Wednesday, September 23rd 2020
Microsoft Releases Flight Simulator Patch Improving Performance By 10%
Microsoft have recently released Flight Simulator patch 1.8.3.0 which provides major optimizations, especially in CPU-limited scenarios. The specific improvements include; Optimized cockpit screen display when screens are not displayed on screen, New option available to control cockpit screen update frequency, Tweaked CPU thread priorities to reduce interruption of frame critical threads, Optimized loading system to reduce overall loading times, Optimized heavy airport scenes impact on CPU, Reduced the amount of GPU overdraw to improve GPU performance, Memory optimizations to reduce software memory footprint and improve performance on limited memory computers.
These improvements will provide strong performance benefits to all players especially those who are CPU constrained. Overclock 3D has tested the latest patch and have recorded improvements of 11.4% at 1080p with average framerates increasing from 79.5 FPS to 88.6 FPS on their NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti and an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X test bench. They also noted an improvement in 1st Percentile framerates increasing from 71.3 FPS to 74.6 FPS. These performance improvements will be most notable in "heavy airport scenes" where Microsoft has focused their optimization efforts.
Source:
OC3D Internal Testing
These improvements will provide strong performance benefits to all players especially those who are CPU constrained. Overclock 3D has tested the latest patch and have recorded improvements of 11.4% at 1080p with average framerates increasing from 79.5 FPS to 88.6 FPS on their NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti and an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X test bench. They also noted an improvement in 1st Percentile framerates increasing from 71.3 FPS to 74.6 FPS. These performance improvements will be most notable in "heavy airport scenes" where Microsoft has focused their optimization efforts.
11 Comments on Microsoft Releases Flight Simulator Patch Improving Performance By 10%
Porting seems like a bad idea. A ground up build should have happened in the first place on DX12.
Joking aside, I still don't see a low-level API as the solution to everything. I believe a higher-level one will still be needed for years to come.
I agree only because it seems you'll probably never get a jack of trades.
you need both.
Remember... :D Another funny one was the panic for Dx12 not coming to W7... look where we are now :P
A bunch of people, including myself, had these massive frame freezes and stutters that would tank the framerate from like 40fps to 0fps for like 10 seconds. And the game would regularly dip to the low 20s fps for multiples seconds too as it tries to do...something. Some Reddit users found a temp workaround by lowering the game priority through Process Lasso and that mostly fixed the big freeze and stutters - good thing the game devs picked up on this and implemented something like this in-game (see below).
So with this latest patch I don't have to run Process Lasso to stop the freeze/stutters anymore, and the game's average framerates are noticeably higher too! Running high settings @1440p regularly gets me 45-60fps flying over cities, and usually locked 60fps if I'm more than a couple thousand feet up in the air.
From the 1.8.3.0 patch notes. I bolded the fix that probably solved the terrible game freezes and stutters
PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT
- I did more testing over the weekend. It seems there are still a few situations where the Process Lasso hack helps. When flying quite low (<1000 feet, I did this over a specific stretch in NYC: from a building next to Central park going south towards the Empire State Building) the CPU usage is very high, frequently hitting 99%-100%. Under this situation, running the game without Process Lasso frequently causes the game to stutter from about 40fps to 28-30fps. When running Process Lasso, the game steadies with much smaller drops from about 40fps to 35fps. It's definitely noticeable and repeatable; I repeated this over multiple game sessions doing the same thing over and over again. So FYI.