Microsoft Releases Flight Simulator Patch Improving Performance By 10%

[Uskompuf]

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.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[kayjay010101]

All their effort should be spent on porting the damn thing to DX12. Let me use more than 4 threads total, with 3 of those sitting mostly unused and a single thread maxed out. All the optimization in the world can't fix their broken usage of available threads.

 

[DemonicRyzen666]

All their effort should be spent on porting the damn thing to DX12. Let me use more than 4 threads total, with 3 of those sitting mostly unused and a single thread maxed out. All the optimization in the world can't fix their broken usage of available threads.

One should really wonder why it isn't on DX 12 at all. How long has DirectX12 been out ?
Porting seems like a bad idea. A ground up build should have happened in the first place on DX12.

 

[bug]

One should really wonder why it isn't on DX 12 at all.

Probably to underscore Microsoft's faith in that API?

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.

 

[DemonicRyzen666]

Probably to underscore Microsoft's faith in that API?

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 should have let in this then "DX12 even Microsoft won't use it"

I agree only because it seems you'll probably never get a jack of trades.
you need both.

 

[repman244]

All their effort should be spent on porting the damn thing to DX12. Let me use more than 4 threads total, with 3 of those sitting mostly unused and a single thread maxed out. All the optimization in the world can't fix their broken usage of available threads.

Making a game in DX12 won't magically enable it using more threads.

 

[Antykain]

DX12 support is being worked on still, I'm sure. They did say during the developer Q&A last year (!!) that it was going to coming to FS2020. I would have hoped that it would have been included with the release, but.. Been trying to find the source, but I do remember reading something from last month saying it was going to be released "very soon". What exactly "very soon" means, I guess time will tell..

(Dev Q&A from Sept 2019)

 

[Vayra86]

But but 'muh Maxwell card can't do DX12 proper! HALP!'

Remember... Another funny one was the panic for Dx12 not coming to W7... look where we are now

 

[mastrdrver]

It's not DX12 because the game was not originally designed by Microsoft and, if I remember correctly, was originally began before DX12 even came out.

 

[wtfbbqlol]

The improvements for some of us have been much more significant than the 10% indicates.

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

• 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 memory limited computers.
• Overall performance optimizations.

 

[Bubster]

3950 X and 2080 ti to get only 70 -80 fps in 1080p ....this is a resources guzzling buggy game. even FSX doesn't work any longer since Windows 10...especially virtual cockpit.

 

[wtfbbqlol]

A few days ago, a couple posts up I wrote "So with this latest patch I don't have to run Process Lasso to stop the freeze/stutters anymore"

- 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.