Huge stutters / low GPU after time or month change

Hi all,

 

Generally happy with the sim so far but tonight I've been doing some flying over Heathrow. The flight will start smooth and stay that way unless I change the time of day or month then the GPU throttles right down and it becomes a slide show. I've changed the Windows preference (GPu scheduling to On) and Windows balanced power setting to the PCI (off) but none of these things has had an effect.

 

Some times, it will settle down and the GPU load will ramp back up again. All temps are good, CPU usage is low (35% ish), Ram is around 50%, nothing seems to be under any strain, it seems to be coasting instead of running it's little cores off! It’s a 1070ti running a single monitor 1440p.

 

I've read so many threads and tried so many things but run out of ideas.

 

Any new ideas?

 

Thanks

Neil

Edited October 19, 2020 by guzler

Hi Neil,

 

I have the same problem and made a post recently here. https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?326569-Low-GPU-and-CPU-Utilization

 

I've been doing a lot research and testing over past few days and can't get GPU usage higher than about 50%. I've tried many different settings too numerous to mention. From what I've read it's common issue many are having with MSFS. Normally a low end CPU paired with a newer GPU will bottleneck the GPU. I have a I7-8700 with a GTX 1080, so I don't see how the I7 would be bottlenecking the 1080.

 

The only way I've increased GPU usage is to up the resolution to 150-200, but FPS suffers and image quality doesn't look any better on 1080p. Same as you, my CPU and GPU don't seem stressed at all and I'm just chalking it down to MSFS optimization issues with certain CPUs and GPUs.

The sim isn't using all the cores equally. At this point, almost all the CPU operation is fully using one or two cores, and doing little with the others, consequently, even though one core is maxed out, the other cores are only running minor processing tasks and are vastly underused, thus the low CPU usage. One core is really getting a workout, and becomes the bottleneck. Supposedly, the plan is to implement more distributed core function when DX12 version comes out. I am sure they are working to optimize more core distribution now, but it doesn't sound like there is a lot they can do with current Direct X. That is why an I5 9600K has about the same performance as an I7 at this point, the sim can't efficiently yet use all the cores.

BTW, I am seeing 65% GPU usage and in dense areas I have seen it at 85%.

Edited October 20, 2020 by plainsman

Hi guys,

 

I did some more experimentation this morning by turning on the developer mode to monitor activity and downloading HWMonitor and come to the same conclusion, one core is bottlenecking whilst the others are under utilised.

 

However, last week and over the weekend I was doing some flights over central London with Orbx London City & Landmark packages installed and it run smoothly with the GPU at 95-100%. I could change month & time with no effect and was blown away with the sim in all areas. Since then, I've added more custom scenery, updated the game via the content manager which included Heathrow and now I am having terrible stutters and it's like FSX all over again! I need to do some more like for like testing to see whether something has changed in the game or whether the fact that I'm flying in different high density areas and adding extra stuff to the game is contributing.

 

At least I now know why the GPU isn't getting maximised so it's a step forwards, just looking at a wall now though!

 

Thanks

Neil

Hi all,

 

...The flight will start smooth and stay that way unless I change the time of day or month then the GPU throttles right down and it becomes a slide show.

 

Any new ideas?

 

Thanks

Neil

 

Of course it stutters. It's loading in new scenery.

So tonight I've been doing some more experimenting but got no where. What have I tried?

 

Removed XMP setting

Removed most of Community addons

Gone back to NVidia driver 456.55

 

At first, all looked good on the new driver, I'm getting steady flights over central London with GPU running above 80% and staying there like I was originally. This was a noticeable improvement over the current driver 456.71. However taking off from Heathrow, all was good, nice n smooth until I changed the time and the stuttering started and progressively got worse. Max core load on the highest core was 50-60% yet the GPU gradually reduced until it was 25% after about 5 minutes of watching a slide show.

 

If the issue was loading new scenery, I wouldn't expect to see it getting worse 5 minutes after changing the time and smooth at the start of a flight.

 

Very frustrating

Im convinced there is some kind of glitch in the program now. I was flying round southampton with a city detail pack for around 10 minutes and it suddenly started stuttering. No cores were near max load . I went to restart the game but noticed the GPU shot up when I pressed the restart button. Instead of clicking the YES prompt, I clicked NO, went back in to the game and all smooth again. I'll try that as a quick fixer from now.

I don't think it is related to XMP, I have had that on all the time and I don't have these problems yet. I also run vsync, and again it has not been a problem for me. After the last driver update, the appearance seemed to degrade a little, particularly at distance. It could just be my eyes are getting older or it could be Nvidea lowered something to reduce fatigue on overworked GPUs??

I don't think it is related to XMP, I have had that on all the time and I don't have these problems yet. I also run vsync, and again it has not been a problem for me. After the last driver update, the appearance seemed to degrade a little, particularly at distance. It could just be my eyes are getting older or it could be Nvidea lowered something to reduce fatigue on overworked GPUs??

 

I’ve since Re-enabled xmp, I was just trying things earlier. I’m quite happy with the older driver, I seem to be having less issues. Tomorrow I’ll look at background apps to see if anything is conflicting. At the moment, I’m not seeing the issues Being related to a single core hitting it’s limit in most cases, something else is causing it. It’s like the pc just chills out! Performance in windows and nvidia control panel are all set to high performance.

 

Most of the time flight simming is not in fact flying but meddling with pc settings!

...The flight will start smooth and stay that way unless I change the time of day or month...

 

You can specify time and date BEFORE you start a flight. If it stutters if you change it, don't do it. Why agonize over it?

 

As I mentioned before, scenery is being loaded to reflect your changes.

 

Do you have a fast internet connection and are you using NVMe drives? I can see that as your only solution.

You can specify time and date BEFORE you start a flight. If it stutters if you change it, don't do it. Why agonize over it?

 

As I mentioned before, scenery is being loaded to reflect your changes.

 

Do you have a fast internet connection and are you using NVMe drives? I can see that as your only solution.

 

The internet’s no problem, it’s all hard wired in with good results. When the issues are happening, network activity has been negligible. My set up is on an m.2 1gb ssd separate to the system too. last night I was flying along enjoying the scenery over Southampton For about 15 minutes with everything smooth and it suddenly started stuttering with no obvious high load issues on the cpu, Gpu, network or disk activity according to the task manager and hwmonitor. I’d like to get to the bottom of that. I did a stress test on the gpu but all seems well there.

Good news. I ran a scan on the system tonight SFC / Scannow and it identified and fixed some errors. Since then, the GPU is back up and flying and the stutters have been minimal. It looks like Windows has got damaged somewhere in the last week. now when I change time, there's a few stutters as expected but then it quickly settles down and gets back to business.

 

What a drama! Happy chap now!

Just a bit puzzled - why would you want to change the month, or even day? Time I could perhaps understand if you were, for example, overtaken by nightfall.

 

I'd hazard a guess that it's not a situation the programmers anticipated - there must be plenty of others - and the sim itself is reacting to the situation as best it can (or in your case, can't) do, not having specific coded instructions. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

 

Do a report to Zendesk about it, but meanwhile if it's bothering you, don't do it!

 

As regards the CPU, I'm not a techie but I read elsewhere about the cores not sharing the load so I've got a little app called Speccy that lets me read what the CPU is doing. It's telling me that my Ryzen 5 CPU is sharing the load across all 6 cores equally, which is probably why I see the CPU often running at 50% and occasionally up to max when it's first loading up the sim.