I just finished a lovely - perfect - GA flight from Oshkosh up to Green Bay, flying past Appleton/Neenah en route so basically photogrammetry all the way. I was at 2500 ft and around 200 knots and it seemed like the scenery was a bit clearer without a single stutter that I could detect.

I can and do fly jets, but it seems like the scenery is grainier, photogrammetry is slower to load in, etc. It seems like the struggle is less real for my 10900K 3060 12GB 32MB RAM early Covid era machine when I fly GA.

What is your experience? Is my latest not so profound observation something obvious (going slower and lower is easier on the machine, and jets probably consume more FPS in general with their systems), or is this a mental trick I’m playing on myself to justify buying the Black Square 114 I still haven’t bought? 😂

Slow more than low is what's impacting your experience.

Whatever your LOD radius is, that's how far out it's loading in detailed scenery. The faster your airplane, the faster it has to load in new scenery.

You can see this effect in other games too. Pretty much any 3d-world game has fairly restrictive speed limits on how fast you can move across the map. The supercars in Grand Theft Auto actually move at around 40mph or so, and the F-16 does maybe 100mph if that, because if it went any faster most computers wouldn't be able to load in the scenery in time.

Back in the day when all computers were slow relative to the powerhouses we have now, in some games it was possible to get going so fast that it couldn't load the graphics in before you got to what the graphics represented, which was a problem if the object was a building. The hitbox would be there, but the visual would not, and you wouldn't know the building was there until you slammed into it.

As far as altitude goes, actually you'd do even better if you could fly high and slow. Think, U2. That's because the high-res LOD isn't a factor when you're a few miles up. It's not loading every tree, car and building detail, so now you're loading stuff that's much easier on the graphics card, slower than you do in a jet.

The complexity of the aircraft is also a factor. A jetliner with 5-7 PFD/MFDs is going to be tougher on your system than a Cub with a few analog gauges. That's why some developers allow you to turn off the copilot's displays, to give the GPU a break on stuff you're probably not looking at much anyway. But again, that complexity is mainly hitting your system from the "graphically render the stuff in the cockpit" standpoint and not quite as much from the "compute what the systems are doing" standpoint.

On 8/15/2026 at 10:21 AM, Republic DC9 said:

I just finished a lovely - perfect - GA flight from Oshkosh up to Green Bay, flying past Appleton/Neenah en route so basically photogrammetry all the way. I was at 2500 ft and around 200 knots and it seemed like the scenery was a bit clearer without a single stutter that I could detect.

I can and do fly jets, but it seems like the scenery is grainier, photogrammetry is slower to load in, etc. It seems like the struggle is less real for my 10900K 3060 12GB 32MB RAM early Covid era machine when I fly GA.

What is your experience? Is my latest not so profound observation something obvious (going slower and lower is easier on the machine, and jets probably consume more FPS in general with their systems), or is this a mental trick I’m playing on myself to justify buying the Black Square 114 I still haven’t bought? 😂

Your rig is only a little less powerful than mine, though I do have 64GB ram and a better GPU. I have a 12700K but that really is a huge limiting factor. I also bought mine in covid (had a GTX 1080 Ti that lasted me a while but it was clear I needed a new GPU - I bought the 4080 about 1 year later).

When I'm lower I actually prefer higher TLOD because I would actually notice stuff further in the distance. I tend to do TLOD 400 and OLOD200 below 10k ft. If flying an airliner thats when I dont care about TLOD as much (leave it at 200). OLOD barely matters up there.

The Commander 114 is Nick's best product yet.

Passengers flying in a jetliner usually endure the flight, more than enjoy it. And there isn't much to see. Passengers taken up in a small GA plane and flying low usually enjoy the whole experience, start to finish. The difference is the wonder and thrill of flying and the scenery seen from down low and very visible.

A GA VFR flight is very much easier on the sim than a big jetliner which takes more horsepower. If you follow the Youtube VR msfs channels you will see most of the flights are relatively low, and in GA planes. Because VR is all about the visual impact. As the famous poem ends: "Put out my hand, and touched the face of God". The better graphics performance of simple planes is a bonus to all of that.

Great thoughts, guys - since I wrote this post I've been enjoying my low and slow(er) flights very much, even in photogrammetry areas.

