FPS Degradation on Long Flight

SinkRate

I've never had an addon do this, Starship seems to be the first. Currently 3hrs and 44 minutes into my first real long trip, and since about the 2 hour mark my FPS has been getting progressively worse. For the first 2 hours, it was buttery smooth at FL350.

Anyone else experience this?

Black Square

I had only one report of this while testing. I supplied a new version of the aircraft (the one you are using) that seemed to fix it for him, but he also made a BIOS change that improved performance across the board and eliminated any noticeable degradation effects (if there were any left). He is now happily flying Starship with no such issue, so hopefully we can solve the problem for you too!

If you open developer mode and look at FPS counter when this is happening, an every-other-frame red spike on the "Main Thread", and "Manipulators" graph would confirm that it's likely the same issue.

Here is what he shared with me to tell others:

"I did today change a setting in my BIOS that explicitly activated C-States for my CPU. This seems to be an issue with some motherboards and the new AMD CPU generation, that this setting is off by default, but dramatically improves performance once activated."

SinkRate

Thanks Nick! That's a bit counterintuitive, as C-States is a power-saving function that allows the CPU to basically "rest" threads that aren't being used. You'd think that would make performance worse, not better

Outermarker

I'm sad to report that I encountered the same on my first flight yesterday, I landed with 10 FPS after 1:35h...immediately had flashbacks to this issue that I had with the Bonanza and TBM that eventually fixed itself...I'll see if that's active in my BIOS and then try another flight.

Outermarker

I've enabled the C-States in BIOS and just finished a beautiful 3:30h flight.
This time I did not have FPS degradation over time but towards the end of the flight I did encounter the significant Main Thread and Manipulators spikes every second or so you mentioned.
This ended once parked and I turned off the avionics. It's certainly not great if the sim lags once every second but for now I'll take it over 10 FPS.

Chimaeira

I am also noticing performance degradation over time. At the end of my 2h20m flight I was at 21fps. I play in VR but normally I can reach at least a stable 40fps. Not sure if a BIOS setting will do the trick for me as I am using Intel not AMD.

Marionettework

I”ve also had such a flight after I landed at a major airport and then flew again in the same session. The framerate was really bad on the return flight. I’ll check the fps more closely if I see this again. Of course who knows if this is just a general MSFS issue.

Black Square

Not to complain too, but it's incredible that we can get this kind of differing behavior on different systems when Asobo forces us all to update, and there are only Windows systems in play. After the one report of performance degradation I received last week, I did flights up to six hours on my machine with zero loss of performance. I also exchanged modified versions of the aircraft with the tester to pinpoint the issue. We stopped when his problem was alleviated by the BIOS change.

I have an idea of where this is coming from, but once again, these things are so hard to troubleshoot when there are only a single digit percent of users who exhibit the problem. I'm happy to walk anyone through some troubleshooting here if you're willing to make some edits to the code. We might be able to find an exact cause for this (most likely in Asobo's map drawing or database loading code) any alleviate it.

LSilva

Same here, FPS dropped from ~90 to ~55 after about an hour, with the mentioned red spikes in the graphs. I enabled C-States in BIOS and so far (about 2 hours into a test flight) I haven't seen any performance degradation.

Black Square

Thanks for another data point. I haven't been able to find any information on what the "manipulators" thread really pertains to, so I will report this to Asobo and see if they have any advice or information.

SinkRate

Just a question for everyone. How many of you have Toolbar Pushback installed? Apparently it can cause this exact issue with certain addons, and it just so happens that my Starship longhaul was my first flight after installing it. I've uninstalled it and will see what happens, but I'm just wondering how many of us having this issue are also using that addon.

Outermarker

@Black-Square Sure, I'd be happy to make some edits for troubleshooting

@SinkRate I don't have that installed and I generally try to run my sim as lean as possible, only activating the add-ons I really need for the specific flight using AddonLinker

Qazme

@Black-Square said in FPS Degradation on Long Flight:

Not to complain too, but it's incredible that we can get this kind of differing behavior on different systems when Asobo forces us all to update, and there are only Windows systems in play. After the one report of performance degradation I received last week, I did flights up to six hours on my machine with zero loss of performance. I also exchanged modified versions of the aircraft with the tester to pinpoint the issue. We stopped when his problem was alleviated by the BIOS change.

