Hi guys,

I wonder: Do you ever delete the shaders/the shader chache of the sim?

Back in the days of P3D it could help sometimes with performance.

Is this something you guys also do in MSFS sometimes? If yes, when?

Thank you & kind regards!

Christoph

On 7/22/2025 at 1:21 PM, Christoph123 said:

Hi guys,

I wonder: Do you ever delete the shaders/the shader chache of the sim?

Back in the days of P3D it could help sometimes with performance.

Is this something you guys also do in MSFS sometimes? If yes, when?

Thank you & kind regards!

Christoph

When you run NV's GPU driver installer and choose 'Clean Install' the prior shaders are deleted.  And that because shaders are tied to the specific driver so there is no need to have prior shaders present.  Periodically I go thru the ritual of a complete uninstall of all NV components save NVCP, go into Safe Mode and use DDU to clean out other remnants, then reinstall the GPU driver of choice.  I almost always notice and improvement in smoothness, which is an element of 'performance' in my book.

 

Hello, 

@Noel thank you for the reply! 

What is NVCP? 

I found a tool on flightsim.to which also cleans the Nvidia shaders: https://flightsim.to/file/92765/msfs2024-cache-removal-tool

Do you think what the program provided in the link does is essentially the same as the steps you do on your system? 

And I absolutely agree with you, real performane is highly connected to smoothness in my opinion. Even the best graphics are completely worthless to me when it's a slideshow.

I got some more questions:

1.) Do you use Lossless Scaling? (https://losslessscaling.com/)
2.) Are the Nvidia Shaders the same as the MSFS Shaders? Cause back in the days of P3D I just deleted the Shaders within P3D, never Nvidia shaders (except when doing a clean install of a new graphics driver, but I didnt know whats happening in the background).
3.) When do you delete shaders? Are there specific timing intervals, events?
4.) Do you only delete Nvidia Shaders, or MSFS shaders too? Just in case these are different, I have no idea.

Greetings,
Christoph

Edited July 28, 2025Jul 28 by Christoph123

11 hours ago, Christoph123 said:

 

Hello, 

@Noel thank you for the reply! 

What is NVCP? 

I found a tool on flightsim.to which also cleans the Nvidia shaders: https://flightsim.to/file/92765/msfs2024-cache-removal-tool

Do you think what the program provided in the link does is essentially the same as the steps you do on your system? 

And I absolutely agree with you, real performane is highly connected to smoothness in my opinion. Even the best graphics are completely worthless to me when it's a slideshow.

I got some more questions:

1.) Do you use Lossless Scaling? (https://losslessscaling.com/)
2.) Are the Nvidia Shaders the same as the MSFS Shaders? Cause back in the days of P3D I just deleted the Shaders within P3D, never Nvidia shaders (except when doing a clean install of a new graphics driver, but I didnt know whats happening in the background).
3.) When do you delete shaders? Are there specific timing intervals, events?
4.) Do you only delete Nvidia Shaders, or MSFS shaders too? Just in case these are different, I have no idea.

Greetings,
Christoph

Hi Christoph,

NVCP is NVidia Control Panel.  I use Win 11's add/remove programs to remove all NV apps except NVCP.  Then run DDU in Safe Mode, omitting having DDU mess w/ NVCP.  I don't know if or why MSFS would have its own shaders.  I do also use Win 11's Disk Clean option to remove DX shaders in it, but dunno if it matters one way or the other.  As mentioned when I do my ritual, done only when there seems to be a persistent downturn in smoothness, I do often notice immediate improvement in smoothness.  I'm not sure if shader removal matters at all because the current NV driver will look for and use only those shaders installed w/ that driver.  It may well be mostly the delete and reinstall of the driver that really matters.  I also use GeForce Experience for its filters.

