Pardon me but I remain so impressed by 2024 and had to share this.  Not a hint of a stutter anywhere for this 2h+ flight from departure involving taxi/TO in the Fenix 320 at LIPZ to EGLL involving landing and taxi to the gate w/ ample FSLTL traffic, just pure perfection!  As I've always maintained when you have flawless frame time variance this correlates very well with subjective perception of super smooth animation.  This was from the landing at EGLL.  Yes, it's a modest 60FPS-fg but no significant rate-related visual aberration that can happen in certain types of lighting and textures in which case I will bump the native rate up to 45/90FPS-fg.

 

Can you update me again...what refresh rate you run?   And what sort of frame limiting are you doing right now?  Still RTSS w/front edge sync?   And vsync off in sim?

I sure wish that was my situation. I have a 5090, AMD 9800X3D, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 1000 watt power supply, clean Windows install in a Dual Boot config, empty community folder, 1GB fiber connection and the &$@!# thing stutters every ten seconds with this latest .21 beta build. The audio crackles every time it does it. The frame counter turns red for an instant, then green for a period, then rinse and repeat. VRAM usage is low, regular RAM usage is low, it’s set on 40 frames max. Nuts.

Edited April 21Apr 21 by Jaxsimmer

1 hour ago, Mace said:

Can you update me again...what refresh rate you run?   And what sort of frame limiting are you doing right now?  Still RTSS w/front edge sync?   And vsync off in sim?

Yep same old same old and it still holds up for me.  Refresh is at 120 or 144 and it doesn't matter really except the lower the refresh the more visible can be rate-related visual aberrations w/ FG.  Vsync off.  Gsync on.  For a long time I stuck w/ native rendering but after a long hiatus from I tried FG many months ago now and was delighted to discover the 2nd screen judder was gone which was a fair part of the problems I had w/ FG as I'm always going back and forth between screens.  And, now that performance is as good as it is can bump up to 90FPS-fg when conditions demand due to rate-related visual aberrations.   TLOD is always 100-150 on the ground, all else Ultra, and Render Scaling is at 130 along with the NVCP sharpening feature can't really do any better image quality wise.  There are times when this doesn't happen of course and I like many chalk it up to server/net issues.  It does help to refresh the GPU install periodically which I do maybe every 2-3 months or so as it seems things slowly get garbled a little over time where I will see some stutters return, but it's rarely much unless as I say something outside the box is in play.  I just did this refresh a few days ago, same NV driver, a recent but not current one.  

47 minutes ago, Jaxsimmer said:

I sure wish that was my situation. I have a 5090, AMD 9800X3D, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 1000 watt power supply, clean Windows install in a Dual Boot config, empty community folder, 1GB fiber connection and the &$@!# thing stutters every ten seconds with this latest .21 beta build. The audio crackles every time it does it. The frame counter turns red for an instant, then green for a period, then rinse and repeat. VRAM usage is low, regular RAM usage is low, it’s set on 40 frames max. Nuts.

That is bizarre for sure.  The good news is you *should* be able to fix it (i.e., you have the hardware) so it's in the software domain, but finding out how is another story good luck!  I'm not on a Beta either so that could a big reason.  FWIW, I do not install the NV HD audio driver, and found the NV App to be troublesome for the frame time variance, but that could be an artifact of how CapFrameX captures video.

Your recurrent regularly spaced pauses point to some polling/saving feature.  In fact THAT was what prompted me to dig deeper into what impacted animation quality as I was getting recurrent regularly spaced pauses as well, and it turned out to be the windows background was set to change periodically, like every minute? (if I recall correctly, in Win 10) and once I saw that and disabled the pauses ceased.  That led me to learn about RTSS to control rate which is when I discovered the best path to lowet frame time variance and I've been stuck there ever since.  A very nice benefit to RTSS is one can change the rate lock during flight so comes in handy if I need to go from 60FPS-fg to 90FPS-fg.  I try to stick w/ multiples of 30FPS which Simconnect is confined to I believe, hence helps with GSX Pro.

Edited April 21Apr 21 by Noel

3 hours ago, Jaxsimmer said:

I sure wish that was my situation. I have a 5090, AMD 9800X3D, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 1000 watt power supply, clean Windows install in a Dual Boot config, empty community folder, 1GB fiber connection and the &$@!# thing stutters every ten seconds with this latest .21 beta build. The audio crackles every time it does it. The frame counter turns red for an instant, then green for a period, then rinse and repeat. VRAM usage is low, regular RAM usage is low, it’s set on 40 frames max. Nuts.

As Noel said I am the same way, I do not install the nvidia audio drivers or whatever it wants to install with a driver.

Also, be careful about realtek audio drivers, either make sure you have the latest, or, get rid of them completely and go with a standalone sound card (that is what I finally did).  I'm convinced that unless you buy a really top-end motherboard, the onboard sound is usually junky.  Good enough for most people's uses but not for our high-system-stress sim applications.

Maybe when the non-beta SU5 launches, all will be ok, but we can never be too complacent.  I would certainly report your experience to Asobo/MS along with your hardware (in particular the audio solution you have i.e. motherboard audio, brand, etc. or standalone card) so that they have another data point to look at, and if it's a problem that just cropped up with this .21 beta build, they can diagnose and fix it for the release SU5.

