6 hours ago, Noel said:

Nope, I've enough times done the "30 seconds" you mentioned and still the thing doesn't launch.  I just tried this with my last flight I'm still in:  

1. Rebooted the PC
2. Started MSFS, and observed for when Couatl first loads via Task Manager.  Then I killed process tree of the .exe.   
3. Then I set up my flight in the World Map planner.
4. I hit 'Fly'
5. This takes you to the pre-load the actual plane at the gate 'Fly Plane Now' or I forget what it says but it's 3 words.  This then normally takes what 15 seconds or so to load to the plane's VC.  
6. Immediately upon hitting the Fly Plane Now button I Restart Couatl.

Then the plane loads and GSX I think immediately loaded itself which I've seen happen before w/o doing this ritual, fully complete with an already green Simbrief indicator.  I've sensed something is wrong with how Couatl launches, when it is actually coded to start in the startup sequence MSFS is doing, creating this unreliable launching.   I'll try it again next time up and report back.

Maybe your installation is borked because that‘s definitely not what most people are doing with GSX. For me the GSX menu automatically opens after the flight has loaded. I don‘t touch Couatl or anything.

I suggest a *clean* GSX reinstall.

8 hours ago, Noel said:

Then the plane loads and GSX I think immediately loaded itself which I've seen happen before w/o doing this ritual, fully complete with an already green Simbrief indicator.  I've sensed something is wrong with how Couatl launches

The only thing wrong here, is your convoluted sequence to kill it, restart it and launch it again, which is not required at all. By doing that, you are causing the problem, not fixing it, because if it's doing something, like rebuilding the model cache (always required after an update), by stopping and restarting it manually, you are aborting the process so it will have to restart it again from scratch. Just leave it alone, and it will work.

 

8 hours ago, Noel said:

This then normally takes what 15 seconds or so to load to the plane's VC

"Normally" ??? Do you mean you need to wait an extra 15 seconds after the loading progress, so it's from the moment you see the plane at the gate with some camera animations and the yellow button active, you need to wait *another* 15 seconds for the VC to load ?

If yes, something is really wrong with your system, or you PC is just very slow because, normally, on most airplanes, the VC appears in less than a second, the PMDG 737 a couple of seconds, and with the 777 is like 5 seconds tops.

If just the airplane VC appears 15 seconds later for you, it's no wonder the GSX menu is taking longer as well so, my "20-30 max" might be much longer in your case, but that's really not the norm.

5 hours ago, Fiorentoni said:

Maybe your installation is borked

Sounds good I'll try that thanks.

2 hours ago, virtuali said:

The only thing wrong here, is your convoluted sequence to kill it, restart it and launch it again, which is not required at all.

You simply don't get it, sorry.  Fiorentoni does, it may be despite many FSDT Live Updates and as long as they take I'm a bit surprised the install could indeed still be borked but I have to assume that is what's up.  And THAT is why I came up with a WORKAROUND because right now it's clearly screwed up.

3 hours ago, virtuali said:

If yes, something is really wrong with your system, or you PC is just very slow

Nope, it's very fast, performance is superb.

22 hours ago, virtuali said:

This is usually caused by too much traffic on Simconnect, which is forced by running with an unlimited frame rate. ALL your running add-ons running on Simconnect (not just GSX) which are synched to the Visual frame rate will be forced to generate extra traffic when you run with unlimited frame rate, making the sim working twice as much just to keep up and, sometimes when it can't keep up, it will delay updates to running add-on, resulting in stuttering movements. Of course, the stuttering happens on every add-on but, if it's not something that visually does something or moves, you don't get to notice it but, all your add-ons were affected by the increased traffic caused by the too high frame rate. Limiting fps in MSFS will help a lot about this.

GSX ground vehicles are the ONLY component of MSFS that consistently stutters now as I'm super well tuned.  I've always locked frame rate a minimum of 10% below wide open.  I use RTSS for this which allows changing the lock on the fly.  Right now even w/ PMDG/FBW ware in complex airports it's exceedingly rare to see ANY stutters, except ALWAYS with GSX ground vehicles, period.  My locked rate sits between 40 and 50 depending on conditions and it doesn't get any better for smooth stutter-free than this:

 

Edited October 20, 20241 yr by Noel

15 minutes ago, Noel said:

GSX ground vehicles are the ONLY component of MSFS that consistently stutters now as I'm super well tuned.  I've always locked frame rate a minimum of 10% below wide open.  I use RTSS for this which allows changing the lock on the fly.  Right now even w/ PMDG/FBW ware in complex airports it's exceedingly rare to see ANY stutters, except ALWAYS with GSX ground vehicles, period.  My locked rate sits between 40 and 50 depending on conditions and it doesn't get any better for smooth stutter-free than this:

You don't understand what I wrote.

