As I'm writing this, MSFS2024 is scheduled to release in 05days:03hrs:02mins:31secs. And I'm still tweaking MSFS2020 for the best performance and visuals 🤣

Richard @RJC68 shared this video with me today:

In the video, they compare DLSS and TAA in terms of shimmering. And recommend doing a change in the usercfg.opt file* which allegedly will reduce DLSS shimmering, bringing it closer to TAA image quality. 

However, when I tried this, the sim performed horrendously, with FPS at least half of what I normally get. After one minute or so, the sim crashed with this message: 

Does anyone know what the advice in the video actually does? They recommended replacing SecondaryScaling 1.000000 with SecondaryScaling 2.000000. 

*located here for MS Store installs: %localAppData%\packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache

Edited November 14, 20241 yr by Cpt_Piett

"the simuator obviously looks beautiful as ever" *obvious shimmering shows* *quickly moves the camera away from it* 

🤔

DLSS is a very complex system that has clear advantages and drawbacks. It's a tradeoff. I personally would seriously doubt alleged miracle solutions to the drawbacks by changing a number. Every time I've tested something like this, it proved disappointing. 

Edited November 14, 20241 yr by Abriael

14 minutes ago, Abriael said:

"the simuator obviously looks beautiful as ever" *obvious shimmering shows* *quickly moves the camera away from it* 

🤔

DLLS is a very complex system that has clear advantages and drawbacks. It's a tradeoff. I personally would seriously doubt alleged miracle solutions to the drawbacks by changing a number. Every time I've tested something like this, it proved disappointing. 

😅

It's a tricky thing, deciding whether to leave everything at default (I do think the sim looks great), or fall into a bottomless rabbit hole of endless tweaking. I've fallen victim to the latter countless of times. 

This video got me confused though, as they advocated changing a setting that I'm not familiar with. So, if anyone can shed some light of what this actually does, it'll be great. 

Edited November 14, 20241 yr by Cpt_Piett

15 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

😅

It's a tricky thing, deciding whether to leave everything at default (I do think the sim looks great), or fall into a bottomless rabbit hole of endless tweaking. I've fallen victim to the latter countless of times. 

This video got me confused though, as they advocated changing a setting that I'm not familiar with. So, if anyone can shed some light of what this actually does, it'll be great. 

The big issue with this kind of miracle solution is that rarely anyone *really* knows what they do under the hood, let alone the people suggesting them. They may mitigate an issue (or act as placebo pill for it), but may create other issues that you wouldn't immediately notice. 

From my research (google), SecondaryScaling 2 tells DLSS to render natively at twice the resolution it usually would, which basically makes DLLS basically pointless. So yeah, it's removing some of the artifacts created by DLLS by pretty much negating DLSS's performance benefit. Hence, your performance loss. 

So yeah, usual YouTuber peddling a miracle solution that doesn't actually solve squat.  🙄

Edited November 14, 20241 yr by Abriael

1 minute ago, Abriael said:

From my research (google), SecondaryScaling 2 tells DLLS to render natively at twice the resolution it usually would, which basically makes DLLS basically pointless. So yeah, it's removing some of the artifacts created by DLLS by pretty much negating DLLS's performance benefit. Hence, your performance loss. 

No wonder why it brought my RTX4090 to its knees then! For some time now, I've used DLSS+DLAA i.e. no DLSS downscaling. Out of curiosity, I'll change the SecondaryScaling to 2, boot up the sim, and verify what actually happens. If the render resolution is 8K, at least it'll give me a good laugh, if anything 😝

2 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

No wonder why it brought my RTX4090 to its knees then! For some time now, I've used DLSS+DLAA i.e. no DLSS downscaling. Out of curiosity, I'll change the SecondaryScaling to 2, boot up the sim, and verify what actually happens. If the render resolution is 8K, at least it'll give me a good laugh, if anything 😝

Umh, with a 4090 you really shouldn't need to use DLSS. I'm surprised you have it on at all. 

4 minutes ago, Abriael said:

Umh, with a 4090 you really shouldn't need to use DLSS. I'm surprised you have it on at all. 

I don't *need* to use it. Combined with DLAA (excellent antialiasing), I prefer it to TAA in terms of image quality. Biggest downside: ghosting on fast moving numbers/text in glass cockpits. 

4 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

I don't *need* to use it. Combined with DLAA (excellent antialiasing), I prefer it to TAA in terms of image quality. Biggest downside: ghosting on fast moving numbers/text in glass cockpits. 

Yeah, makes sense. If I had that kind of card, I'd probably just go with DLAA and perhaps bump the resolution down to 1440p and play with the main render scaler, but I only have a 4080, so I can't really gauge what the best balance for you may be. 

Edited November 14, 20241 yr by Abriael

21 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

No wonder why it brought my RTX4090 to its knees then! For some time now, I've used DLSS+DLAA i.e. no DLSS downscaling. Out of curiosity, I'll change the SecondaryScaling to 2, boot up the sim, and verify what actually happens. If the render resolution is 8K, at least it'll give me a good laugh, if anything 😝

Same happened to me! Setting SecondaryScaling to 2 also lost me HDR besides other unpleasant effects already described. I thought I have learned the lesson: when something is working good, don’t touch it! But alas! Obviously not! 😶

 

Oh dear what did I start 😆

I have been trying this today with decent results, I did also try the various DLSS settings and I found performance worked very well on my system. A bit of background, I set my FPS to 72 in RTSS, why such an odd number I hear you ask ... Well boys & girls grab some hot chocolate and I will tell you a story. 

