Good morning all

     I could really use any and all help solving this mystery

I have had Prepar3dv5 since 2021 and have never had a problem with it.    I only run PMDG 777-200,300, Activesky, GSX, Ksfo by flightbeam and EGLL scenery.

And it has been great    no problems for almost 5 years, then beginning in December i start getting Micro stutters and have no idea why,  I have never changed anything in the sim except every 3 months cleaning out the

shader cache files and scenery index files.

I only play 2 or 3 times a week and do long haul flying on the PMDG 777

My system specs are as follows

Processor    Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10900K CPU @ 3.70GHz   3.70 GHz
Installed RAM    32.0 GB
Storage    2.73 TB HDD ST3000DM007-1WY10G, 932 GB SSD WDC WDS100T2B0C-00PXH0, 1.82 TB HDD ST2000DM008-2FR102
Graphics Card    NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 (10 GB)
System Type    64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

Windows 10 Pro

 

A true mystery as to why now   

any and all help would be great 

 

thanks

13ifs40

 

 

You may not have changed anything, but Microsoft and others may well have.

How recent are your drivers?  Microsoft changes the underlying low-level driver interfaces with Windows updates periodically, and a device running an old outdated driver can suddenly start having issues becuase it was designed to run on an older WDDM version.  A really old, outdated BIOS can also be a problem.

Check that you don't have some other process running in the background, e.g. search index service, antivirus scan, etc.  A complete A/V and anti-malware scan would be appropriate.  And make sure that any A/V has the appropriate exclusions so that the A/V isn't getting in the way of every texture file loading.

 

3 hours ago, 13ifs40 said:

any and all help would be great 

I had microstutters too and removed a lot of old sceneries, I suspected to have an effect but it did not change. I then tried again with Riva Tuner Statistics Server RTSS and I had success.

These are my settings:   

Spoiler

Nvidia Driver: 591.59

Nvidia App
    Global
    Shader Cache Size 10GB
    Prepar3D.exe
    default

Riva Tuner Statistics Server RTSS Profile for
    Prepar3D.exe
    Framerate limit: 0 means unlimited
    Scanline sync x/2; 60 // click on Scanline to change. This reduces my fps to 30, since Monitor is set to 60 Hz

Prepar3D v5.3

Prepar3D.cfg
    [JobScheduler]
    AffinityMask=268394495
    P3DCoreAffinityMask=4095
    MainThreadScheduler=4
    RenderThreadScheduler=6
    FrameWorkerThreadScheduler=8
    
    For i13900K 24 physical cores, 32 threads

Display
    FXAA:off
    AA:4xSSAA
    Texture filtering: Anisotropic 4xSSAA
    Texture Resolution: High 2048
    Blackout Desktop
    VSync: on
    Triple Buffering: off
    Target frame rate: unlocked
    Wideview Aspect Ratio: on
    Mipmap VC Panels: on
    
    LOD Radius: Ultra
    Tesselation: Ultra
    Mesh Resolution: 5m
    Texture Resolution 7cm
    Use high resoltion textures: checked
    
    Scenery complexity: Extremely dense
    Autogen Scenery draw distance: Medium
    Autogen vegetation density: Dense
    Autogen building density: Dense
    Road lights: Freeways
    
    Water Details: Ultra
    Reflections: Clouds, User Vehicle
    Special Effects: 2 x high
    
    Enhanced Athmospherics: checked
    Volumetric clouds: off
    Cloud: 2 x max
    
    Shadow Quality: medium
    Shadow draw distance: medium

My monitor could also go up to 144 but my RTX3090 and the cpu could not sustain a higher framerate without having spikes again. I think, that I found the spot for my system.

I also have to add here, that I reduced the Intel default settings in the BIOS of my Gigabyte Z790 board to the lower level and since then have lower temperatures on the system. I also let the cooling run at a higher rate to keep the system at a lower temp. 

Dan
P.S. Forgot my Windows 11 is  version 25H2 build 26200.7462

   

Edited January 3Jan 3 by blaunarwal

2 hours ago, blaunarwal said:

I reduced the Intel default settings in the BIOS of my Gigabyte Z790 board to the lower level

Can you provide details, specifics at to which settings and their old and new values?

I found that my micro stutters were coming from HD Audio drivers, I've removed them and mi little flickers are gone.

8 hours ago, SayAgain said:

Can you provide details, specifics at to which settings and their old and new values?

Please read the spoiler in my post.

Just regarding clearing out shader files, the only reason you would ever do that is if you are changing the graphics driver or changing the graphics settings within P3D (the latter might be sufficient to create a whole new suite of shader files whereas the former definitely will). Other than that you are just wasting your time deleting them and making things worse since the simulator is just going to re-create (eventually) everything you have just deleted. And the files it creates all over again will be 100% identical to the ones you have just deleted (unless the situations I described above have occurred).

As for the new stutters, if you have not updated your graphics drivers or changed anything in the sim then the only possible culprit as I see it can be Windows updates or you have hardware that is now throttling due to heat (which would require disassembly of the fans and coolers and re-pasting, etc.

One thing I have done with my Windows 11 updates is changing the update interval to 1042 weeks. That way I can wait to see what the feedback is relating to a new update before I implement it myself. I obviously do not wait 1042 weeks - it is just a habit of setting the maximum possible so I do not have to think about it. I will usually then do the update a couple of months later. Note that this does not change the frequency of the essential security updates. They remain updating virtually daily.

53 minutes ago, JonP01 said:

the only reason you would ever do that is if you are changing the graphics driver or changing the graphics settings within P3D

There are other reasons, more specially if you’ve ever CTD during a flight or worse yet you Blue Screen or power just shuts down during flight … these events could leave corrupted shader files. 

On 1/7/2026 at 10:22 AM, SayAgain said:

There are other reasons, more specially if you’ve ever CTD during a flight or worse yet you Blue Screen or power just shuts down during flight … these events could leave corrupted shader files. 

Fair enough. I have been lucky in that I haven't had any CTDs in all of my 28 years of flight simming however a lot of that is purely just luck. I do however live in a blackout prone area (I have had 34 blackouts since December 2024). The reason I know I have had 34 blackouts is because my APC Gaming UPS counts each and every one of them!!!