Funky D

The only drawback of this is I have been penalized for flying over Class B airspace after canceling IFR (as I should be, but I also shouldn't be able to cancel IFR above FL180 in the first place). The update apparently no longer penalizes for flying through "prohibited" airspace... not sure what that all entails, but the sim shouldn't be penalizing for anything ATC or "procedure" related at this point since it's all so broken. Sometimes manually doing things through the ATC menu negates the penalties. Usually, it does not. I bite my tongue and deal with it, but I have gotten frustrated enough to end my career session short more than once.

You can also try deleting your rolling cache... I know stale rolling cache has caused issues for others in the past: https://flightsimulator.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019202439-Default-location-and-how-to-delete-the-Rolling-Cache-and-the-Manual-Cache I typically delete the Nvidia shader cache with new updates as well, but not sure if that is important with AMD cards. Hopefully you can find the root cause, strange issues like this are always the worst. Did you try with an empty community folder?

It's really the luck of the draw... My first 3 career missions in SU6 all had issues with the hold short lines showing up in completely the wrong spot (at a runway intersection, in the displaced threshold, at a midpoint exit taxiway). The ATC hangups seem to be 100% related to ATC/sim load. I got them multiple times during approach in high traffic areas. You are basically guaranteed a break in ATC quick reply flow by landing anywhere on the east coast of the US. Actually, I consider the hangup a feature: If you spam the quick reply button, you can sometimes stump the ATC flow and get silence during cruise instead of handoffs every 30 seconds, sometimes to a controller on the other side of the country. I then just contact the nearest center again when I'm close to TOD. ATC has gotten better with descent management, but that started before SU6... I think it was a server-side tweak that Asobo never told anyone about.

2024 tutorials as well, unfortunately they never updated them. Also, not the best location for the tutorials... higher altitude, and for the "level flight" tutorial it's hard to line up with the horizon when the horizon is jagged mountains. Nice scenery, though!

Do you have Bijan's Seasons Enhanced addon? I know some folks have seen degraded performance after SU updates with that addon installed... I know he is updating it for SU6 because there were some conflicts in the SoCal area but not sure if it was released yet.

I never said Asobo should stay quiet about the changes, but I'll still respectfully disagree about settings remaining static. MSFS is in constant flux... including the addition of things like FSR, which, if enabled, would invalidate all previous benchmarks anyway. And unlike most games, there is much more competing for resources in MSFS (flight dynamics, aircraft systems, ATC, etc), all evolving over time. If adding things like wake turbulence means the LOD has to be cut by x% to retain performance, I am personally fine with that. Many folks have complained about the LOD on landing gears... but one complaint I haven't heard much of since that change is stuttering on short final. Whoever mentioned the optimization of the MSFS engine is akin to getting blood from a stone is likely spot on. The alternative could be worsening performance with each update unless you lower settings... until the next version of MSFS is released, at which point all of those settings have a new baseline.

True, and unfortunately only Asobo/MS has the actual metrics on this. I'm sure they are also looking at folks that load up the sim a few times in GamePass and then abandon it and try to look for reasons/trends for the lack of "retention". Did they actually remove the ability to get better quality in SU6 though, or does increasing the LOD provide similar quality to SU5? There doesn't seem to be a consensus on that yet. Let's also consider the user who always sets their quality to "ultra" because that is what they set for every other game. Most of us here know that MSFS has always been a different beast. I think it's perfectly fair to nerf the ultra presets, as long as there is a way to get beyond those settings. Again, I'll use Cyberpunk as an example... there are settings that will bring a 5090 to its knees that need to be specifically enabled.

My point was the PC users on 4080+ hardware are in the minority. The Steam hardware survey is the best indicator of all the different hardware PC gamers are using, not just the power users. Blurrier, but which is truer to real life? The 2020 image to me looks like an oversaturated, over-sharpened photograph. Then again, I'm not particularly a fan of the "HD mods" for other games (Cyberpunk comes to mind)... they always seem to over-sharpen every texture in the game, including textures that shouldn't have much texture in real life. I thought the same of ORBX's KATL when I saw everyone praising it... the tarmac just looks over-sharpened and oversaturated to me. Out of your 3 sets of pics, I think only the last is significantly worse in 2024. The first in particular just looks like two photos with different post processing performed. You could probably get very close to the 2020 image by using nvidia filters and sharpening. The 2020 image is sharper, yes, but it is also grainier as a result. To me, the first looks like a picture you'd find on the cover of Flying magazine, while the second is what I'd see when actually looking out the window. But my eyesight isn't the best, even with my glasses 😂

Everyone likes to blame consoles... Take a look at the latest Steam hardware survey: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam Most popular GPU? RTX 3060. The amount of folks that have high-end GPU's is tiny. Asobo is not just optimizing for consoles, they are optimizing for the most popular PC's in the wild. Do I wish they would include additional settings for high-end systems? Of course! But if increasing the LOD to higher numbers fixes blurriness, doesn't that count for something?

