MSFS Key Settings Guide | Are you changing the right settings for best performance? AI Traffic & LOD

in this video we're going to be having a look at two things firstly some in Sim settings that you should be looking at but probably aren't and may be unaware of the big impact they have on the overall Sim performance and secondly we're going to be having a look at one or two of the graphic options I'll be explaining and demonstrating exactly what they do and the chances are they're not doing what you think they're doing and as they're key to overall performance this may be degrading your sim experience unnecessarily allow me to make a quick but very important explanation on performance and frames per second we'll keep things simple so for you technophobes out there take the blue pill as I will be generalizing it's all about the amount of data and your system's ability to process that information in a timely manner this information is coming directly from the program and at times will also include some stream data the more data being processed by your your system the lower the FPS and of course bandwidth could be a consideration stutters and pauses occur when there's a particularly big batch of data to be processed and it's waiting on one of the components to complete the processing before proceeding to the next as a general guide in all things flight Sim faster is better and the relationship between your CPU graphics card and the amount of system RAM and the speed thereof will all directly influence how good or poorly your system is able to process this data in Microsoft flight simulator we've got a variety of different settings we can change and this is there so we can vary the amount of data being fed into the system to achieve a reasonable performance High FPS turn those settings up low FPS well too much data turns something down that's the reality welcome back to the Sim Hangar my name's mark thank you very much for watching and let's get started as we we want to highlight one or two points we've kept the Sim as vanilla as possible using the developer mode I've just put on the FPS counter we're at London Heathrow this is default scenery no add-on let's head to our general options menu and by default it opens on the graphics tab I'm running in 4k full screen mode and TAA NTA listening and it's here you'll normally come to tweak one setting or another my settings are mainly a mixture of high-end Ultra but for this video my settings are not important because we're heading to the traffic Tab and it's here we'll find some of the biggest hitters in terms of FPS and these settings will impact on you whether or not you're flying on the monitor or in VR these settings are generic across the Sim currently I'm getting about 54 FPS on average okay let's head back to the traffic Tab and here you can see my current settings the FPS that I'm actually getting in Sim are not really important don't get hung up on those different systems configurations graphics cards Etc will yield different results as we we progress through this video The Importance will be the difference in the FPS from one setting to the next and what factors improve or degrade performance and it's these indications that will provide a guideline to you for changes to your system depending on your personal preference of course the first thing we're going to highlight is the impact of AI traffic on your system and how the different settings can impact FPS significantly Land and Sea traffic also has a big impact but I'm going to leave those alone at the current setting for now I've turned off AI traffic and reset all the airport life settings to zero one thing to note turning your Aviation traffic to off does not disable any settings under your airport life okay everything's set to zero apply and save and let's return back to sim as is normal just give the sim a few moments to settle down and although my previous AI traffic levels were not set that High by turning it off my FPS has increased by about 12 or 22 percent so I'm now probably averaging around about 66 FPS does this mean we should never fly with AI traffic no not at all but it does highlight the impact that it can have on your system let's head back to our traffic Tab and let's now go to The Other Extreme everything on all maxed out to 100 for both Aviation traffic and for airport life that's done apply and save and let's head back to our Sim and now we'll just have to wait a minute or two whilst the Sim spawns in the AI traffic don't worry about the FPS let it settle first okay about 45 seconds has gone by things seems to have settled down and I estimate an average of about 35 FPS so the difference on my system between AI off and AI at Max is around 31 FPS or about 47 my frame rates have almost halved the difference between 66 and 35. back to our menu and now if you like we know the best case and worst case scenario in terms of FPS you can now experiment with different settings for both air traffic density and air life to establish optimal settings for your system the aviation traffic settings in simple terms relates to that traffic that's moving that could be around the airport as well as inbound and outbound air traffic airport life settings which again are highlight are separate adds vehicles and static aircraft as well as workers to your scenery you need to experiment with both as they're related I can demonstrate that we'll leave some ground aircraft density on and turn the AI aircraft traffic density down to zero and we can then head back to sim and see what the impact is what we've effectively done is disabled the moving or in transit aircraft but our airport is still populated as shown in Sim you need about 30 fps to get a reasonable performance slightly more if possible if using AI traffic you'll want to settle at around about 45 FPS if you can and that'll give you the required Headroom for AI traffic the default AI traffic is certainly not optimized it's very heavy on the system and I found third-party apps like FS LTL AI traffic a much better option giving me more traffic with less of an FPS hit for those interested fsltl is available from the flyby wire team Link in the notes below so in summary pay attention to your AI traffic settings as you saw they can reduce my FPS by a substantial amount by nearly 50 percent set your minimum and maximum and experiment from there what your system is capable of but talking of graphic settings it's time to move on from here we're going to move on to our Graphics Tab and here I want to explain two of the graphics setting to the best of my limited knowledge and their impact on the Sim they are the terrain level of detail and the object's level of detail two settings that are often misunderstood their labels can be confusing and arguably should be relabeled draw distance I've now turned up the terrain level of detail all the way up to 400 you may have assumed the main function of the setting is to change the texture resolution up or down of the terrain but its main function is to vary short nor lengthen the draw distance of rendered items and this in turn will either increase or decrease the load being put on the GPU and CPU this is particularly heavy on the CPU a good example of this is the trees here those trees close to us on the right hand side have remained unchanged but notice increased detail has reduced our FPS at the end of the last section we were on about 60. once again let's go to The Other Extreme and we'll turn it down from 400 down to the minimum which is 10 and let's have a look at the scenery again apply and save FPS has jumped right up and things certainly look different those trees that are close to us on the right hand side they haven't changed they're exactly the same as they were before both in terms of texture and detail but when we cast our eyes further out to the Horizon many of the trees have now disappeared and we've just got green Patches by reducing the slider to zero we've