Stutters Ruining Enjoyment

[alr5100 5]

Hi All, 

 

I am having a consistent micro stutter on short final for the last couple of months that is ruining the enjoyment of nearly all my flights. I have spent over 100+ hours fiddling with the sim/settings and tweaks to try to solve the issue to no avail. 

 

The stutters occur on all four aircraft I primarily fly, which are the PMDG 737, Leonardo MD-80, Fenix A320 and the Inibuilds A300.

 

Around 500 feet all the way to touch down I get these stutters which really ruins an otherwise beautiful flight with incredibly smooth performance. 

 

 

 

SYSTEM SPECS 

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D 16-Core Processor, 4201 Mhz, 16 Core(s), 32 Logical Processor(s)

GPU: ASUS TUF Gaming OC RTX 4090 24GB

Motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix X670E-E Gaming WiFi 6E

Ram: 64GB G.SKILL Trident  Z5 RGB DDR5 6000MHz CL30 (2 x 32GB)

 

The problem also occurs whether I am recording a flight using OBS or just flying without recording it. 

 

I typically can get well in excess of 100+ FPS with DX12 and Frame Gen, but my smoothest experience is with FPS locked to 90 in NVCP, DX12, TAA. Mostly Medium and High Settings and Ultra for terrain pre-caching and terrain vector data. TLOD 100/ OLOD 100. 

 

I have the sim on its own dedicated NVMe drive separate from Windows, and my sceneries are linked from its own SSD using Add-On Linker. I have not tried moving all my scenery onto the NVMe Drive with the sim but unsure that would help.

 

The stutters occur both on SU14, and SU15 Beta.

 

Things I have tried with no success over the last 2 months to stop the final approach stuttering include but are not limited to:

 

Turning off frame gen

Locking frames at 60,50,45…makes no difference. 

Flying offline (Not on VATSIM) makes no difference.

Trying DSR Factor scaling with DLSS. 

Downscaling the image using Render Scaling. 

Turning down TLOD and OLOD to 10.

Run with rolling cache (I usually have rolling cache off)

Disabling all aircraft effects like tire smoke

Capping frames using Riva Statistics Tuner

Turning off GSYNC and using Scanline Sync

Tried using AUTOFPS / Dynamic LOD

Cleared Shader Cache Many Times

Many more things I am not thinking of. 

 

Visually the stutters seem to coincide with scenery popping when I am in the final 200-300 ft of the approach, when taxi-way signs and fences begin to pop in, it seems like the stutters are synchronous with the scenery popping in at this critical phase of flight. 

 

Any help is appreciated with this matter since it’s really made me not want to invest the time in doing any flights knowing that the final approach is going to be ruined by stutters while the first 99% of the flight is perfectly smooth. 

 

Thanks!

 

[History 48]

I am so discouraged knowing that a system like yours still suffer stutters for months. One would expect much better experience with such amount of investment.

One thing though, have you turned off the Rolling Cache (if you happen to active it)

Edited May 11 by History

[alr5100 5]

Yes I tried both rolling cache on and off. I have flown with it off except the last couple of days and it did not make a difference having it on vs off for me personally. And yes I agree it is disappointing to throw a serious amount of money into the hobby in terms of hardware and sceneries and still not get the level of enjoyment you are hoping for. 

[Noel 4,564]

We have very similar systems and I have pure excellence w/ zero to very few stutters anywhere from gate to gate in any of my four planes used in APL and SLC, out of all types of airports, default and payware.  I use all Ultra, TAA/16xAF/8xSS/RenderScale 160/AMD FidelityFX Sharpening 200.  I do not use DLSS Frame Generation as the hit on image quality and stability isn't worth the add'l frames, and with my hardware, I can maintain a favorable frame rate.  My base native rate is 45fps, which will be anywhere from 10 to 25% below the wide open rate at that moment in sim time.  The reason this is done is to provide headroom to accommodate transient spikes in demand that can contribute to stutter.  3440x1440 but w/ MSFS RenderScale at 200.  Exquisite sharpness.  I do use DynamicLOD and the lowest rate is 60 on the ground and increases with climb, fairly gently, up to 170 at  cruise.  This is my default setting at complex airports.

Sounds like something is very amiss for you.  Have you done a clean GPU driver update, clearing out the DX caches? 

Edited May 11 by Noel

[Todd2 2,189]

Wow I just got a system just like yours but with a 4080. I was having a ton of stutters with the new system I thought something was broken. Turning off rolling cache fixed it for me. Sorry it didn't work for you. 

[alr5100 5]

1 hour ago, Noel said:

We have very similar systems and I have pure excellence w/ zero to very few stutters anywhere from gate to gate in any of my four planes used in APL and SLC, out of all types of airports, default and payware.  I use all Ultra, TAA/16xAF/8xSS/RenderScale 160/AMD FidelityFX Sharpening 200.  I do not use DLSS Frame Generation as the hit on image quality and stability isn't worth the add'l frames, and with my hardware, I can maintain a favorable frame rate.  My base native rate is 45fps, which will be anywhere from 10 to 25% below the wide open rate at that moment in sim time.  The reason this is done is to provide headroom to accommodate transient spikes in demand that can contribute to stutter.  3440x1440 but w/ MSFS RenderScale at 200.  Exquisite sharpness.  I do use DynamicLOD and the lowest rate is 60 on the ground and increases with climb, fairly gently, up to 170 at  cruise.  This is my default setting at complex airports.