The more you download, the longer the sim will take to start up as it has to verify all of those local files. Updates can also be an issue, especially if they are hot off the press... you may need to disable and then re-enable the addon in order to get the update to properly install. I've never bothered with downloading and never had any issues that I could point toward streaming as the root cause. I just enjoy all the extra space I have compared to 2020, especially now that storage prices have gone through the roof!

I won't sugarcoat it: You still need a decent amount of patience to deal with career mode. Many of the game-breaking issues have been resolved for a while now, but I still do not trust skipping phases of flight (nor do I even want to, I just increase the simrate if I'm in a hurry). I still get unfair dings to my performance rating when the sim screws something up. The scoring for some modes, like crop dusting, is so out of whack that I just don't bother with those flights anymore. That said, I would guess 70% of the career mode issues are related to ATC. If you can deal with the default ATC, you can probably deal with career mode. I do the majority of my flights in career mode, usually VIP charter missions flying the Phenom. Charter, cargo, and probably the ATP missions (I don't fly them often) have been the most trouble-free... Oh, and the skydiving missions, those are fun if not a bit repetitive. In my last post, I noted a 172 on final with a missing landing gear. ATC had me hold short until it vacated the runway. It just disappeared, ATC was none the wiser, and after losing my patience I just took off. The mission ended in a failure for taking off without clearance. I do not remember that being a hard failure in the past... Those are the types of things that will make you want to pull your hair out in career mode. In retrospect, I should have just restarted the mission. With all that said, you will likely find a lot of small, cool little airports that you never knew existed if you do a lot of medium cargo and VIP flights. That is what I like most about career mode.

I'm wondering if the improvement with cloud visuals is related to the native DLSS 4.5 support? I noticed significantly less shimmering with the clouds, and shimmering is often related to DLSS. I know many here use injection to ensure they're on the latest DLSS version, but does injection carry all the benefits if the base sim is not optimized for the new version? I was a bit worried that my 3090 performance would tank with the switch to DLSS 4.5 (I've read it works best on 40/50 series cards), but everything seems to be as smooth, if not smoother, than before (I never bother bringing up the FPS counter to verify this, though). I did notice the new mast lights have LOD issues similar to the POI lighting issue that cropped up an SU or two ago; I was able to see the mast lights from KSDF over 60nm from the airport and they were BRIGHT. I also got pretty dramatic pop-in of the terminal on short final at the default KSDF, but I use the sim's dynamic settings set to 30fps. Not sure if it was the lighting or the buildings themselves, and not sure if this is a new or old issue as I don't fly at night often. I won't pretend the landing gear issue doesn't exist; I saw it on a 172 on short final. That said, everyone likes to talk about the "culling" that Asobo brought up, but if the LODs of the landing gears are tied to other objects as well, simply changing that may bring back the short final airport stutters so many folks used to have. I'm happy with the new update though, and even more happy how quickly it went from beta to general release. That just means future SUs with new improvements will come out even faster!

For the ground textures, I wonder if this is more about limiting server-side bandwidth than improving performance? Bandwidth isn't free after all, and the one thing that is probably keeping MSFS from being subscription-based is marketplace revenue. I do agree some "ultra+" options would be a nice compromise for things like aircraft/scenery textures and LOD's.

Are you using a wireless keyboard by chance? I remember having issues with my old bluetooth keyboard back in the 2020 days, they go to sleep pretty aggressively to save battery and the sim can have issues when pressing a key to wake the keyboard up. Back then the issue resulted in CTD's, but I could see this causing input issues like you're experiencing. I eventually solved by replacing my keyboard with a Logitech wireless keyboard that has its own dongle instead of bluetooth, and I disabled all the USB sleep settings I could find in device manager (although this probably wasn't needed). If you have a spare keyboard to try, that would be a quick way to confirm or deny a hardware issue.

You can also try a repair... the standard "verify integrity" route: https://flightsimulator.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360016125019-How-to-repair-Microsoft-Flight-Simulator-on-Steam Similar process in the Xbox app if you purchased from the Windows store. Edit: just saw you posted as I was writing the above... if it's stuck installing, definitely confirm your community folder is empty and try renaming the config file as others suggested. These do not get wiped during a reinstall. I believe the rolling cache isn't cleared either, so deleting or renaming that file may help as well: https://flightsimulator.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019202439-Default-location-and-how-to-delete-the-Rolling-Cache-and-the-Manual-Cache