flying_w

any hint on which parts of the UK (and Ireland) will see the love?

Sounds like FlyByWire needs to update their side also for compatibility, par for the course.

Yes it has, with the caveat there's a lot of opportunity to improve. My simple yardstick is I find it hard to quit and go to bed at night. A couple of highlights are Asobos post release engagement and the wealth of freeware being produced. To balance that with a couple of low lights, I'd like to see the default aircraft work to the fullest extent that Asobo intend for them and more resource put into Simconnect not only to make what we already have actually work but expand to service the new features of the simulator.

3rd party addon from flightsim.to I believe. Be interesting to find out how one airport can cause difficulties elsewhere.

Despite working at home like many do these days, I've not been able to get in front of the simulator until now. First thing I tried was FXAA, and yes indeed IT WAS set in the NCP explicility for MSFS. Boy did that make a difference, my RdrThread is back below 10ms for the most part with occasional spikes, which is nothing in the overall scheme of things. My FPS is back to my 30 lock point, and everything is smooth again. I'd have to echo the thoughts of @marcg11 and others, performance and image quality appear to be the best yet, and subjectively there seems to be a much greater radius of buildings than before. So a rational explanation to my problems, and with the helpful experiences of others I just needed to find it. Nothing to do with my "computer being not exactly the latest spec" or "this is the way it is with an update, get used to it". Thanks all! Simon

Correct, this does not affect everyone, maybe not many and I'm glad to read of the positive experiences others are having with the update. I sincerely hope what I say does not come across wrong, I've enjoyed MSFS since day 1 and still think it's a great sim and a place I want to be. When problems occur I'd like to understand them and fix them if that can be done, but no way do I want to give up on it. I'll raise a ZenDesk ticket and see how it plays out.

I agree with you there's no free lunch, if you want new functions and improvements they come at some performance cost. But no way should it be as much as 66% in my case. If Asobo come out and say that's how it is that's different, but I don't recall any expectations being set in that regard. And before the update, my modest machine worked great with all the features you describe. I can turn everything low, and still performance suffers in a way it did not before the update. Something more has changed, I look forward to understanding what it is.

No, all addons were disabled to rule that out before applying the update. I don't have any of those mods installed that change the internal files of the simulator either, so it must be something else. While I'm sorry to hear of other problems, it's clear that the problem is not unqiue to me.

Before the latest update everything was fine, I had decent performance in many places in the light aircraft despite my aging PC. After the update, performance is much worse to the extent the simulator has become unusable. An example: Before update, Cessna 172 (non-G1000) at FACT Cape Town I could easily see 45fps even when looking at the terminal building. Dev mode would say I am GPU limited, which is correct and the Rdrthread (render thread) was executing in less than 10 ms. After update, same sceanrio I am seeing a little as 15fps. Now Dev mod says I am "Limited by RdrThread", something I've never seen before. The Rdrthread is now taking over 60ms to complete, way more than the situation before the update. This performance loss is consistent across all aircraft and all locations. All community add-ons are disabled, so I am on the vanilla package. Settings are global high, reducing to medium helps a little bit but not enough to make it usable. The update is literally the only thing that's changed. Tried turning off "motion blur" in settings, and that's new, but did not help. My system: i7-6700K at 4.4Ghz 32GB RAM 3600Mhz GTX 980Ti All system resources are lightly loaded, with CPU consumption being 25%. Any ideas about this one? Thanks all Simon

This seems like a golden opportunity for representitives from Asobo, be they developers, management or whomever, step in and speak to some of the concerns being raised here. A little transparancy would go along way. Did the changelog state anything along the lines of "we are reducing LOD to improve performance (or some other reason)", as seems to be the case with update 3. LM staff don't address every P3D topic ever raised, but they do have a track record of actively participating in their forums for example.

It doesn't have to be either or. I enjoy VFR with GA aircraft in MSFS and IFR with QW 757 etc between major airports in P3D. Maybe one day MSFS will have it all, but right now I've the best of both.

