How do you optimize this game to run well?

[Popypoplandpop popy]

I have the game cranked down to the lowwest setting's on 1080p and im still getting below 60fps. And still getting the same fps if the settings are turned up even higher? Even with the settings on low the fans are cranked up all the way. I really want to play this game after waiting hours for it to install, but now this is just another deterrent.

My specs are are far well above the reccomended needed to run the game.
Rtx 3070 Moible with 8gbs of vram
16gbs ddr4 ram
11800h I7
512gb ssd
Windows 11

[Mondyrocks]

I'll google that for you....

https://flightsimulator.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360016142680-How-to-improve-the-performance

[Manwith Noname]

The main killer in terms of graphics settings is typically the terrain lod but since you apparently have set everything to low and have issues I would try reducing or disabling ai traffic.

Also photogrammetry if you're in an area with it.

[shadowgravy]

I noticed RTX 3070 Mobile in your specs. I did a search...
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/laptop-buyers-beware-comparison-between-laptop-and-desktop-performance-rtx-3070/373783

[★Macman★]

Start by removing:
GeForce Experience with a fresh Driver latest install and only DRIVER & PHYSX and no AUDIO Driver.
No GAMING MODE; CORTANA; NO BLOATWARE (can disable some in TASKBAR STARTUP)
Set Virtual RAM to 1.5x your RAN or a minimum of 24GB at least and on BACKGROUND SERVICES.
No cluttered icons on your Desktop and use Default High Definition Sound if you can or just avoid it running WAVES MAXXAUDIO bloatware which alters sound by compressing and enhancing 3D to be worse.

Then set NVIDIA PANEL for MSFS to use 16x Anistrophic Filtering and do NOT use this ingame as it makes it use 1/2 of this setting.
MAX FPS = whatever you can achieve consistently in Cruise
Power Management Mode = Prefer Max Performance
Texture Filtering = OFF, LOD bias = CLAMP
Threaded Optisation = ON

Set ingame Graphics to medium and raise from here for what you like as priority with Grass & Trees being least. Clouds use HIGH and Glass Panel on MEDIUM. Ambient Occlusion is a hog as are shadows. You can set CAS on 200 and distance draws on just 70 or up to 120. The idea of balancing here is ALL about keeping your VRAM within Usage and not to go over else it will use a Fallback to use your slower RAM instead.

Use DX11 or DX12 instead if you have a 3080 card or higher. Set this to use DLSS and then use either TAA for least blur OR use DLSS set to QUALITY.
There is also a newer DLSS Driver 3.5.1 availabe to replace ingame one which can get better fps.

Also go into UserCFG.OPT file and edit to NOT use many Post Processing options e,g, FILMGRAIN; etc.

Use FSLTL from https://flybywiresim.com/ and not use AI Ground Aircraft and set no AI Liveries but do use Realtime.

Just follow the VR guides as these are the best optimisations...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwBOyTUZpcU

[CdnRod]

I have had MFSF for just over three years now (700 flying hours) and after lots of tweaks my sims performance is outstanding. It is like fiddling around with a race car for years until you get things just right.
Might I suggest these two youtube channels. There are others out there but these two I've used the most, especially the first one. It is not to say I exactly have everything set up today like they have but it was a good start, then with my own little playing around I am very happy with my smooth and high frame rate experience. I only have a i7-10700 with RTX 2070 Super but achieve a smooth 50-60 fps regularly, I glad I didn't spend a fortune on hardware upgrades because I've got great results with settings adjustment, addons etc.

Macman's post above has a lot of good advice too. Pay close attention to the FSTL part. MSFS's default traffic (planes, boats, cars etc) is a performance killer.

Good luck!!!

https://www.youtube.com/@2020fsers

and

https://www.youtube.com/@IslandSimPilot

[ждун]

yes investing time into fiddling and tweaking is definetellly worth it in this sim. With proper optimization you can reach significant improvements in both performance and visual quality.

[ZombieHunter]

First things, not enough RAM and not enough VRAM. Nvidia gimped the 3070 by only putting 8 on it. Also if it is mobile I doubt you are getting the full performance of your hardware due to heat. Mobile is a terrible form factor for gaming. Just facts. There isn't enough cooling so everything has to be throttled. I will tell you even on a full tower case with a 3 fan AIO, it is difficult to cool the system. I cannot imagine how a laptop would without throttling the CPU.

