Afterburner

I use Youtube premium, which allows me to watch videos commercial-free (without the need to use any tools), download them on my smartphone and listen to the audio while the screen is turned off. That service costs money, but if it's worth to you, I would give it a consideration.

Another reason that makes this add-on a buy for me is that it allows you to quickly look up the weather at a station and get information about upper winds and temperatures. They are important if you fly long routes that include step climbs. Active Sky also features a nice flight planner that allows you to calculate the flight time based on those upper winds / temperatures and your chosen flight level / cruise speed along the entire flight route. And the fact that the add-on runs externally means that you can do the checks and calculations on the flight without the need to access the menu of MSFS.

To avoid this problem, under P3D sound settings, you need to select the specific audio device that you want the simulator to use. Do not leave it at "Default Communications Device" (with which you will have this problem).

What are your brightness settings in P3D? I remember that the user manual of Envshade/Envplus recommends a setting of 1.3 (if you have auto exposure off, which I assume is unchecked on your system). Some users have noted a little low brightness on some screens you posted on the first page, so I assume that you have set it to less than that. With 1.3, you might achieve the optimal brightness outside and in the cockpit.

Are you changing the "Aircraft Shadows Depth" value? Have you tried a value of 0.50, which corresponds to the slider being all the way to the left before Envplus?

What about ORBX New Zealand South region? It comes with detailed scenery and airports, although I can't remember how detailed the NZCH airport is compared to the one discussed here. I have occasionally flown Concorde-X from Sydney to Christchurch on FSX many years ago.

It is disappointing to see that the developers at FSL still haven't provided an explanation for why changing the AllSync setting in the ini-file improves the performance for a lot of users. If they are not giving an apology to Maxime for the long silence, at least they should thank him for coming up with the helpful tip for free. @kmax59 What I am interested to hear is whether your CPU load on the main core is at 100% when your fps drops below 30. If yes, it indicates that the CPU can't keep up with that frame rate (as it is normally the case in a CPU-limited situation). If not, then something else slows down the performance of your PC.

@Ray Proudfoot Can you tell me what the shaded part of the CPU load graph (beneath the bold one) represents? I haven't seen it on my PC, so I am wondering. @kmax59 I am glad to hear that you have finally had a chance to enjoy your flight with the Concorde. Do you have any fps cap enabled, and are you able to maintain that cap? Also, if you use other airplanes, do you see odd cores active and even ones idle on your task manager CPU load graphs (the way it should be according to your AF settings)? If yes, then it must be indeed the case that Concorde "plays" with the AF settings internally.

@Ray Proudfoot It would be interesting to see your results and the CPU core load during an actual flight with engines running, not just using slew mode. I think that the load distribution you have posted may not be representative of an actual flight.

In my humble opinion, not only does Maxime deserve a huge amount of credit for his finding, but also an apology from the FSL developers! I am saying this because when Maxime made his first post about performance issues back in August, none of the developers responded. Repeated reports about the bad performance were met with silence (or the issue was blamed on the mouse cursor problem). There was an announcement about performance optimizations, but it did not come to fruition. The thread was on the verge of being locked by the boss. Now, six months later, changing a parameter that was undocumented by the team worked almost wonders. I think that it was the developers who implemented this entry in the cfg, so they should properly document it, and they should have suggested to change it in Maxime's thread. Instead, it was a lucky finding after many hours of frustration that partially solved the problem for the user. Not a professional way of helping customers, if you ask me.

Hello Maxime, I am glad to see that you are making progress with the performance of FSL Concorde on your PC by modifying the "RenderASync" entry. However, you mentioned that despite higher fps, your CPU load is still relatively low. This means that your PC power is not fully utilized and that there is room for improvement. You were wondering why your GPU load dropped when your fps dropped to 15. Well, that's quite simple: When the fps drops so low, the GPU is underutilized, hence it needs only little power to process the fewer frames per second. Under normal circumstances, if you do not limit fps externally or via Vsync, either the CPU (on the main core) or GPU should run at 100%, while the fps should reach the maximum. This does not seem to be the case with your setup. Your finding shows that the gremlin is hidden somewhere in the internal processing by the Concorde and not in your GPU or CPU. I hope that FS-Labs will disclose the meaning of the said entry and provide more suggestions on how to optimize the performance.

Maxime, what are your Vsync settings in the Nvidia Control Panel? Do you have adaptive Vsync (half refresh rate) on by chance? I suspect that some setting related to GPU may be the culprit here. Why do I think so? Because in your case, the FPS jumps from 60 to around 30, and then from around 30 to around 15. Each of these numbers is a divisor of 60. I know, for instance, that this happens if you turn on Vsync in P3D, but leave triple buffering off. In that case, if the sim can't reach 60 fps, it "tries" a value that's half of it, and if it can't reach that, it uses another half of that. Also, the CPU load is quite low in the scenario where you took off at night and made a turn. Under normal circumstances, the load on the main core (core 0) should be maximum if not restrained by other factors. You have mentioned somewhere that you are using Gsync, but I would try to turn it off and use a fixed monitor refresh rate and set Vsync in NCP to "Use the application setting" or so. Also, for experimental purpose, I would turn off Vsync in P3D (while leaving the target FPS at unlimited) and try to switch from full screen to windowed mode. Let me know what the results are.

This is very unfortunate. It makes me wish they would simply have ported the old Concorde-X for 64-bit P3D environment back in 2017 when they conducted the e-mail poll, which would have given us a lot of years to enjoy until the release of the current version and provided good performance on top of that. (If it ran well on P3Dv3, it would have run even better on version 4 and 5). Now we have a performance hog that uses way too much RAM and, as Ray and some others on the respective forum stated, drags down the FPS even when the CPU load is not maxed out. This doesn't normally happen. I "only" have 16 GB RAM, and I don't even get close to using it with all other airplanes, while I read that the new Concorde can easily use 24 GB RAM. It will be really interesting to see how it will handle in MSFS. While that sim is said to have better performance than P3D, no airplane made for it has had a level of complexity equal to Concorde. I expect that with a comparable number of AI traffic, that plane will suffer from the same low performance unless changes will be made.

I have been using the default Windows defender since I switched to Windows 10, and I have never had any problems with viruses - but I do not surf on risky or suspicious sites.

Ray, just an idea: Have you tried the default AM setting in prepar3d.cfg (or deleting and generating a new file)? Just to rule things out.