I was the author of this post about obtaining smoothness at lower frame rates, that is to say looking at Frame Time Variance to get that as low and tight as possible.  The basic method still applies today in 2020 and 2024 so is what I use:  

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/628655-ultimate-smoothness-at-modest-frame-rates/#findComment-4899096
 

One can of course have near perfect FTV and yet suffer from a frame rate so low it's easy to  see this when panning rapidly.  So the best possible subjective impression of animation comes from perfectly low FTV along w/ a frame rate you can live with which again is based solely on how you use the sim.  For me, my goal is 50FPS-native--this gives me ample frame rate for how I use the sim, and bumping it up to 100FPS-fg only improves the picture slightly.   I don't use any form of frame generation as I find the increase in frame rate is not worth the the artifacts associated with frame gen.  I'm almost always able to maintain 50FPS-native in the most demanding aircraft and airports and also maintain at least 10% headroom over that to accommodate transient spikes in demand.  The Gsync display helps when in a super demanding area where the rate does can drop below 50.  

I believe MS/A have changed memory management to favor more use of system ram over VRAM in the recent past, and this is contributing to some loss of smoothness and total performance.  It's rare to see VRAM over 13.5Gb now, and common to see sys ram up to 30Gb or higher now.

 

 

 

@Noel,

thank you for the link to the other post and the detailed explanation! 

I gotta say Im not an computer expert at all, but for me the use of Lossless Scaling helped a lot - Almost perfectly smooth, only when flying in new areas it can give some minor stuttering from time to time. At least thats my impression. 

I will see if I can implement some of your tips!

Best regards,
Christoph

@Noel Hello, do you have the rolling shader cache on or off? 

I wonder if it makes any difference regarding occassional stutters.

Furthermore: I now use MSFS2020 cause Im afraid MSFS2024 will be too demanding on my system. Do you feel 2024 is more demanding or not, in practice? 

Thank you & kind regards,

Christoph

Hi Chistoph, funny you should ask as I just turned it off after having it set at 124Gb in 2024.  You can't NOT use a RC file in 2024 but you can use the default size of 16Gb, so that is where it is as of an hour ago.  Can't really compare performance between 20/24 because I haven't used 2020 for many months now.  My sense though is that frame rate has gone down in 2024 from where it was say 2-3 months ago.  I believe this is could be secondary to their VRAM optimizations.  I used to see much more VRAM in use compared to now.  In fact, my 24Gb is nearly always half unused as it's rare to see much over 12Gb in use now.  It's mostly frame rate that is impacted by this now as since SU3 arrived it's running smoothly, but with lower frame rate in the most demanding spots now.

 

@Noel Maybe you could explain the Rolling Shader Cache for me? 

People say when it gets full it causes them stutters. So I wanted to check the size of the file after deleting the Rolling Cache, if it's really empty then.
So I  to deleted it, and set a new value for it, 24 GB in my case. Once I did that, I closed the sim, and checked the file. The size said 24 GB, although I havent done a single flight.

So how does it work? Is the file right away the size set in the settings? But that would mean it's full all time time, and content gets replaced constantly once flying into a new area. 
That in return would mean the statement "When its getting full it causes stuttrers" cant be right. Cause now my sim is 100 % smooth, although the Rolling Cache File says 24 GB and thats also the maximum I chose. 

Do I miss something on that topic? 

Thank you! 


 

I had to disable rolling cache in 2020 due to stutters. In 2024 everything works fine with the 16 gigabytes default cache, so I just left it at that.

I assume they made some changes to the way they manage the cache in 2024. 

7 minutes ago, Christoph123 said:

 

So how does it work? Is the file right away the size set in the settings? But that would mean it's full all time time, and content gets replaced constantly once flying into a new area. 
 

Most likely, when you set the cache size, it creates an empty “container” file of a fixed size, which is then filled with blocks of data. So the disk space would be consumed instantly, but there would be no data stored initially. 
 

Caching can be quite complex (and difficult to get right)

Regarding to this topic, does anybody knows, what is MIcrosoft Flight Simulator-1896-1.nv-gpudmp and .json files? I got lots of them in my local cache folder from a quite long period of time. The number changes. Can I delete them? And this is msfs2020