I have an idea of where this is coming from, but once again, these things are so hard to troubleshoot when there are only a single digit percent of users who exhibit the problem. I'm happy to walk anyone through some troubleshooting here if you're willing to make some edits to the code. We might be able to find an exact cause for this (most likely in Asobo's map drawing or database loading code) any alleviate it.

I commented on another thread about this, I completed 2x a little over 5 hours flights yesterday and on release day I did numerous 1.5-2 hour flights, without restarting the sim just a shut down, start up, fly next leg, and have not had this issue. So I'll throw another data point out there maybe?

Windows 11, 2024 SU2 AMD 9950x3d, RTX5090, 64GB ram - running in triple 4K. So I'm taxing the simulator, this plane, and my machine about as hard as you can push everything and I've seen no issues at all with performance. In fact this is probably the smoothest plane in my entire fleet.

SinkRate

I'll add another datapoint as well. I've removed Toolbar Pushback after reading several reports of it causing exactly this issue with certain addons. It appears to have completely resolved my issue. Did a 2.5hr flight last night with no issues at all, doing a 4.5hr flight now and will report back.

Black Square

@SinkRate Thank you for this. Hopefully anyone coming here might tell us if they have the same experience with Toolbar Pushback. I will also ask the original tester who brought this to my attention if he can try this too.

Flys787

Maybe this is not the correct thread, but I was having severe stuttering issues that rendered the Starship unflyable. I raised my Rolling Cache from 100gb to 256gb(the max allowed) and the plane worked flawlessly. What a joy to have this amazing and unique airplane in the sim.

Marionettework

@SinkRate said in FPS Degradation on Long Flight:

Just a question for everyone. How many of you have Toolbar Pushback installed? Apparently it can cause this exact issue with certain addons, and it just so happens that my Starship longhaul was my first flight after installing it. I've uninstalled it and will see what happens, but I'm just wondering how many of us having this issue are also using that addon.

I also have Toolbar Pushback installed. I'll try with and without and report back if I see the FPS issue again.

SinkRate

I wish I could say that removing toolbar pushback fixed things, but I can confirm that the issue is still present without it. It happens after Starship has been loaded up and operated continuously for around 8 hours. Just did Gander to Keflavik, then Keflavik to London. Each leg about 4.5hrs, with an hour on the ground in Keflavik. Right around 3 hours into the second leg, performance began dropping steadily. Maybe a memory leak somewhere?

Outermarker

I never used Toolbar Pushback to begin with and still have degrading FPS and/or MainThread lag spikes.

Black Square

Okay, anyone who wants to test this for me, here is the first thing that I would try. It's extremely simple.

Locate ...\bksq-aircraft-starship\html_ui\Pages\VCockpit\Instruments\NavSystems\bksq-aircraft-starship\MFDmapConfig.json

Change preventLabelOverlap to false. That's it.

There is a chance that you will have to drag the aircraft's layout.json on top of the MSFSLayoutGenerator afterwards, but only in MSFS 2024.

If that doesn't work...

I have already heard confirmation that removing both ND's and the MFD from each panel.cfg eliminates the problem, but it would be nice to get some additional confirmations that this is indeed where the problem lies.

To do this, you can either remove or comment out the three [VCockpit] entries in each panel.cfg (or in only one aircraft, if you're feeling confident of which is which) that include "MFD", or "ND". No renumbering in the file is required. Comments can be made by beginning each line with // or ;.

After that, I'm afraid that it will take some volunteers to solve this one again. If any of you have already written to Just Flight about the waypoint deletion CTD, and also experience this problem, then let me know.

Much appreciation again. As you might imagine, these bugs that only affect some number of users, and none of my beta testers can be a real pain to track down, so I am very thankful for your willingness to help.