effectively said just draw what's close to us in detail our fps's around the upper 60s let's wind it back up to 400 percent and return to the Sim again just to remind us of the impact on FPS give it a moment or two to settle and time to draw in the additional vegetation and we've gone from the upper 60s to the upper 30s it's quite a significant difference if you're an airline pilot you may want to turn that setting down if you're a bush pilot well you may want to put it up as with all things it's trial and error for my system I find something between 100 and 150 works very well I'm going to set it for 130 we'll apply and save and quickly jump back to sim so we can see what sort of difference that's made and that 130 setting is giving me the best of both worlds I've got trees out in the distance perhaps not as densely packed but that suits my type of flying and the FPS has jumped up again more than acceptable to the mid 50s let's now jump back to our graphic settings and I just want to make a quick comment on the off-screen terrain pre-caching I currently have mine set on high I tend to be corrected on this one but as far as I can ascertain the various settings of low medium high and Ultra determine how much of the scenery around you almost draws a circle around you is rendered low predominantly in front of you Ultra all the way around you 360 degrees in effect it's pre-loading scenery that you haven't looked at yet if I've got that wrong let me know in the comments below I'd appreciate it getting this setting right is really important for those flying in VR and can have a big impact on the degree of stutter's experience a setting of high works well for me but it's worth experimenting and compromising elsewhere if you need to okay and finally let's move on to object's level of detail my current setting is 100 maximum is 200. the minimum is 10 which is the lowest setting let's exit back to the Sim just bear with me on this one it does take some explaining these are part of the default scenery they're static items and the object's level of detail setting determines two things the distance at which rendered items are drawn in just like the terrain and depending on the object that's being drawn how much of the detail is rendered items such as these cargo containers have very few different levels of detail and will normally be loaded when the airports loaded itself or certainly very early on whereas the luggage trailer behind it has multiple detail levels and will only be rendered as you get closer how early will depend on the setting 10 being very close or 200 further away regardless of the setting that we've applied when we're very close to an item we can see fine detail and relatively high levels of texturing so maintaining our view let's go back and change our object level of detail from 10 all the way up to 200 and have another look at that container and you'll be able to see from this image there's absolutely no difference the image is exactly the same because we're close up the difference the setting makes relates not to the level of detail applied but the distance at which it's visible hope that makes sense so let me return our object's level of detail back to the default I had 100 and let's return to Heathrow and now we're going to slowly zoom in and if you have a look where my mouse is pointing we can see that those containers are already visible not at the full detail obviously but they're there but there are other items in this scenery in that area that will only become visible as we get closer how close we get before the detail is shown will depend on the setting in our object level of detail you can see here now some of the luggage trailers are being drawn they're being drawn at different times and different distances to ease the load on the system if it loaded everything at full detail as you approach the airport the Sim would probably freeze for a while and the closer we get for some of the items the more detail we get faster CPUs and gpus can accommodate a higher setting because they're faster and can do so without pausing the Sim let's pay attention to what I assume is a luggage trailer with a blue side on the left hand side my current object level of detail is 100 factorial settings and we're going to reset that down to the minimum which is 10 and then head back to sim and see if we can notice any difference take a look at the wheels they're no longer wheels just ugly blocks but have a look at our containers in the center they're still well rendered going back to what we said at the beginning of the video it's all about the amount of data your system can handle and explains why When approaching a busy airport you experience those stutters and pauses on occasions if it's a regular occurrence you may need to turn your object level of detail down so it renders more images only when you're closer Let's Get Closer now and the wheels have now been rendered they're still fairly blocky but if we get closer still they've now been fully rendered and all more round and realistic as we pull back we'll get a lower rendered image and we'll start to lose the detail of the item and our ugly blocks will return So at the minimum setting our trolleys have turned to blocks from this distance so let's hold this position and head back into our Sim and you know exactly what we're going to do back to the object levels of detail push it all the way up to 200 and let's go back and see if there's any change and immediately we can see that wheels are there and they're fully drawn we can now pull back further and see what difference we get between 10 and 200 and as we pull back further and further we will eventually get to a distance where the blocky wheels will then appear there they are so different items have different render levels and our slider changes the distance at which these changes take place the earlier it takes place the more your system may have to do and a further load on your GPU and CPU here's perhaps a simpler example object level of detail is 200 and even at the further extents of the airport we can see some detail from this distance it looks like there's some jetways or Vehicles there and so on once again back to our Sim and we're going to change our object level of detail and turn it all the way down to 10. apply and save and let's go back to the same view those items closer to us have remained unchanged but we can see here this far less detail further out in the airport we'd have to get a whole lot closer to the terminal at the far end before it rendered any of the additional items have you ever wondered why we get such good performance on the Xbox or Microsoft flight simulator just the object and terrain level of detail on the fly it does it automatically on PC it's a manual intervention personally I normally have my object level of detail set at 100. it's the Midway point and seems to suit me best but I do have a fairly powerful system the purpose of this video was to highlight to you the impact that the AI traffic settings can have on your sim and also for me to explain I'm no expert so in my limited capacity how both terrain level of detail and object level of details work and once again they can have a big impact on your FPS it may also help you understand why you're getting pauses or stutters When approaching a large airport and if the developer has been a little bit lazy and allowed most of the things to load straight away you'll feel the impact even more and hopefully it will have assisted you in determining best settings for your system thank you very much for joining me today look after yourselves stay well I'll see you again soon and bye for now

Channel: SimHanger Flight Simulation

Views: 34,236

Keywords: fsltl, msfs 2020, microsoft flight simulator, microsoft flight simulator 2020, msfs settings guide, msfs tutorial, msfs tutorial xbox

Id: clG_8HpTlGM

Length: 17min 30sec (1050 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 23 2023