The stuttering you are inducing by running on a very high fps in the sim, is a Simconnect stuttering caused by the extra load you are placing on the sim on ALL running addons, it's RESULT (for you) might be a Visual stuttering, but the cause is the traffic. Don't confuse cause with effect.

You might only see its effect in GSX, because GSX is possibly the only add-on that is suffering from Simconnect stuttering that does something you can SEE on screen. You can't possibly know if, for example, an autopilot code is "stuttering", because there's nothing there for you to see.

 

18 minutes ago, Noel said:

My locked rate sits between 40 and 50 depending on conditions and it doesn't get any better for smooth stutter-free than this:

That's confirms it. Since GSX animations are made at 30 fps, by locking with higher than necessary fps, you are creating almost twice as much traffic over Simconect (again, generated by ALL add-ons combined) than you would need to have to see the animations at their native fps. All that extra traffic over 30 is just wasted cpu time.

Try locking it at 30, and see how it improve. because, again, you will reduce ALL Simconnect traffic generate by ALL your add-ons combined, so each one of them will benefit, although (as I've said), it might be difficult to see if they don't do visual stuff but, for example, an auto-land code might work more reliably, because it won't ever be interrupted by the sim momentarily stopping to keep up with all queued requests caused by too much traffic ?

Have you ever seen GSX Passengers "sliding" for a few seconds ? If yes, that's another proof of what I'm trying to explain. 

Do you think it was GSX which stopped updating their position ? That's not how Simconnect works, it's a Callback system, it's the sim that calls us back, telling us to update an animation or move something on screen, the simulator is our "metronome", if it skips a beat, because there's just too much traffic, you'll see stutterings and jumps in animations.

Other developers reported this issue, sometimes the frame rate subscription stops for a while, and what you see in GSX as a stutter or a position skip or a missed animation, might translate into issues with their system simulation, see this post here on MSFS Devs forum from TFDI:

https://devsupport.flightsimulator.com/t/simconnect-data-read-rate-suddenly-intermittently-drops/9586

 

 

48 minutes ago, Noel said:

Nope, it's very fast, performance is superb.

If it really takes 15 extra seconds after the camera cinematic to load the VC then no, sorry, you clearly have serious performance issues, because 15 seconds at that stage is quite a bit.

44 minutes ago, virtuali said:

Try locking it at 30

🙃 no thanks!

55 minutes ago, virtuali said:

That's confirms it. Since GSX animations are made at 30 fps, by locking with higher than necessary fps

Oh so it's not that I have terrible performance, great.  Okay just dial everything back to 30 fps and all will be well.  You've lost your mind Umberto.  Go ahead and tell everyone else here to drop rate to 30 to get rid of GSX stuttering.  That might have been fine 4y ago but that is absolute nonsense now.  Some who use NV DLSS FG might get away with this if they lock at 30 x2 is 60 but I much prefer not having the visual aberrations associated with FG.  I'm not going to decrease the rate by 50% to cope with GSX when the rest of the entire sim runs essentially flawlessly at 40-50, or more.   The reality is GSX occupies a small quotient of an entire flight so my tact is to just ignore the stuttering as it only happens during pushback.  Very fortunately when the animatronic zombies are boarding the plane the plane is not moving because the frame rate hit is right around 20-25%.   This is why I started this thread in the hopes there will be something good enough out of the native sim.

8 hours ago, Fiorentoni said:

Maybe your installation is borked because that‘s definitely not what most people are doing with GSX. For me the GSX menu automatically opens after the flight has loaded. I don‘t touch Couatl or anything.

I suggest a *clean* GSX reinstall.

Again, the ritual described was a workaround for the fact that enough times I've exceeded the 30 seconds Umberto stated was about the maximum it should take to initialize.  This came from experimenting to solve this when the menu initialization simply did not proceed.

I did a complete reinstall of GSX and won't know if this is solved permanently until I've run thru enough launches to validate that.  I'm at KIAH right now and it took 23 seconds to initialize which is fine and indeed that does happen regularly and the workaround was sought for when it doesn't initialize within that time frame and that was happening enough to warrant this--believe me I've sat for a full 60 seconds w/o success when this happens.  Fortunately the workaround immediately loads the menu.

