I'm at my wits end with lousy MSFS performance

[Noel 4,518]

33 minutes ago, MauBen said:

it may well have nothing to do with MSFS.

Here's what I would do given your incredibly potent hardware and poorer performance, and I don't know if you've already done these steps.  I'm assuming you must have had great performance in the benchmarks you said you ran, and your CPU temp was good enough to avoid throttling, correct?  Take a screen shot or two of all of your MSFS settings.  Also, a screen shot of settings in NV Control Panel if used.

• Do a clean install or reinstall of the current NV driver for your GPU.  No need to get 3rd party apps involved anymore, just use the official NV installer and choose clean.
• Clear the disk for DX shader cache  (Disk Cleaner, windows app)
• Turn off Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling if on
• Rename or park the Community Folder to eliminate anything there
• Drop the Terrain LOD to 100 and Object LOD to 100
• All other settings should be fine maxed to the hilt!
• Try running the sim again

If no real improvement, I would do a complete delete and reinstall of MSFS.  It's not that bad to do and your issue sounds serious enough to go thru that because rather than doing piecemeal change and recheck which can takes a long time to get you nowhere.  Fortunately reinstall is a piece of cake in large part, at least compared to FSX/P3D.  You don't have to sit there and watch but of course it takes time.   Presumably you have ample drive space.

Good Luck!

 

[mryan75 281]

3 hours ago, MauBen said:

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 😄 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

Try updating your DLSS file. If you’ve never done it, it might be a major change for you. 

https://youtu.be/hyJZ4djtuto

[MauBen 82]

1 hour ago, Noel said:

Here's what I would do given your incredibly potent hardware and poorer performance, and I don't know if you've already done these steps.  I'm assuming you must have had great performance in the benchmarks you said you ran, and your CPU temp was good enough to avoid throttling, correct?  Take a screen shot or two of all of your MSFS settings.  Also, a screen shot of settings in NV Control Panel if used.

• Do a clean install or reinstall of the current NV driver for your GPU.  No need to get 3rd party apps involved anymore, just use the official NV installer and choose clean.
• Clear the disk for DX shader cache  (Disk Cleaner, windows app)
• Turn off Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling if on
• Rename or park the Community Folder to eliminate anything there
• Drop the Terrain LOD to 100 and Object LOD to 100
• All other settings should be fine maxed to the hilt!
• Try running the sim again

If no real improvement, I would do a complete delete and reinstall of MSFS.  It's not that bad to do and your issue sounds serious enough to go thru that because rather than doing piecemeal change and recheck which can takes a long time to get you nowhere.  Fortunately reinstall is a piece of cake in large part, at least compared to FSX/P3D.  You don't have to sit there and watch but of course it takes time.   Presumably you have ample drive space.

Good Luck!

 

All good suggestions which I have tried except Hardware acceleration lowering LOD since all that was working great not too long ago. But first I am going to switch to DX12 and see what happens. 

But I fear I'm stuck doing an MSFS reinstall, and god forbid, a Windows reinstall 😅

[MauBen 82]

3 hours ago, JYW said:

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.

All temperatures are perfect, but good suggestion.

[seamaster55 75]

When anything like this happens, always start from scratch by putting all the graphics settings back to default in the MSFS graphics settings window.

You can always put them back to your preferred settings later on. 🙂

[Noel 4,518]

2 hours ago, MauBen said:

All good suggestions which I have tried except Hardware acceleration lowering LOD since all that was working great not too long ago. But first I am going to switch to DX12 and see what happens. 

But I fear I'm stuck doing an MSFS reinstall, and god forbid, a Windows reinstall 😅

I went thru a similar scenario fall of '22 and went ahead and did a Win 10 reinstall and MSFS and its 3rd party addons, which are only a few in my case.  I will support the MSFS Marketplace and have bought maybe 6 airports and some night light enhanced cities  and those as you know are automated you just select what you want installed then go do whatever else you do with your free time for the hours it takes to complete the reinstall.  Don't need to baby sit to answer prompts, it just does its thing.  

I think you said you had done benchmarks to test your PC generally.  Were they all as expected?  If so, that supports the idea the issue lies in MSFS.  I think in your case it would be clean to just do a MSFS reinstall.  This means you don't have to reinstall 3rd party addons, you just do the straightforward MSFS reinstall.  If that fails, then I guess it's time to reinstall Windows.

