Hello, I have always had the problem with P3Dv5 that if I have any traffic enabled at all, it decreases performance and causes stuttering when using high quality scenery.  The only solution I've found is to set ground traffic to Freeways Only and set the slider to 0% traffic density.  Even if I add just a little bit of freeway traffic, it causes issues.

Is there any way I can have traffic in P3Dv5 without the performance decrease and stuttering?  In FSX this was never a problem for me, I could have plenty of ground traffic and it was stutter free.  Please, is there any way to fix this?  I miss my ground traffic.

I had that issue with P3Dv4 and v5 having stuttering, jerky road traffic.

P3Dv6 has smoother road traffic.

Dave

On 5/5/2025 at 9:41 AM, dave2013 said:

I had that issue with P3Dv4 and v5 having stuttering, jerky road traffic.

P3Dv6 has smoother road traffic.

Dave

That's good to know for the future but unfortunately I don't plan to upgrade anytime soon.  I still need to find out if the add-ons I can't do without will work with P3Dv6 and I'm not looking forward to all the tinkering I may have to do to get everything working.  The only possible solution I found is something called Simple Road Traffic which can be found here:

https://sites.google.com/site/fsxstuffbybk/sceneries/simple-road-traffic

(Note: this website also has some very interesting freeware aircraft and other things)

It says in the description it may be 64 bit compatible but from the way it is written, I don't think it was tested.  The only thing I don't like is it says that it only comes with three different car models and it doesn't seem to be any other models for it.  I have a feeling if it did work in 64 bit P3D than it may work better, or more smoothly than the default traffic.

I can get away with having just highway traffic enabled if I am not flying in around to major cities like New York, Chicago or London, etc.  If I set the traffic to all streets, then it's stutter city, no matter where I fly.

Seeing empty roads all the time sucks but at least than I get smooth flights.

Edited May 8, 20251 yr by Zylx

4 hours ago, Zylx said:

I can get away with having just highway traffic enabled if I am not flying in around to major cities like New York, Chicago or London, etc.  If I set the traffic to all streets, then it's stutter city, no matter where I fly.

You’re asking your CPU to do something it’s incapable of. I don’t have all roads enabled with my faster CPU as I don’t want to see loads of traffic everywhere.

Drop the setting and you should be fine.

20 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

You’re asking your CPU to do something it’s incapable of. I don’t have all roads enabled with my faster CPU as I don’t want to see loads of traffic everywhere.

Drop the setting and you should be fine.

I am unable to have all roads have traffic at any density, it will still cause stuttering.  Also, even if I have just highway traffic enabled and have the density set to 14% (because I think it's the most realistic density) or even less and I still get stuttering in big cities.

In Orbx manuals, it says to keep traffic below 16% to save resources and also because around 16% is very close to accurate to what you would see in real life, so I never go very high with the ground traffic density.

I know I don't have the latest high end CPU, but it should be able to handle the 14% I have it set at anywhere.

@Zylx, locate your Prepar3d.cfg and paste the JobScheduler section. I’m wondering if your system is properly configured for your CPU.

6 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

@Zylx, locate your Prepar3d.cfg and paste the JobScheduler section. I’m wondering if your system is properly configured for your CPU.

It should be configured correctly, most I left alone, but I did make one change, I changed MainThreadScheduler=0 to 6 because it suggests doing this in the learning center advanced help page.  Maybe that could be the cause perhaps?

[JobScheduler]
AffinityMask=65535
P3DCoreAffinityMask=65535
MainThreadScheduler=6
RenderThreadScheduler=2
FrameWorkerThreadScheduler=4

@Zylx, that looks fine. I also switched the MainThread to 6 from 0.

Not sure what else I can suggest. Maybe dropping scenery complexity to low and see if that helps. It’s all about balance.

On 5/9/2025 at 9:45 AM, Ray Proudfoot said:

@Zylx, that looks fine. I also switched the MainThread to 6 from 0.