Thanks for your input.

Reading this thread just makes it clear that using GSX is much more trouble than not using it! 

Edited October 20, 20241 yr by JonathanC

5 hours ago, Noel said:

You've lost your mind Umberto.  Go ahead and tell everyone else here to drop rate to 30 to get rid of GSX stuttering.  That might have been fine 4y ago but that is absolute nonsense now.  Some who use NV DLSS FG might get away with this if they lock at 30 x2 is 60 but I much prefer not having the visual aberrations associated with FG. 

Except that's not the direction the gaming industry is moving towards.

Quite the opposite, games are increasingly relying on Frame Generation more and more, because reaching a steady 60 fps with the help of the video card, is way more efficient than doing it natively. And this is even more valid with a product as complex as a realistic simulator, which is still highly reliant on the CPU to do all sort of multiple non-graphic tasks, so every CPU cycle spared from having to keep up a native higher frame rates, becomes available to do actual simulation stuff because the graphic card is handling the frame rate doubling.

That even without considering the issue of increased Simconnect traffic caused by not limiting the fps internally, which IS an issue that is unique to MSFS and gets more and more pressing the more add-ons you run at the same time.

About artifacts caused by FG, they are not much worse than artifacts caused by any form of temporal antialiasing ( DLSS or TAA ), and I'm sure they'll tend to improve overtime with better drivers and newer DLLS versions because, the whole gaming industry at large is taking it from granted and relies on it.

 

1 hour ago, JonathanC said:

Reading this thread just makes it clear that using GSX is much more trouble than not using it! 

Or might is letting you be more aware of the consequences of dealing with a sim that by its own nature is designed to run with multiple add-ons at the same time, which makes it crucial to understand a bit how it works internally, because I'm not sure that everybody that is not a Simconnect add-on developer knows how it really works inside.

I'll try to explain it in the simplest way possible:

If you run with an unlimited frame rate, let's say 50-55 fps, EVERY single add-on that uses Simconnect and has subscribed to the Visual Frame rate event (almost every add-on does it), will be "called back" BY the sim almost twice as much as if the frame rate was internally locked to 30 fps. And by "call back", it means it will get whatever amount of data it needed almost twice as often so, combining multiple add-ons doing the same thing, the overall amount of traffic will increase quite a bit. How much, it's difficult to know, because it depends how big the data packets requested by the various add-ons are.

Limiting the frame rate is good not "because of GSX", but it will benefit all add-ons, because the overall traffic will be more predictable and steady.

That is even without taking into account that, to prepare and send those packets of data to the add-ons takes CPU time, so even if hypothetically the Windows Named Pipes system (this is the method Simconnect uses to communicate with all add-ons) was capable to handle an "infinite" amount of traffic (it's not), it would still free CPU time if you do it 30 times per second instead of 50-55.

I'm just trying to raise awareness to what seems to be a little know issue, and understanding fps locking is very important to understanding how the sim really works, that is regardless of GSX.

Finally, I'll let you with a recent video which analyzed several types of add-ons, trying to understand which are the ones that are most affecting performances. Test without and with GSX starts at 6:25 in the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVjThxh4fRk

Unsurprisingly (for me, since I already knew the answer), GSX proved to have very little impact on performances, and that was when doing the most demanding task in GSX, which is Boarding with Luggages.

If you need to write thousands of words explaining your product and how all your users (or many of them, whatever) just don't understand your amazing product...

Yes, I don't want or need to understand the internals of Simconnect. I'm happy with MSFS at 70+ fps and no GSX, thank you very much. 

35 minutes ago, virtuali said:

Unsurprisingly (for me, since I already knew the answer), GSX proved to have very little impact on performances, and that was when doing the most demanding task in GSX, which is Boarding with Luggages.

Maybe at a default airport, with FPS locked at 30 at 720p using the ATR, the 4090/7950X3D has enough headroom to handle the task. Under normal circumstances, GSX has a significant impact on performance.

3 hours ago, JonathanC said:

If you need to write thousands of words explaining your product and how all your users (or many of them, whatever) just don't understand your amazing product...

The "thousands words" explained how MSFS itself works, GSX might not even exists, all my considerations and suggestions would still valid, because they are related to how the simulator works.