G MIDY

Okay I fixed this (I think). I needed to kill the app, change MSFS graphics settings, close MSFS and then run everything again with AutoFPS. I should maybe read the popup better!

I have noticed in recent days that my graphic settings keep being changed by AutoFPS. I have checked the settings and I can't figure it out. Everything was previously just left with expert unticked and the settings are being changed/nuked. I ticked Auto Reduce and unchecked all settings but corrections are still being applied to everything? Basically I don't want the clouds etc to be changed, just TLOD. It's slightly annoying as the clouds especially now look awful as the app is nuking my settings. I could set the FPS target higher maybe but then surely the tool loses its point? For some reason it is just nuking everything repeatedly. Maybe I'm doing something wrong or something is broken?

I'm certain that we did at least some of those with fuel stops in Bangor/Gander. ATA it seems didn't have the long range -500 and MAN-MCO is around 3,700nm+ by the great circle so very likely required a stop?

I can recall when I was very young flying on the Tristar from Manchester several times, I'm sure it was American Trans Air MAN-MCO and Delta MAN-ATL. I think we also did the DC-10 with Monarch to Sanford. All of these required a stop for fuel too. I can also remember on one return we left Orlando in our shorts and t-shirts but had to stop in Bangor or Gander (I can't remember which) for a fuel stop where it was -10°c and snowing.... And in those days everybody had to leave the aircraft for refuelling...! Really looking forward to this one, I love nostalgia aircraft.

Check the F/CTL ECAM, does the trim setting match the one you have set in the MCDU? The MCDU FLAPS/TRIM also needs to be calculated seperately and the EFB will do this for you. Do you also have any of the MSFS assists enabled? One of them is auto trim which may interfere? Trim Check (TOS1) TOS1 also compares the trim setting entered by the crew into the Takeoff PERF page with the actual Trimmable Horizontal Stabilizer (THS) position and with the trim computed by the FAC/FMGEC/FE based on the CG value provided by the fuel management system. If an inconsistency is detected, this will trigger the F/CTL PITCH TRIM/MCDU/CG DISAGREE (A320/A330/A340)

This may be because those sound drivers are using CPU cycles. Maybe you could try reducing your sound sampling rate? Nahimic will contribute I guess as it is a form of additional sound processing which means more CPU processing. I doubt that the sound driver will make much difference unless something is wrong and problems would also occur outside of MSFS. In any event, it is likely that the CPU is being saturated and this is manifesting as a drop in sound. Personally I feel like I've had an increase in stability by moving away from SoundBlaster products (which use virtual processing) to NZXT Relay speakers which just plug directly into the motherboard onboard sound. Does any of this really matter? I'm not so sure.

200 is unfortunately very high in my opinion. Add in a complex aircraft and it's just inevitable that stutters will occur regardless of how strong the hardware setup is. FPS may be good and stable though once everything is actually loaded but loading something and then rendering it are two different things. Think of it like you need to fill a bucket with water, doing it faster is irrelevant if you have more water than the bucket can hold. The only solution is to fill the bucket with less water (lower TLOD) or a bigger bucket (new CPU with lots of cache). I know it's visually terrible but experiment with 50 TLOD and see what happens, then gradually increase it until you get problems. If you use something like AutoFPS then this experimentation can be used to guide maximum settings.

This is caused by short term main thread saturation. I believe that it is caused by the loading of terrain tiles and photogrammetry because the sim must quickly goto the network, download the new data and then display it. This new data load pushes the main thread over the edge and stutters occur which also manifests as loss of sound. It almost always occurs during view changes or fast slewing because those usually trigger rapid data loads. The only solution is to increase the CPU headroom by reducing the amount of data that must be loaded at any given time. TLOD specifically is the most important setting because if TLOD is set low enough then the CPU always has headroom to load everything. A great test is to set TLOD to 50 and then slew at any speed anywhere. I can guarantee that if your main thread and FPS was previously good then your stutters will vanish. One offending tool for this is AutoFPS because AutoFPS decreases TLOD on the ground which is great for FPS. However, AutoFPS then (optionally) increases TLOD with increased altitude versus current FPS. Even if FPS is stable, any increase in TLOD can push the main thread over edge during a rapid data load because only so much data can be loaded at once. It's not a question of speed but a question of the millisecond availability of bandwidth. It's a common misconception that MSFS is highly reliant on CPU speed but this isn't really important anymore and even heavy overclocking gives very small gains nowadays. The huge 3D cache and increased data processing bandwidth is why the AMD X3D processors give such huge performance improvements in MSFS. Basically, reduce your TLOD to a degree that works to stop those stutters in most situations. If you can't live with the visuals then unfortunately you will have to live with the stutters.