Still need to buy the 114!

This is amusing because I used to fly high with jets when performance was so bad down low with FSX. Makes sense with the photogrammetry loading now though.

Also, a ton of bush trips are back.

dd

On 8/15/2026 at 10:21 AM, Republic DC9 said:

I was at 2500 ft and around 200 knots and it seemed like

On 8/15/2026 at 10:21 AM, Republic DC9 said:

I’m playing on myself to justify buying the Black Square 114 I still haven’t bought? 😂

The 114 is great! But in the 114 you ain't gonna do 200 knots at 2500 ft without a serious tailwind 😄

6 hours ago, ryanbatc said:

The Commander 114 is Nick's best product yet.

I can only echo this. And he's working on some updates that will make it even more amazing. I've not flown another plane since its release, and I'm having a hard time talking myself into flying anything else. Nope, not fast - just awesome!

Scott

Everybody struggles flying MSFS2024 on a flat screen with RTX video cards and 3-4 generations-old CPUs.... And I'm there, flying MSFS2024 in VR with my i7 8700k and my GTX1070ti...

(and yes, OF COURSE my graphical settings are catastrophically low 😂)

Edited Wednesday at 07:03 AM3 days by Daube

6 hours ago, Daube said:

Everybody struggles flying MSFS2024 on a flat screen with RTX video cards and 3-4 generations-old CPUs.... And I'm there, flying MSFS2024 in VR with my i7 8700k and my GTX1070ti...

(and yes, OF COURSE my graphical settings are catastrophically low 😂)

I was getting fairly decent framerates on my Reverb G2 on a 1080Ti at about mid-tier graphics slider settings, so I can see it. Then everything got better when I got a 3070Ti, until I got a Crystal Light thinking the G2 would be nerfed by M$ soon. That headset absolutely murdered my card.

What headset you use will have a huge impact on whether or not you can get away with an older card.

6 hours ago, Daube said:

Everybody struggles flying MSFS2024 on a flat screen with RTX video cards and 3-4 generations-old CPUs.... And I'm there, flying MSFS2024 in VR with my i7 8700k and my GTX1070ti...

(and yes, OF COURSE my graphical settings are catastrophically low 😂)

Believe it or not the 8700k is still a powerhouse of a CPU for VR, the bottleneck doesn't even get that bad until you go past a RTX 3090 surprisingly. It will show it's age in the 0.1% and %1 lows though compared to much more modern CPUs. Still one legendary beast of a six core that will still dominate a BSB2, Rift S, Q3, G2 Reverb and Samsung Odyssey Plus.

Edited Wednesday at 01:50 PM2 days by blueshark747

I was mostly trying to be funny 😅

My headset is a Pico 4. In the sim I'm forced to lower the render resolution (FSR3 on 'Balanced') and keep the LODs quite low as well. But the experience is immersive enough to enjoy it, until I can renew my old computer (more than 8 years old already :( )

21 minutes ago, blueshark747 said:

Believe it or not the 8700k is still a powerhouse of a CPU for VR, the bottleneck doesn't even get that bad until you go past a RTX 3090 surprisingly. It will show it's age in the 0.1% and %1 lows though compared to much more modern CPUs. Still one legendary beast of a six core that will still dominate a BSB2, Rift S, Q3, G2 Reverb and Samsung Odyssey Plus.

The 8700k was indeed a very nice CPU !

Unfortunately, I happend to mount it on a motherboard called Asus ROG H370.... which is the ONLY "Republic of Gamers" Asus motherboard that doesn't allow overclocking... 🤣☠️

7 hours ago, Daube said:

The 8700k was indeed a very nice CPU !

Unfortunately, I happend to mount it on a motherboard called Asus ROG H370.... which is the ONLY "Republic of Gamers" Asus motherboard that doesn't allow overclocking... 🤣☠️

I feel your pain bud....I mounted mine on the notorious sound crackling popping audio Asus ROG Maximus X Hero. Not sure if the audio crackling issue was ever fixed as Asus has since removed the 200+ page thread of complaints about it. Only work around back then was using Bluetooth audio devices.

Edited Wednesday at 10:03 PM2 days by blueshark747