13 minutes ago, cwburnett said:

Thanks, I had read about this, but the symptoms didn't align with mine. Anyhow, I gave it a go. It does somewhat improve FPS in-game when the spikes happen. So, the CPU spikes still exist, but with the 'background tasks' tweak enabled, I now only drop a few FPS instead of 10-ish. So before this 'fix' I fell to about 20 fps for the 5 seconds of the spike every 5 mins or so. Now, I only go down to 27 fps, but the stutter is still present. I then tried setting the priority for the flightsimulator.exe process to Low as also suggested, but that had no impact.

Thanks for reporting back. Didn’t help me but many in the reddit thread.

Hard to know what’s really helping and whatnot with all these tweaks and fixes popping up lol.

At the end of the day we’ll need either a patch or new hardware lol.

1 hour ago, TheRandomGuy said:

Sounds to me like you would benefit from the processor scheduling tweak to prioritize background apps in Win 10.

https://reddit.com/r/flightsim/comments/idmdqq/update_msfs_2020_stuttering_when_window_focused/

Dont forget to change it back when not flying.

This is the winner. After doing this, the stuttering is gone even when CPU usage goes to 100%. My CPU runs cooler and the fans spin up less, too, which I don't fully understand but is certainly a nice bonus!

Probably just a band-aid for now, but I'll take it.

Thanks!

James

I would definitely try turning off Real-World and AI live air traffic. (There will still be airplanes on the ground at your airports.) I was having similar experiences with stutters on takeoff at the handcrafted airports -- problems which I thought were caused by the complex detail of the airport buildings. But when I turned off Real-World and AI air traffic, the stutters completely went away, and I could fly past these same buildings during takeoff without stutters. I think a lot of people are blaming detailed airport scenery for their FPS hit when the problem is actually with the Real-World and AI traffic parked NEXT to that airport scenery.

1 hour ago, cwburnett said:

It was, but just tested this as well and the CPU spikes appear even when set to the Clear Skies theme...

Thanks for all the suggestions...this is pretty odd.

I notice exactly the same, Did you get anywhere with this?

I also have a i5 9600K @ 5Ghz. Full specs below. I can lock to 60FPS and it is really smooth then all of a sudden my CPU hits 100% and the FPS tanks, then after a few seconds it will recover. I have the installation on a 7,200 RPM WD Black at the moment as I did not have any spare SSD space. Not ideal I know and I was wondering if that contributes to the issue. I am only flying GA aircraft at the moment as the airliners are just a slide show at present, Mind you low and slow in MSFS 2020 is simply sublime when things behave.

If I feel like a long haul I will jump into X-Plane and my FF A320, Zibo 737X or FF B757

Hopefully future updates will resolve these issues.

So, as an update....

Basically none of the suggested solutions in this thread have helped, though I appreciate them all and have tested each one.

I did make one change that has improved things, and that was to undo a stupid mistake I made in my overclock settings. I was writing a post the other day in the hardware forum and explaining to someone not to use an AVX offset with flight sims. And, in looking to confirm what the setting options were, I inadvertently apparently enabled an AVX offset of -1. I just undid that and while I am still seeing the spikes in CPU and some slowdown, it appears to be less frequent and of shorter duration. I'm about half way LGA-BOS on my latest test and have only had one CPU spike.

I have re-enabled rolling cache, I have undone the "Background Apps" tweak and I have returned to setting the sim to run at High priority. I have also re-enabled live weather.

I'll report back with further updates after this test flight.

@Richdem do you by any chance have a non-zero AVX offset set in your OC settings? 

15 minutes ago, David Mills said:

I would definitely try turning off Real-World and AI live air traffic. (There will still be airplanes on the ground at your airports.) I was having similar experiences with stutters on takeoff at the handcrafted airports -- problems which I thought were caused by the complex detail of the airport buildings. But when I turned off Real-World and AI air traffic, the stutters completely went away, and I could fly past these same buildings during takeoff without stutters. I think a lot of people are blaming detailed airport scenery for their FPS hit when the problem is actually with the Real-World and AI traffic parked NEXT to that airport scenery.

Absolutely. I turned this off pretty much right away. AI is a murderer as of now in this sim.

2 minutes ago, cwburnett said:

So, as an update....

Basically none of the suggested solutions in this thread have helped, though I appreciate them all and have tested each one.

I did make one change that has improved things, and that was to undo a stupid mistake I made in my overclock settings. I was writing a post the other day in the hardware forum and explaining to someone not to use an AVX offset with flight sims. And, in looking to confirm what the setting options were, I inadvertently apparently enabled an AVX offset of -1. I just undid that and while I am still seeing the spikes in CPU and some slowdown, it appears to be less frequent and of shorter duration. I'm about half way LGA-BOS on my latest test and have only had one CPU spike.

