jpf

you don't say how much PC or GPU ram you have. right click on the task bar and select task manager, choose the processes tab and sort on memory. at a guess I would expect textures to be the culprit, either P3D settings or weather but who knows?

also worth considering FSrealWX. free! I believe.

per your requirements I would seriously consider the TOGA products.

rex tex is textures; it includes weather textures (clouds). rex sky force is a weather engine; it provides dynamic weather effects (mist, rain, clouds,storms) using it's own textures (or from rex tex). many use ASP for their weather engine with sky force providing the textures others use ASP and ASCA for the weather textures. generally there seems to be a consensus that ASP is a very capable weather engine. using sky force as the engine, you will experience a very obvious 'POP' when new texures are loading. this is far far more subtle with ASP. I use ASP and ASCA. I find the rex stuff a bit resource heavy and have experienced CTDs with it. I didn't like ASCA to start with but it has grown on me significantly to the extent I prefer it now. I would look at toga also.

I use toposim myself and have no complaints. I am quite happy with 45 odd zip files as they're based on continent/region/county, etc. and I download what I want when I need it. on top of that, I have read comments from the developer in forums and he seems a genuinely nice person.

a 1060 will be seriously bottleneck your CPU choices. as said 1070ti (for cost conscious) or a 1080 if you can get one cheap.

very reasonable assumption to make. I would expect to need to reset/delete the usual suspects (outlined in P3D upgrade instructions) if you were to choose to revert to 4.3. I'm not entirely sure that would fix your CTD as nt...dll is OS related and as stated earlier, that is not the cause but the effect.

P3D will use the native resolution. I tried a couple of things. normal aspect ratio will cover the same cockpit real estate whether windowed or 'full screen'. this should make the gauges look awful but it doesn't... perhaps that's attributable to the curved screen. as it is; I use the equivalent screen real estate of a 'normal' wide monitor and the rest for ancillaries. If I switch to wide aspect ratio/full screen in P3D then on a GA aircraft that fish eye effect is dramatic. central focus is fine but edges are blown out of proportion. switching to windowed alleviates that and a satisfactory view is achievable by changing the window but seems a bit pointless when there's already a standard view. many of the tube liner add-ons come with standard/wide configuration options and I would expect those to increase the width view to ultra-wide in standard mode without distortion. assuming you're interested in GA and 'round' gauges.. standard, non-wide aspect view is excellent (for me). I certainly don't think you would be disappointed. panning around in a GA aircraft full screen/standard looks fantastic. gauges and labels are the correct shape all this not withstanding that screen ratios and whatnot can probably be adjusted in config files also. I don't bother with that myself.

a default install of win10 will benefit immensely from some optimization: complete all OS updates exclude all FS folders from AV scanning disable all notifications disable background creation of (hidden) thumbs.db and esp. that photos app scanning everything. there's probably a relevant optimization guide somewhere here (idk... new here myself) however ghosting sounds more hardware (or drivers) than software hence the regulars are a bit perplexed.

1070ti ftw! with the 1080 you would be able to set more cloud textures at 4096 but that's about it.

I use an ultra-wide curved asus rog swift pg348q which is lower resolution. personal preferences: I don't use wide aspect within P3D and I don't use the whole screen width for the flight sim (about 66%). fully zoomed out in-cockpit (centred detente) with a 737 I can see and operate AP altitude but not the right hand CMDs. for the rest of the real estate I have littlenavmap running. I do have trackir but tend not to use it. with wide aspect there's too much of that 'fish eye' effect for me. normal/standard aspect ratio works for me; others would certainly have no issues with wide. no black bands. outside of the sim, the DPI is a bit too high for my old eyes and I have an old(er) dell 24" 1920*1200 on the side for that.

try r-click on the P3D(?) icon, compatiblity, and turn 'disable full screen optimization' 'on' for a start. that or v-sync, triple-buffering and unlimited in P3D(?) options might help. I use either/or but not both 😉

happy to defer to you on this 🙂

SSDs are basically faster than HDDs. M.2 drives are similar tech to SSDs but faster still and connect to the motherboard using a different connection (m.2). I am inclined to think that your PC would be stutter free with a faster m.2 drive. I think that your stutters are more than likely a mixture of an un-optimized OS system and the slow speeds that a HDD will produce trying to supply textures to P3D (specifcally ORBX products). I think you have a good system. I think the HDD sucks and the monitor is great as a secondary monitor but isn't going to cut it if you upgrade the GPU mainly because it is not going to support resolutions above what I call 2K but is also called 1440p. definitely not 4K. HDMI is better but better still is display port.

I agree but that monitor isn't going to adequately support a better GPU... specifically it's only D-SUB or DVI.

if your z370-p has an m.2 socket then add an M.2 drive. that alone might cure your stutters.

what leaps out at me is that monitor has to go before you upgrade anything. the rest of your system is pretty sensible but as already mentioned a 1080 is not going to break much of a sweat unless you upgrade your CPU (motherboard & ram??) if you haven't messed about with affinity masks and whatnot the 100% on core0 and 70-80% on the rest will be your CPU running as effectively as you can expect. DVI on your monitor is going to restrict the benefits of a 1080. I would probably consider an SSD to start tbh .

I'll qualify that for you. somewhere below 40FPS a g-sync monitor will start to duplicate the same frame. below 20FPS it will produce 3 frames that are the same.

might be 'pro' version specific? there's been a lot of security updates from MS of late that try to mitigate malware attacks across networked devices. it's been a constant source of problems in the multi OS environment I work with as in 'it was working and now it doesn't' type.

bought those two myself 😊 then went back for the bell and the grumman for a bit of fun.

any of the 1440 vertical monitors (your setup is practically the same as mine except the GPU 1080 and monitor asus rog swift pg348q)

in my experience with an asus g-sync 34" you will not get any screen tearing with a g-sync monitor. this is because a g-sync monitor requests a new frame from the GPU every time it is ready not at the FPS interval. tearing is part of one frame and part of the next displaying on the monitor at the same time. g-sync does not operate below 30FPS... there's no point. at lower refresh rates it will always complete the frame before the GPU sends a new one. if you don't suffer from screen tearing already then that doesn't mean you won't with a new monitor especially if you are increasing the resolution which can be a significant burden on the GPU. the benefit of a higher DPI monitor is you don't get jagggies. even with a 2K monitor you can turn AA off in P3D which in turn reduces the load on the GPU (so it can support a higher resolution). sweet spot ATM is 2K g-sync. not so expensive as 4K too. g-sync is expensive, that's why it doesn 't come on every monitor. probably more so the license than the actual circuits themselves. free-sync (note the name) is cheaper. some free-sync monitors actually handle g-sync fine but remain incognito... probably to bypass the license fee??

well, I'm interpreting the OP's wishes as being the best option to improve P3D performance from an 8700K/1080ti combination. I'm inclined to think that a 9900K might provide better performance per $ than a 2080ti (everything else being equal) but I don't have any experience to support this other than in my case (8086K/1080) CPU0 is 100%, other CPUs 80% and GPU is maybe 50%, often less. for me I would love an 2080ti but it might not be the most effective method to 'improve' performance. I'm not even sure how Z370/Z390 chipsets performs against each other.

putting this out there: Philips 436M6VBPAB based on this link

how about if one was to consider changing the 8700K for a 9900K .hopefully not derailing the thread for the OP.