After that the terrain LOD is the biggest bang for your buck in FS 2020. Reducing it will improve performance. The other setting is resolution. Then AA. The rest of them likely don't make any noticeable difference on their own. That is for the graphics side.

For the logic side of the sim, AI traffic is the biggest bang for your buck. Reducing it will improve performance by quite a bit. The rest, not so much.

A lot of people mess around with 80% of the settings that don't matter and skip the 20% that do.

And on this sim I will add that you are not going to get any performance like you do in Unreal, Dunia 2, Crytek or any first person shooter games. It isn't going to happen so don't expect it. In FarCry 6 I can pull 120 to 165 FPS but in FS 2020 I pull 40 to 50 with both in 1440p. FS 2020 is updating a lot more 'stuff' in the background than FarCry 6 is. Different requirements, different audiences, different results.

[lawnmower501]

Originally posted by ZombieHunter:

First things, not enough RAM and not enough VRAM. Just facts. There isn't enough cooling so everything has to be throttled. I will tell you even on a full tower case with a 3 fan AIO, it is difficult to cool the system. I cannot imagine how a laptop would without throttling the CPU.

Gaming on a laptop with this sim is not really possible when every laptop mfr has tried to go very slim and lightweight after the last decade or so. The pack followed suit. Hardware and reliability are always has a trade-off. AMD is promoting easy swap-able upgrades of laptop hardware components like a desktop but that will make supply and cooling systems like a solid heavy brick again. As it should be. A computer should last a week with heavy use without recharging imo. And that should should extend to months in the future

I have 8gb VRAM with the GTX2080S but usually only get 20-30fps or so in cities.
Liquid cooling. 48gb RAM. Huge Rolling Cache available on HDD.
Good computer within specs. Slow ISP.

When PG is completed that 20-30fps city is on the higher side.
Without PG it is about 40-60fps.

Anything above 30fps most human eyes will not even notice.
A solid 40fps+ is acceptable to most unless you seek to be given high-speed bad data.

Depth of view (distant objects and tiles),
and traffic (still a problem since FSX),
and LOD settings (melted buildings),
=Are all CPU-based to my basic understanding (but could be wrong)

I wish the Developer will have an easy fix slider solution in 2024...

[★Macman★]

Ah. So that's what a "Moible" is. So also play without Photogrammetry and perhaps OFFLINE for no LIVE WEATHER nor MULTIPLAYERS.

[Kambien]

Originally posted by lawnmower501:

Anything above 30fps most human eyes will not even notice.

Studies over the last 4-6 years have noted the human eye sees up to 60 FPS and where we don't see individual frames above 60; however, frame rates of 120, 144, 165, higher increases how smooth everything appears during movement or rotation (of your eyes or even head or body direction).

Also, since the OP is using Windows 11 turn off HAGS in Windows. It's known to cause massive issues for a few years now on almost all games. Turning off HAGS alone could resolve most issues. Make sure to restart your computer afterward.

[★Macman★]

BOOST YOUR VR with AutoFPS...
https://github.com/ResetXPDR/MSFS2020_AutoFPS/releases/tag/v0.4.0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uyncvkgi0mA

[ждун]

i tested this tool, its quite cool, but motion reprojection is better disabled with it. The tool is constantly measuring fps and adopts quickly. But motion reprojection tends to switch between certain fps like 20/30/40/60 etc... and stays there as long it can hold it. AutoFPS has an issue with this stepped performance switching. In example when motion reprojection is stable 30 autofps won't change anything as it thinks the setting are right to keep stable fps. So you get stuck with motion reprojection, better turn it off when using AutoFPS.
Cool about AutoFPS is that its tuning down terrainLOD to minimum when youre sitting on the ground. That is awesome as you don't see far objects anyway when sitting on the ground, but it significantly improves performance. Once you take off and gain a bit altitutude it starts tuning terrain LOD up keeping stable fps eventually reaching maximum LOD level when flying up high. That is really amazing feature.