2 hours ago, Noel said:

Yep same old same old and it still holds up for me.  Refresh is at 120 or 144 and it doesn't matter really except the lower the refresh the more visible can be rate-related visual aberrations w/ FG.  Vsync off.  Gsync on.  For a long time I stuck w/ native rendering but after a long hiatus from I tried FG many months ago now and was delighted to discover the 2nd screen judder was gone which was a fair part of the problems I had w/ FG as I'm always going back and forth between screens. 

My CapFram results don't look as good as yours.  I am debating whether I should bother doing anything, because what really matters is in-sim performance and not CapFramX.  My in-sim performance is great.  It could be that if I'm getting a microstutter, I don't notice it at 60hz, or the fact that I have so much overhead, I'm just not getting any stutters.

I should revisit RTSS as a limiter though.  It could be that I'm missing out on that last 1%.

Are you using any tools like AutoFPS that variably change TLOD?  Or the in-sim/native option?

5 hours ago, Noel said:

Pardon me but I remain so impressed by 2024 and had to share this.  Not a hint of a stutter anywhere for this 2h+ flight from departure involving taxi/TO in the Fenix 320 at LIPZ to EGLL involving landing and taxi to the gate w/ ample FSLTL traffic, just pure perfection!  As I've always maintained when you have flawless frame time variance this correlates very well with subjective perception of super smooth animation.  This was from the landing at EGLL.  Yes, it's a modest 60FPS-fg but no significant rate-related visual aberration that can happen in certain types of lighting and textures in which case I will bump the native rate up to 45/90FPS-fg.

 

I would hope your sim would be stutter free when you spend nearly $3,000 plus on a system.

3 hours ago, Mace said:

My CapFram results don't look as good as yours.  I am debating whether I should bother doing anything, because what really matters is in-sim performance and not CapFramX.  My in-sim performance is great.  It could be that if I'm getting a microstutter, I don't notice it at 60hz, or the fact that I have so much overhead, I'm just not getting any stutters.

I should revisit RTSS as a limiter though.  It could be that I'm missing out on that last 1%.

Are you using any tools like AutoFPS that variably change TLOD?  Or the in-sim/native option?

As you may recall I first noticed a significant improvement in smoothness, not freedom from stuttering per se, but smoothness, when tried using RTSS w/ front edge sync passive waiting I think it's called in RTSS setup.  I was not using CFX at that point in time and only later after learning about CFX that I noticed that subjective sense of smoothness at some level does correlate w/ low FTV captures.  At some level it's presumably the difference between this:

__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __             and this:

__ _ __ __ __ _ __ __ __ _ __

Of course real stuttering from whatever cause is going to adversely impact FTV too, so it's perhaps a fair way to assess if you are setup well for the rate you're trying to maintain.

This sim is more temperamental than both my ex-wives combined....

Just got home, fired it up, apparently it downloaded the latest SU5 update, .22, and we are back to smooth as silk performance, no stuttering, and no sound hiccups. That's at 3440 x 1440 and landing at X-Codr KDEN.

Asobo, I have very little gray hair left to pull out...but thank you...

Jaxsimmer

2 hours ago, Danthepilot77 said:

I would hope your sim would be stutter free when you spend nearly $3,000 plus on a system.

Yes you would hope but it's not guaranteed at all, as you should well know if you spend any time here.

9 hours ago, Jaxsimmer said:

 thing stutters every ten seconds

I don't think the sim works on any 10s interval. This sounds like an add-on. Have you done an isolation test without any add-ons to confirm?

nvm, I see it's solved. Nice.

Edited April 22Apr 22 by Damian Clark

18 minutes ago, Damian Clark said:

I don't think the sim works on any 10s interval. This sounds like an add-on. Have you done an isolation test without any add-ons to confirm?

nvm, I see it's solved. Nice.

I appreciate the help. Like I said, the issue seems to be solved with the latest update. Yes, I had removed everything from the community folder and tried to shutdown any other programs I could think of. It was almost like the main thread was locking up for an instant at regular intervals.

On 4/21/2026 at 7:43 PM, Noel said:

As you may recall I first noticed a significant improvement in smoothness, not freedom from stuttering per se, but smoothness, when tried using RTSS w/ front edge sync passive waiting I think it's called in RTSS setup.  I was not using CFX at that point in time and only later after learning about CFX that I noticed that subjective sense of smoothness at some level does correlate w/ low FTV captures.  At some level it's presumably the difference between this:

__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __             and this:

__ _ __ __ __ _ __ __ __ _ __

Of course real stuttering from whatever cause is going to adversely impact FTV too, so it's perhaps a fair way to assess if you are setup well for the rate you're trying to maintain.

Want to tell you, on my 4K/60 setup,  I have been re-experimenting with this (RTSS as frame limiter rather than in-sim vsync) and it has indeed smoothed out the last bit of __ _ __ __ __ _ __ __ __ _ __  that I had.

Definitely noticeable.  Definitely better.  I just realize I had async on in the RTSS setup, so I may mess around with front edge.   Passive waiting enabled.  

I use the nVidia audio driver all the time with no issues. 

dd