A while back I got bored and decided to see what I could do to achieve the most reliable, and best looking sim that was consistent. I started tweaking a few things using the experience I had gained with my 3080TI and then my 3090. I knew it was important to stay away from being CPU limited so I decided to test various FPS settings, what I found was that for me 72 gives a very smooth experience and plenty of headroom for my 4090, so with that info I bumped the render scale to 110 which put a bit more load on my GPU but more importantly when I started looking at the FTV (I blame Cat_Piett entirely for going down that rabbit hole !!! lol) What I saw was very interesting. At 72 FPS and keeping the load on my 4090 up there the FTV was very very consistent and I mean pretty much a flat line. This equated to a wonderfully smooth and fluid experience. Now knowing that it would be pretty much much impossible to achieve this in all situations I did some further testing at IniBuilds EGLL in the 777 with FSLTL traffic, all I did once I loaded at the gate is tweak my fps until I had a consistent FTV once again, In this case the FPS that gave me the best result was 59 and I was also using Auto FPS to limit the TLOD on the ground to 80, but what I also did is because my FPS was now lower my 4090 had more headroom so I bumped the render scale to 115. As soon as I was in the air I could hit the asterisk on my num pad and unlock the FPS. Alternatively I could change the FPS lock back to 72 which literally takes seconds. Now if I am flying from a really demanding airport I start off with locked FPS of 59 and get repeatable results. Most of the time I fly in and out of airports like IniBuilds EGNM or LEIB in which case I just leave everything as is at 72 FPS.

In trying the method outlined in the YouTube video I saw a slightly higher load on my GPU which makes sense but a wonderfully smooth FTV and no glass cockpit blurriness. Tomorrow I will see what this is like in the 737 Max 8 as I do find the Fenix is my best performing complex airliner.

The key take away from all of this is to always adjust the settings in the sim to suit your own hardware and to get the best result, even though I can run the sim at 100 fps and in some situations 110 - 120 fps there really is no need. I run my 55 inch Sony X55K @ 120 Hz in 4K with GSYNC and I can barely hear the fans in my PC.

Edited November 14, 20241 yr by RJC68

27 minutes ago, Abriael said:

From my research (google), SecondaryScaling 2 tells DLSS to render natively at twice the resolution it usually would

You were right, sim renders in 8K:

This quickly gets confusing. DLSS renders the original image at a lower resolution, then upscales using "deep learning" to make the resulting image look better than the original image. So, with the method described in the video, the native resolution is doubled with SecondaryScaling set to 2, then downscaled by DLSS (performance/balanced), then upscaled... 🤷‍♂️ 

17 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

You were right, sim renders in 8K:

This quickly gets confusing. DLSS renders the original image at a lower resolution, then upscales using "deep learning" to make the resulting image look better than the original image. So, with the method described in the video, the native resolution is doubled with SecondaryScaling set to 2, then downscaled by DLSS (performance/balanced), then upscaled... 🤷‍♂️ 

Agreed this confused me, using DLSS performance with SecondaryScaling set to 2 gives me pretty much the same visual quality as TLAA, less shimmering and what seems to be an all round smoother performance and no glass cockpit blurriness 

29 minutes ago, RJC68 said:

Agreed this confused me, using DLSS performance with SecondaryScaling set to 2 gives me pretty much the same visual quality as TLAA, less shimmering and what seems to be an all round smoother performance and no glass cockpit blurriness 

I'm fairly sure the smooth performance is a placebo effect. Your PC is likely brute forcing it without your noticing, and variance in conditions is doing the rest.

While the youtuber in the video pretends this is new, and something that "tricks the system" (oh goodness... whatever 🙄), this has been going around for over a year if not longer, and the results have been entirely inconclusive. It's basically equivalent to just running DLAA. 

Incidentally, a thread about it was in this very forum a few days ago.

 

Edited November 14, 20241 yr by Abriael

2 hours ago, RJC68 said:

The key take away from all of this is to always adjust the settings in the sim to suit your own hardware and to get the best result, even though I can run the sim at 100 fps and in some situations 110 - 120 fps there really is no need. I run my 55 inch Sony X55K @ 120 Hz in 4K with GSYNC and I can barely hear the fans in my PC.

Indeed. On Tuesday we'll see what sort of performance we get in 2024. With increased GPU usage and better multithreading, we might be in for a positive surprise 🙂

Btw, I learned from @Noel this week that it's possible to assign key binds for decrease/increase FPS lock with RTSS, which could be useful. 

4 hours ago, Cpt_Piett said:

As I'm writing this, MSFS2024 is scheduled to release in 05days:03hrs:02mins:31secs. And I'm still tweaking MSFS2020 for the best performance and visuals 🤣

Richard @RJC68 shared this video with me today:

In the video, they compare DLSS and TAA in terms of shimmering. And recommend doing a change in the usercfg.opt file* which allegedly will reduce DLSS shimmering, bringing it closer to TAA image quality. 

However, when I tried this, the sim performed horrendously, with FPS at least half of what I normally get. After one minute or so, the sim crashed with this message: 

Does anyone know what the advice in the video actually does? They recommended replacing SecondaryScaling 1.000000 with SecondaryScaling 2.000000. 

*located here for MS Store installs: %localAppData%\packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache

I tried this and it seems not to work for me and ASAP set my settings back to it as was before, and more HAPPY now..

cheers 😉

Edited November 14, 20241 yr by pmplayer