I have re-enabled rolling cache, I have undone the "Background Apps" tweak and I have returned to setting the sim to run at High priority. I have also re-enabled live weather.

I'll report back with further updates after this test flight.

@Richdem do you by any chance have a non-zero AVX offset set in your OC settings? 

I am just finishing a flight in X-Plane. I will jump into my BIOS settings when I get a chance. What section would this be under? I do not remember that setting when I originally did the O/C

Looking at resource monitor I seem to lose a whole core to various services - mainly AppInfo - do other people see the same?

I've been flying the same half hour saved flight for the last two days trying to figure out why I have 5 mins of smooth flight followed by 30 secs of stutter

Trying multiple things finally had a flight without any stutters perfectly smooth. Never had any flights before without stutters.

Not saying this is a fix for me but here is what worked

Set my monitor to 60 fps

In Nvidia settings set FPS to 31 and 1/2 refresh rate

Set advanced windows settings to background applications per this thread

Do not know if all of these are necessary but its working for the first time

 

 

 

 

5 minutes ago, SteveFx said:

Looking at resource monitor I seem to lose a whole core to various services - mainly AppInfo - do other people see the same?

Would you mind sharing a screenshot of what that looks like in your resource manager? Want to be sure I'm comparing apples to apples.

7 minutes ago, cwburnett said:

So, as an update....

Basically none of the suggested solutions in this thread have helped, though I appreciate them all and have tested each one.

I did make one change that has improved things, and that was to undo a stupid mistake I made in my overclock settings. I was writing a post the other day in the hardware forum and explaining to someone not to use an AVX offset with flight sims. And, in looking to confirm what the setting options were, I inadvertently apparently enabled an AVX offset of -1. I just undid that and while I am still seeing the spikes in CPU and some slowdown, it appears to be less frequent and of shorter duration. I'm about half way LGA-BOS on my latest test and have only had one CPU spike.

I have re-enabled rolling cache, I have undone the "Background Apps" tweak and I have returned to setting the sim to run at High priority. I have also re-enabled live weather.

I'll report back with further updates after this test flight.

@Richdem do you by any chance have a non-zero AVX offset set in your OC settings? 

I've read alot on different forums/reddit. Those who don't manage to solve their performance issues with different tweaks/change of in-game settings either have i3 or i5 processors. They lack hyperthreading. I'm starting to believe that we might be out of luck in case Asobo can't find some specific issue. Also from what I've seen most people with i7 or i9 processors either don't have any problems or they manage to sort it out by trying out different fixes and/or enabling HT in case it was disabled. Surely some poor soul with an i7 or i9 might still have problems but it doesn't seem to be as many.

3 minutes ago, Denwagg said:

I've been flying the same half hour saved flight for the last two days trying to figure out why I have 5 mins of smooth flight followed by 30 secs of stutter

Trying multiple things finally had a flight without any stutters perfectly smooth. Never had any flights before without stutters.

Not saying this is a fix for me but here is what worked

Set my monitor to 60 fps

In Nvidia settings set FPS to 31 and 1/2 refresh rate

Set advanced windows settings to background applications per this thread

Do not know if all of these are necessary but its working for the first time

 

 

 

 

Where in NVidia Control Panel do you set teh FPS to 31?

27 minutes ago, cwburnett said:

Would you mind sharing a screenshot of what that looks like in your resource manager? Want to be sure I'm comparing apples to apples.

sure

 

 

 

30 minutes ago, TheRandomGuy said:

I've read alot on different forums/reddit. Those who don't manage to solve their performance issues with different tweaks/change of in-game settings either have i3 or i5 processors. They lack hyperthreading. I'm starting to believe that we might be out of luck in case Asobo can't find some specific issue. Also from what I've seen most people with i7 or i9 processors either don't have any problems or they manage to sort it out by trying out different fixes and/or enabling HT in case it was disabled. Surely some poor soul with an i7 or i9 might still have problems but it doesn't seem to be as many.

I think that minimum hardware requirements for MFS should be eight logical cores. Until I enabled hyperthreading and thereby raised the number of my logical cores from four to eight, the sim was pretty much unusable on my i7. What I still find completely baffling is why I got perfectly fine performance on the alpha/beta test builds with hyperthreading disabled, but when the final, commercial version was released, I had to enable hyperthreading (once I learned what it was) to get the sim to run properly. Any theories?

15 minutes ago, David Mills said:

I think that minimum hardware requirements for MFS should be eight logical cores. Until I enabled hyperthreading and thereby raised the number of my logical cores from four to eight, the sim was pretty much unusable on my i7. What I still find completely baffling is why I got perfectly fine performance on the alpha/beta test builds with hyperthreading disabled, but when the final, commercial version was released, I had to enable hyperthreading (once I learned what it was) to get the sim to run properly. Any theories?

They broke the program that was running fine.