Agreed. It will be interesting to see how competition, availaiblity, COVID and the economic situation affect the price. Could go either way or nowhere. Then there's how MSFS and Prepar3D V5.1 evolve over the next 6 months+, and what combiniation of stuff is then best for each.

For those experiencing good performance, is that with a simple cockpit such as C152 or something more intense like the 320/747/787? I get great performance out of basic aircraft with my aging config (6700K, gtx980ti, 16GB DDR4-3000) but the airliners are a struggle. I will upgrade at some point in the next 6 months or so, but there's a few things to understand first: Intel v. AMD architecture. Better considered once Zen3 is in the wild. Sweet spot for core count Effect of CPU Cache Effect of memory speed I'm glad there's been several articles published at various sites concerning MSFS performance comparing different combinations of hardware, and these sites seem to be suggesting they will regularly update their articiles as new hard becomes available. DX12, if and when it comes, may alter this picture significantly.

The default aircraft make a good introduction to various aircraft, and especially for newbies can open the doors to a bigger experience (PMDG et al). That said, the default aircraft need to do what they do perfectly, some bugs and performance problems exist right now especially with the airlines right now. It's fine to have limited system scope in the default aircraft, but that limited scope has to work. I hope Asobo will be able to put some resource into addressing such bugs and performance. I'll probably be alone in saying this, but I used to get a lot of mileage out of the default 737 in FSX. As others have said, there are some days when you don't have the energy for something more than "jump in and go".

I agree with the principle of installing outside the sim folder and linking back to it. On the one hand I'm not too concerned with hardware breaking because one day it will so a backup strategy is worth investing in. There are many excellent backup products out there, both freeware and payware to help. On the other hand the disk space is finite, and I'm quite certain it will run out one day. I'd like an option to spread the add-on installs ala ORBX today and Prepar3D in general over multiple disks.

I try to keep up with everything but sometimes miss useful discussion points. There so much more traffic on the forums now, as you might expect. What's the CPU utilisation bug? I've seen occasionally all 8 of my CPU threads (6700K) run up to 100% for a few seconds, and that reduces the FPS over the same period ("stutters"). Not repeatable just seems to occur at random. I just ride it out when it occurs, but would love for it to be investigated and resolved. Otherwise I've elminated just about all the stutters, so long as I don't try create too complex a situation for my PC to handle. Hurry up RTX3080 and Zen3!

Yes, I do! the first few times the frame rate drops and stutters then it's all good.

About $99 for the same on amazon.co.uk, a litle less compelling.

Thanks! Incidentally I have the same Ripjaws as you except 3000Mhz and only 16GB. Love the timings on G.Skill stuff.

Was that 21GB all MSFS or the total across all applications according to Windows (including MSFS and everything else that runs under Windows)? Either way, it's a point well made. Out of curisoity is 24GB as 3 banks a valid confiugration, or must it be 1, 2 or 4?

Shame about the 32GB outcome, I was planning an upgrade to. Now I think I'll just save the money for better CPU/GPU down the line.

I was hoping the manual cache might permit me to download higher res photo tiles that are present in Bing but for some reason are much lower res in the simulator. Sadly it did not, so I'm struggling to see the advantage of manual beside a capable (32Mb/s) internet connection and rolling cache

@MarcG Welcome and glad to hear you are enjoying your experiences so far.

Today I have 16GB of PC3000. Your suggesion is such an obvious thing to do I don't know why I hadn't considered taking the RAM with me to the new machine. I guess I just assumed I'd buy whatever the fastest is at that time and selling the incumbant for next to nothing. The question then becomes, how much difference to MSFS does RAM speed have? But before that, I think a RAM upgrade will be on it's way here soon. Thanks all - this has been an interesting topic to discuss.

not a stupid question at all, the other consideration is does it improve smoothness, i.e. reduce stutters. Every so often around a busy scenery like EHAM I'll get a random frame take twice as long as it should (acording to RTSS), which manifests as a stutter.