[ZombieHunter]

Originally posted by ждун:

i tested this tool, its quite cool, but motion reprojection is better disabled with it. The tool is constantly measuring fps and adopts quickly. But motion reprojection tends to switch between certain fps like 20/30/40/60 etc... and stays there as long it can hold it. AutoFPS has an issue with this stepped performance switching. In example when motion reprojection is stable 30 autofps won't change anything as it thinks the setting are right to keep stable fps. So you get stuck with motion reprojection, better turn it off when using AutoFPS.
Cool about AutoFPS is that its tuning down terrainLOD to minimum when youre sitting on the ground. That is awesome as you don't see far objects anyway when sitting on the ground, but it significantly improves performance. Once you take off and gain a bit altitutude it starts tuning terrain LOD up keeping stable fps eventually reaching maximum LOD level when flying up high. That is really amazing feature.

The sim is already doing this. Go into wireframe mode in developer mode and you will see this. It is using the terrain geo mip-mapping algorithm from FSX days. The only thing the utility is doing is a more aggressive second guessing of what the sim is already doing. Also the utility may be forcing more issues by dynamically doing it in a way the API does not expect. There are obviously house-keeping issues that must be performed under the hood when you dynamically adjust the detail. If it is being done outside of the sim or through an API in the sim, it is possible issues could arise. I would test it in many different areas and on long flights to see if it creates stability issues later. I am usually not a fan of dynamic adjustment of detail outside of LOD systems already within a game b/c the number of cycles required to determine if changes are needed and then the cycles required to set those values and then re-compute internally might be more expensive.

City scene
To illustrate let's take a city scene. We are on the edge of the city looking into it. Now obviously the absolute optimal render would be do not draw buildings that are covered by other buildings. Even more optimal would be only to draw the portion of distant buildings that we can see from our current position. However all of this determination requires a lot of processing. Sometimes it is faster to just render everything, let the w or z buffer take care of overlap and be done. Sometimes it is faster to determine object occlusion.

The most expensive operation would be to determine what portion of buildings are visible and only draw that. That would be computationally expensive b/c you really can't split the model up at just any old spot. It has to make sense. And that means your code has to kind of understand the geometric layout of a building. But then your code doesn't just render buildings, it also renders grass, roads, mountains, etc. So if you make it hyper aware of how buildings are constructed, now you hard-coded it to suck at everything else.

So what you could do is portal rendering like we find in some indoor FPS games. What you do is create a frustum that is created by the objects that are visible. So for instance if we look down a street the frustum created would be the area of blue sky we see that buildings do not occupy. We could theoretically draw a massive mountain in the distance, clip it to this frustum and we would be guaranteed to only render the portion of the mountain that is visible. The speedup isn't in rendering but in processing. Not only do we not render those portions, we don't even send them down the pipeline for processing. So we save cycles.

But now the question comes, is it more expensive to render the scene 100% precise in hopes of being more performant, or just rendering the whole thing brute force and taking your lumps for overdraw? That is something that must be found pragmatically through testing. Really since the W or Z buffer takes care of pixel overdraw all you are doing in the above example is saving on the depth comparison of pixels that are guaranteed to fail the test. Instead we would only be sending pixels down the pipeline that are guaranteed to pass. Therefore it would be possible to render without the W or Z buffer enabled. Is it worth the savings? Who knows.

Often what is found is some level of optimization is good, but then too much actually creates worse performance.

FS 2020 does have very aggressive frustum culling. You can see this if you look left or down left in the cockpit and are overflying trees or buildings. Notice how the trees tend to 'pop in' and then the shadows pop in soon after. At one point the culling said 'no this tree is not visible' and some time soon after it said 'yes, this tree is visible', now also draw its shadow. It is very aggressive and you can see things pop in and out at the edges of your screen b/c it is almost too precise.

[★Macman★]

Originally posted by ждун:

i tested this tool, its quite cool, but motion reprojection is better disabled with it. The tool is constantly measuring fps and adopts quickly. But motion reprojection tends to switch between certain fps like 20/30/40/60 etc... and stays there as long it can hold it. AutoFPS has an issue with this stepped performance switching. In example when motion reprojection is stable 30 autofps won't change anything as it thinks the setting are right to keep stable fps. So you get stuck with motion reprojection, better turn it off when using AutoFPS.
Cool about AutoFPS is that its tuning down terrainLOD to minimum when youre sitting on the ground. That is awesome as you don't see far objects anyway when sitting on the ground, but it significantly improves performance. Once you take off and gain a bit altitutude it starts tuning terrain LOD up keeping stable fps eventually reaching maximum LOD level when flying up high. That is really amazing feature.

Yes that was my feelings also. Gonna play with DX11 and DX12 on my old 2080 Card until I get my PC back with a 3080.