Sometimes this can come down to just about anything. I totally uninstalled the SU3 beta when they broke literally every aircraft in 1.5.9.0. SU2 gave me too many performance problems so I rolled back to MSFS 2020 and weirdly that also had issues. I tried different GPU drivers, I reinstalled both sims multiple times, I rolled back PBO tweaks and I tested stability over and over, I tried everything. In the end I decided to reinstall Windows and that has fixed everything. I have no idea what the problem was but the latest SU3 beta is running perfectly.

I had this problem and you just need to sign up for the insider programme again as I think they changed the terms/process. Once done, reboot and Xbox Insider Hub should update. https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/read-first-welcome-to-the-sim-update-3-beta/591232#p-2634887-update-to-the-microsoft-flight-simulator-2024-insider-program-4 https://www.flightsimulator.com/insider-registration/

SU3 - probably the best SU for 2024 but there is very little addon support at the moment. SU2 - VRAM mess, unusable for me. MSFS2020 doesn't exit properly for me. For any of these options you just trade various problems. MSFS 2020 is probably the only option if you value stability above all else.

Profit is a difficult thing to judge because we do not know how much profit PMDG makes, they may make zero profit for all we know and with that there is no room to reduce prices. Cashflow is a bigger problem, especially for companies that don't release a lot of products. If you for example release 1 product per year in January then how do you pay your staff salaries in December? What if the product slips and is delayed by 3 months? Pricing has to take this into account so PMDG may be expensive purely because they have to stretch their income across a whole year. They've released the 777-200ER and we'll get the LR at somepoint but then I seriously doubt that we'll see any release from PMDG until next year. We all know that most people buy new releases on day one so cashflow presumably drops like a stone after that, it's not a pleasant environment to manage. Releasing products rapidly is the golden goose of flightsim development because it allows companies to reduce prices further without worrying about simply surviving. Companies like iniBuilds are winning this battle and they must be making an absolute fortune.

Anybody asking questions on price should just do the math and logistics. Time is the cost of development and I use UK development as an example. This is very generic but a single person UK developer would expect to work for around £20-£30ph because yes developers must eat, pay their bills and live. A 2 year development cycle for example would therefore cost around £115,000 per person developer (£30 x 37 hours x 52weeks x 2 years) and that's assuming the developer works full time. Ignoring other costs that means £115,000 of sales are required just to break even. If that project projected to sell 1,000 copies then the price would have to be at least £115 ($150) per copy or there's no point. Add another developer to the team and the price must double or the number of copies sold must double. Aircraft development is also multifaceted which means more cost, a software developer for example is highly unlikely to be a competent 3D modeller but for an aircraft you need both! Development is a seriously risky business because the development cycles are long and many developers work projects with zero cashflow so often they can't work on a project full time. Those that do almost always do presales to finance development. MSFS changed this considerably from the P3D days because the market is much larger. It's actually a fact that PMDG products are cheaper. I just checked and 5 years ago and I paid $220 for two 777 variants for P3D. The 777-300ER for MSFS meanwhile is $75 and the 777-200ER is $77 so whichever way you cut it that's half price. If you consider the crazy inflation that has occurred between those two periods (2020 vs 2025) then that's a considerable improvement! I think some should therefore just note that without money there is no flight sim development. Comparing each developer is self-defeative because each developer is different, operating in different countries and conditions. Just be glad that they exist.