[Mace 1,932]

3 hours ago, MauBen said:

All good suggestions which I have tried except Hardware acceleration lowering LOD since all that was working great not too long ago. But first I am going to switch to DX12 and see what happens. 

But I fear I'm stuck doing an MSFS reinstall, and god forbid, a Windows reinstall 😅

That's a bit hasty.  Unless you're seeing some bad trend in HWInfo or some bench program, I'd be reluctant to reinstall anything.

KJFK can be one of the toughest spots in the sim and quite frankly, 35 fps without Frame Generation is in the ballpark if you're taxiing around there.  In my opinion the benefits of DX12+Frame Generation far outweigh the negatives.  I'd run FG if possible.

Be sure you don't have Two (2) KJFK's installed (inibuilds + the one in content manager).  That happened to some people and they didn't realize it.  But even if you don't own ini's version, the custom JFK is a tough performance spot regardless.

[Noel 4,518]

48 minutes ago, Mace said:

I'd run FG if possible.

Why is it some have RTX 40xx GPU, but don't use FG?  What are the untoward side effects that might drive that choice?  I'm using the FG mod and it's very nice for sure, the added frame rate, but for me it's more icing on the cake, than the cake itself, which I've already got.  The cake being stutter-free ultra smooth animation with very tight frame times from gate to gate.  DynamicLOD pretty much solved any minor remaining issues, and I run at 34FPS as my preferred baseline.  Using the FG mod over the last 2 days did make me appreciate running at 68FPS for sure, but the ghosting when zooming on 2D objects like the ATC window, the HUD on the PMDG 738, and other, and the fact when I use my other display, which is connected to the mainboard's Intel graphics connector, that I use all the time for web browsing and more, I get a full screen shake/ghost every time I bring the mouse back to the main display where MSFS runs on.  So with those detriments, I've removed the FG mod.  So, do the 40xx GPUs suffer from any of these detriments?

[Mace 1,932]

7 minutes ago, Noel said:

 So, do the 40xx GPUs suffer from any of these detriments?

Mine does not.  Perfectly smooth panning.  The only neg would be the DX12 issue with disappearing textures at certain airports, which as I said is a DX12 issue regardless of whether one is running FG or not.

I can't speak for the 2- or 3- series mod, perhaps their implementation is not quite there yet for all configurations.

[sniper31 646]

I don't have any of that ghosting going on with my 4090 either, but then I am not running two screens, so maybe that is the difference @Noel

[MauBen 82]

*** Problem has been resolved.***

 

I reinstalled MSFS and I now get what I used to get before things went downhill. Here is a short video around Manhattan in VR and in 2D.  Using mostly high or very high settings.

Thank you  all for your suggestions.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v7q4Un-osA0tXu5CcY8ev9FIkTXgaN6o/view?usp=sharing

Edited January 22 by MauBen

[MauBen 82]

3 hours ago, Mace said:

That's a bit hasty.  Unless you're seeing some bad trend in HWInfo or some bench program, I'd be reluctant to reinstall anything.

 

Well, I did reinstall MSFS and things are much better now. See the video that I posted above or below 😊

[SierraDelta 1,349]

2 hours ago, Noel said:

So, do the 40xx GPUs suffer from any of these detriments?

No - not at all. Brute forcing is still my preferred way to trouble free performance 😉

 

Edited January 22 by SierraDelta

[AnkH 2,271]

1 hour ago, MauBen said:

*** Problem has been resolved.***

I reinstalled MSFS and I now get what I used to get before things went downhill.

That is indeed very interesting, so something in your old installation led to the massive performance drop. But what? Would be extremely interesting, because it might be possible to revert to the earlier performance without reinstalling everything... Glad I did not suffer from reduced performance after SU14. 

On the other hand, with a good internet connection and the community folder approach I guess the reinstallation was a more or less hassle free experience, right?

[MarcG 3,018]

I've often reinstalled entire games when things bog down, especially those that have a strong modding background as junk can accumulate over time, old mods become redundant, files all over the place plus the game itself in a constant state of receiving updates.