions.

Thank you  

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bUcdafPGrqp5pcvbDIrtYNsRFf9J-yEm/view?usp=sharing

Edited January 21 by MauBen
Spelling

[St Mawgan 1,405]

Strange, I'm getting really great performance with everything at max and dual 4K monitors. It's a mystery sometimes. 

[ryanbatc 13,035]

Load that system up - ultra everything and TLOD 300.

Are you using frame gen?

Also you said C drive.  Is this a spinny drive or traditional SSD or M.2?

[Bert Pieke 7,591]

35 minutes ago, MauBen said:

This screenshot is in KJFK and the task manager shows that both the CPU and GPU are barely working, and yet, according to MSFS, I am still limited by MainThread. 

The screenshot shows a 4K screen at a busy airport with 35 fps...  Why is this crappy performance?  And why is CPU limited a bad thing?  As Ryan said... load up the settings and give the GPU something to do..

[AnkH 2,282]

If your GPU is below 90% you are fully CPU limited, no matter what taskmanager tells you regarding CPU load. Simple as that. As others said, invest the «free» GPU performance into visuals to move load to the GPU. And as others said, 35FPS in KJFK is not too bad...

[MauBen 82]

51 minutes ago, ryanbatc said:

Load that system up - ultra everything and TLOD 300.

Are you using frame gen?

Also you said C drive.  Is this a spinny drive or traditional SSD or M.2?

M2 drive. DX11, so not using frame generation.  

Enclosed video is sitting at KJFK with everything on Ultra now. This does not make sense, especially since it was not like this before

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HWq7y7Dni150LTOq0umtxzWqQDXH76-s/view?usp=sharing

[MauBen 82]

34 minutes ago, Bert Pieke said:

The screenshot shows a 4K screen at a busy airport with 35 fps...  Why is this crappy performance?  And why is CPU limited a bad thing?  As Ryan said... load up the settings and give the GPU something to do..

Because with this hardware, it should be much higher than that, and it was much higher before...about twice as high and it got progressively worse over the last 2 months I think.

[MDFlier 2,031]

Right click on where it says "CPU" above the graph, and change it to "Logical Processors". After doing that, you'll see a graph for each core. I'll bet at least 1 of them is at 100%.

[Ixoye 1,837]

That doesn't look right, have you run a benchmark program so you know your PC works as it should besides in MSFS?

[Flyfaster_MTN002 412]

This looks like system issue not MSFS so much?

[MauBen 82]

8 minutes ago, MDFlier said:

Right click on where it says "CPU" above the graph, and change it to "Logical Processors". After doing that, you'll see a graph for each core. I'll bet at least 1 of them is at 100%.

Absolutely right, but that is not the problem here. I was getting about twice the performance over the last few months. In fact, while flying in VR over New York, I often got around 50 fps. So I'm pretty sure my hardware is capable of doing much better, but something has progressively changed somewhere.  

[MarcG 3,031]

There was a widely reported performance regression with SU14, plenty of chat about it in the official forums until the moderators decided to lock the thread and pretend it never happened.

So your issue could be related to that, but it could be a million other things and nothing to do with MSFS of course.

As above check it's not system wide, narrow it down as best you can then pick around the Sim once you're certain it's that.

[JYW 2,989]

The last time I had an unexplained performance drop of this magnitude, it was because the thermal paste under my CPU had perished.  Took about 2 months of messing with absolutely everything under the sun to then discover that conclusion.   Applied new product and et voila, my performance doubled.

EDIT: Just to note that the PC in question was less than 3 months old too.   Off the shelf job, that had used the cheapest, nastiest, skimpiest amount of thermal paste in the build.

Edited January 21 by JYW

[MauBen 82]

1 hour ago, Ixoye said:

That doesn't look right, have you run a benchmark program so you know your PC works as it should besides in MSFS?

Oh yes...first thing I did 🙂

[MauBen 82]

1 hour ago, MarcG said:

There was a widely reported performance regression with SU14, plenty of chat about it in the official forums until the moderators decided to lock the thread and pretend it never happened.

So your issue could be related to that, but it could be a million other things and nothing to do with MSFS of course.

As above check it's not system wide, narrow it down as best you can then pick around the Sim once you're certain it's that.

I also think an update may have degraded the performance somewhat, but as you said, it may well have nothing to do with MSFS. I think I have to byte the bullet and start from scratch again. Probably a good idea anyway to wipe out stuff that I do not use anymore or which left traces somewhere.