Not sure what else I can suggest. Maybe dropping scenery complexity to low and see if that helps. It’s all about balance.

Yeah, I do have the graphics and scenery settings pretty high.  You're probably right that the ground traffic would look better if I turn things down a bit.  For example, I could see how setting the Distance LOD and the Draw Distance options could be contributing to the problem.  Thanks for your input Ray, I will turn down some settings and do some testing.

Edited May 10, 20251 yr by Zylx

@Zylx, I am wondering if turning down the scenery complexity cured your stutters.   For years I never had them in 5.31 and for the last few months I have been fighting them.

8 hours ago, SnoBrit said:

@Zylx, I am wondering if turning down the scenery complexity cured your stutters.   For years I never had them in 5.31 and for the last few months I have been fighting them.

I did experiment with turning down graphics/scenery settings but it didn't seem to make a difference with the traffic enabled for all roads, I still experience micro stuttering.  However, I am no longer getting stuttering with road traffic set to just use main roads.  Even when I'm flying over big cities with lots of main roads, I have a smooth experience.  The only thing that changed is that I reinstalled P3Dv5.4 from an old HDD to a new SSD, so maybe that made the difference somehow, but I'm not sure.

There is another problem I have when it comes to road traffic, the animations are terrible and the vehicles don't drive the roads in a smooth manner.  Instead, disappear and then reappear slightly farther down the road, and they keep doing this over and over.  I think it's because the driving animations were so poorly done.  Strange thing is I never had this problem in FSX lol

I know it cannot be fixed, I looked into it and there's no fix for it.  I just wanted to vent about it because it really annoys the heck out of me 😡

@Zylx, are you using Lossless Generation? You might find it cures stuttering.

It was impossible to enable road traffic in FSX and earlier versions of P3D. It killed fps. And I had a decent PC too.

Even now I don’t enable all roads. There is a noticeable hit.

7 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

@Zylx, are you using Lossless Generation? You might find it cures stuttering.

It was impossible to enable road traffic in FSX and earlier versions of P3D. It killed fps. And I had a decent PC too.

Even now I don’t enable all roads. There is a noticeable hit.

No, I don't even know what it is, what is it?

For FSX, I have it very fine tuned for my modern PC and I get every inch of performance out of the old sim.  I also usually run it in DX10 mode (with Steve's DX10 Fixer) for increased performance, so having normal amounts of traffic does not affect performance at all.  I've not tried earlier versions of P3D so I cannot speak to that.

It's only when I select the option to have traffic on all roads I get the problems, when I set road traffic to only main roads in P3Dv5, I have no noticeable performance impact now.

Edited August 18, 2025Aug 18 by Zylx

24 minutes ago, Zylx said:

No, I don't even know what it is, what is it?

It's only when I select the option to have traffic on all roads I get the problems, when I set road traffic to only main roads in P3Dv5, I have no noticeable performance impact now.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/993090/view/3874849112275096626
 

There are several discussions on AvSim about getting the best from it.

So don’t select all roads. You’re asking your system to do something it cannot do effectively.

11 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/993090/view/3874849112275096626
 

There are several discussions on AvSim about getting the best from it.

So don’t select all roads. You’re asking your system to do something it cannot do effectively.

Very interesting, I will have to try out this Lossless Scaling and see what it can do.

As for the ground traffic, I realize there's no way to get the sim to run well with traffic on all roads now.  I've tried everything to get the sim to work well with the road traffic set to all roads and nothing works so I just do without it.  Just like with FSX, in P3D, you still can't have it all 🙂 

There is actually one possible solution that might work.  There's a site where I found an add-on called Simple Road Traffic that is supposed to be a replacement for default road traffic in FSX and I think it may work in P3D as well.  The reason I haven't tried it yet is because it only comes with three different vehicles and that's it.

https://sites.google.com/site/fsxstuffbybk/sceneries/simple-road-traffic