Sounds like something is very amiss for you.  Have you done a clean GPU driver update, clearing out the DX caches? 

Hi Noel, 

I have done a clean GPU driver update using DDU and cleaned out my Nvidia Caches countless times at the following locations. 

%userProfile%\AppData\LocalLow\NVIDIA\PerDriverVersion\DXCache 
%localAppData%\NVIDIA\GLCache 
%localAppData%\D3DSCache 

I had gone through your pinned post last week and tried many of the settings listed in your recommendations. 

The frustrating thing for me is that I am very happy with my performance with Frame Gen on and locked to 90 FPS other than the final 1000 ft of the approach. The rest of the flight is butter smooth. 

Are you locking your frames at 45 with RTSS? I find I get quite a bit of input lag when locking frames externally with RTSS below 80 FPS. It gets extremely noticeable at 60 and below. 

Also are you using scanline sync and turning off G-Sync or do you take advantage of your G-Sync Monitor?

Are you using DX11 or DX12?

The only perceived downside to running lower than 60FPS for me is the blurriness of the image when panning, which I do quite a bit with my mouse in airliners to make my way around the cockpit. My eyes have got accustomed to the crisp image of higher frames on a high refresh rate monitor with frame gen. 

 

What is the benefit of using back-edge sync for MSFS vs async?

Edited May 11 by alr5100

[Mace 1,964]

And this happens at any airport?

[alr5100 5]

Just now, Mace said:

And this happens at any airport?

Yes this is happening at all airports about 90% of the time. It's happened to me at small 1 runway fields in Eastern Europe with no traffic in the area and sparse scenery which leads me to believe it has nothing to do with dense traffic / scenery overloading the system. 

[Todd2 2,189]

1 hour ago, Noel said:

 3440x1440 but w/ MSFS RenderScale at 200.  Exquisite sharpness.

Thanks for mentioning this I went back to TAA and did render scale to 200. All I can say is wow!

[F1Fan 123]

I have a similar system PC that I upgraded a few months back and was having the same until I saw a few videos explaining how to get a stable frame rate.  One video that help was Capt. Pieit and another was from  2020 fs'ers on Youtube....check it out here if you haven't seen it..It is long but worth the watch.

 

[alr5100 5]

3 minutes ago, F1Fan said:

I have a similar system PC that I upgraded a few months back and was having the same until I saw a few videos explaining how to get a stable frame rate.  One video that help was Capt. Pieit and another was from  2020 fs'ers on Youtube....check it out here if you haven't seen it..It is long but worth the watch.

 

Thanks I have watched that video in full, it does a good job explaining how to tone down the settings to find a sweet spot, but my issue seems only to happen on the last 500 ft of the final approach, I think it may have something to do with MSFS texture popping. 

[Michael Moe 496]

Back in the old days with FSX and P3D GSX could contribute to this. Not so sure with MSFS as it is a different beast so properly not but try disable it for a while if you have it.

Also Aerosoft VDGS driver can make scenerys stutter on my end

Michael Moe

Edited May 11 by Michael Moe

[alr5100 5]

1 minute ago, Michael Moe said:

Back in the old days with FSX and P3D GSX could contribute to this. Not so sure with MSFS as it is a different beast so properly not but try disable it for a while if you have it.

Also Aerosoft VDGS driver can make scenerys stutter on my end

Michael Moe

Thanks for those suggestions, I disabled GSX awhile ago and didn't notice any difference and disabled Aerosoft VDGS earlier today but still had those approach stutters. 

[F1Fan 123]

Ah, ok.  I understand. Yea, this video helped a lot for me.  Really help with the stutters and frame rate.  I really didn't know that I had to balance my setting like he described in the video.  Now I have smooth framerates and hardly no stutters when landing and I use AI traffic like AIG.  I upgraded to a AMD 7800X3D with 32GB 6000 Mem, 4TB NVME 4gen Drive and a GALAX GeForce RTX4090 Hydro White 360mm AIO Liquid Cooler/24GB, GDDR6X....It runs all my stuff really well.

Good luck!

Edited May 11 by F1Fan

[alr5100 5]

Thanks, 

I have a strange phenomena happening when I try to balance the mainthread to the GPU, 

I am already running quite low on CPU intensive sliders, but this is the strange thing...

When I deselect the MSFS window and go to my secondary monitor, my CPU frametimes come down into the green and my frames increase...

 

But when I click back into the game window my Mainthread goes into the red and frames tank. Any ideas why this could be happening?

 

 

I have frame gen turned off in the above example, but same thing happens when I have Frame Gen enabled.