MSFS uses Meteoblue for snow. Meteoblue currently isn't showing any snow in/around Manchester which is obviously incorrect. https://www.meteoblue.com/en/weather/maps/wigan_united-kingdom_2633948#coords=9.4/53.4137/-2.1957&map=snowDepth~hourly~auto~sfc~none

I finally managed to get in and try it this morning. It looks great, feels great and the new aircraft look great. I just feel though that there are going to be serious problems with the streaming model. There is now no point in having fast storage because your internet speed and reliability has become the limiting factor. This is why the sim currently isn't functioning, it's wholly dependent on MS servers which are currently slow or broken. A simple test of this is to slew upwards from an airport to around 3000ft, then slew miles into the distance, you will now have no scenery and get a message that there is no bandwidth. Obviously the servers are hurting at the moment but this was reliable in the past because the server bandwidth and reliability wasn't too important whereas now it's critical. I think they will fix things obviously but there are huge fundamental flaws with this model and it's frustrating that it could so easily be fixed with an optional local disk install option.

Reminder not to fly into LAX in one of these things! The ILS approach alone would almost saturate the INS. 😆

First impressions - they've done an incredible job!

From what I recall VNAV was initially included in the design as per the 146 but it was never implemented as operators weren't willing to pay for the work needed. The button therefore exists but the work to couple the vertical aspect of the flight guidance system to the FMS was never done. The FMS however is VNAV capable so it functions as an advisory system where the vertical profile is displayed but the autopilot can't follow it automatically. You would use V/S to meet any restrictions versus the vertical profile, or LVL CHG for a normal climb/descent.

And I'm sure that Fenix modelled the difference in max speedbrake deflection with AP on/off? This also catches people out in their understanding and comparisons.

No I didn't, apologies to the OP if that's the case but the advice and sentiment is still valid. I'd say that arguably these aircraft should be slippery as opposed to not. I haven't flown the 737 but I know that the perception is that it can be hard to slow down so that is realistic. The 77W is even worse, it has a huge wing and powerful engines even at IDLE so it should be difficult to slow down, the impact of the speedbrakes really don't change things that much. The Fenix speedbrakes do certainly generate a considerable and appreciable realistic amount of drag but this comes down to perception and conditions. I can't say I've struggled with it or noticed it as a problem. Don't forget it is the simulator that generates the flight dynamics response and not just the aircraft.

Speed brakes actually aren't that effective in real life. Their main use inflight is to bleed speed at a speed reduction phase so the aircraft doesn't spend too much time in the level off. If they're being used to increase the descent rate then something has gone wrong with the descent calculation. An easy fix for a smoother descent is to change the planned descent speed, if you're having speed problems then maybe you're setting CI too high? At higher CI the aircraft will be aggressive and descend later at IDLE at the Mach limit before switching to IAS. The subsequent IAS will then remain high and therefore greater intervention is needed to meet any speed reductions later on. A common use for these fast and short descents is if the approach isn't speed limited and the excess can be bled off very late with the speed brakes. This is really good for fuel consumption as almost the entire approach can be conducted at IDLE but it's a terrible idea for restrictive and controlled approaches. An approach to London for example would absolutely be speed controlled, often at 220kts above 10,000ft so hitting this area at 300kts and then relying on the speed brakes to remove a huge amount of speed quickly isn't a good plan. We have huge airbrakes in the military world and they're seldom used because they literally do nothing but make a lot of noise and vibration.

I'm enjoying the iFly, it has great potential and packs so many features. There are bugs though, the autothrust is overriden constantly by throttle spikes so you can't do a 60% spool before takeoff but they're fixing it. I've found that it can also struggle in turbulence and constantly fights the magenta line with large roll inputs. I think this may just be due to how MSFS implements turbulence as the PMDG 777 has behaved for me in a similar way. Landing into Liverpool yesterday at the edge of the crosswind limit was fun but extremely challenging. It is certainly one of the better aircraft to hand fly, the feel is one of the best I've had in MSFS.

The 2k textures probably won't make too much difference unless your GPU is older (<8gb VRAM). One way to improve FPS is to disable the FO displays however it requires panel.cfg modification. The utility 'Taboo' by Parallel42 can also be used to do the same thing I believe.

Is there a way to get presets to apply automatically? I have set the utility to open with MSFS but the preset isn't applied. It's a pain having to go into the utility to apply each preset every single restart. It would also be useful if it could be minimised to the toolbar instead of sitting behind the sim. It looks good but the usability is difficult.

Do you use any of the game filters in the new NVidia CP? I had this problem and with filters active the sim will only start in DX12. Open your UserCfg.opt file and set the line "PreferD3D12 1". I think specifically it relates to use of the RTX game filters.