Your explanation also makes sense to me, especially because the issue happens in situations where the sim likely needs to load tiles more quickly. My fps remain very high, but I notice a small frametime drop of just a few milliseconds, which causes audio popping and sometimes minor and/or major stutters.

Currently, I’m running with TLOD 70 on the ground and 150 in cruise, but I’ll definitely try lowering the TLOD as soon as I encounter the issue again.

On my system, FPS capping (both external and internal) doesn’t give good results in terms of smoothness — I find the sim runs much better without it.

 

 

Edited September 29, 2025Sep 29 by fra147

6 minutes ago, fra147 said:

On my system, FPS capping (both external and internal) doesn’t give good results in terms of smoothness — I find the sim runs much better without it.

You made sure that you capped the FPS to match the refresh rate of your monitor or exactly half of it? Putting just a random number wont work properly...

Yes...I’ve tried several solutions, and the best one (apart from having no cap at all) is using the internal cap set to the same refresh rate as my monitor (60Hz).

1 hour ago, G MIDY said:

200 is unfortunately very high in my opinion. Add in a complex aircraft and it's just inevitable that stutters will occur regardless of how strong the hardware setup is. FPS may be good and stable though once everything is actually loaded but loading something and then rendering it are two different things.

Think of it like you need to fill a bucket with water, doing it faster is irrelevant if you have more water than the bucket can hold. The only solution is to fill the bucket with less water (lower TLOD) or a bigger bucket (new CPU with lots of cache).

I know it's visually terrible but experiment with 50 TLOD and see what happens, then gradually increase it until you get problems. If you use something like AutoFPS then this experimentation can be used to guide maximum settings.

Absolutely, though I still maintain that Realtek and Nahamic have something to do with it as far as my system is concerned.  Disabling them both does not sem to cause any issues for me.

4 hours ago, cianpars said:

Absolutely, though I still maintain that Realtek and Nahamic have something to do with it as far as my system is concerned.  Disabling them both does not sem to cause any issues for me.

I have never had a pc with Nahamic installed. See it blamed for many things over the years. 

Something else to look at is if you're running re-shade.  I ran into this issue the other day when I installed it for the first time after getting Atmos for 2024 to use the two together.  Reshade would instantly cause sound and sim stutters together constantly.  Ended up just uninstalling it.  I've made it without stuff like re-shade this long.  Didn't seem like it was affecting FPS on my 9950X3D and 4090 but the sim didn't like something about it.

On 9/29/2025 at 3:56 PM, cianpars said:

Absolutely, though I still maintain that Realtek and Nahamic have something to do with it as far as my system is concerned.  Disabling them both does not sem to cause any issues for me.

This may be because those sound drivers are using CPU cycles. Maybe you could try reducing your sound sampling rate? Nahimic will contribute I guess as it is a form of additional sound processing which means more CPU processing.

I doubt that the sound driver will make much difference unless something is wrong and problems would also occur outside of MSFS. In any event, it is likely that the CPU is being saturated and this is manifesting as a drop in sound.

Personally I feel like I've had an increase in stability by moving away from SoundBlaster products (which use virtual processing) to NZXT Relay speakers which just plug directly into the motherboard onboard sound. Does any of this really matter? I'm not so sure.

Edited September 30, 2025Sep 30 by G MIDY

On 12/22/2024 at 6:32 PM, Bill A said:

Has anybody noticed their sim sounds cutting out during flights and a stutter would happen around that time also?

delete your rollingcache and restart the sim to rebuild a new one 😜