[tpmx]

Before anyone gets excited and goes to buy the game outright:

First: Please consider trying out the game via the Xbox Game Pass for PC program instead. $5/month, $1 for the first month instead of buying it outright. Do remember to cancel. Thank me later.

Second: The whole download/install experience is a trip. You need to download about ~90 GB of data (no problem!). However, the downloader is abysmal. It's not optimized for throughput at all, each (often small) file is individually downloaded and then uncompressed in sequence. Is this 1997? My favorite bug: if you minimize the download window it starts using 100% of the GPU. This is kind of indicative of what you'll experience later on - that special kind of randomness that stems from developer incompetence. Most people (including me) seem to need to restart the whole thing a couple of times. Loads of people are simply stuck at the download step.

Third: Loading times with this game are insane. It can take a minute or two (with a very fast 6-core CPU, 1 Gbit/s network connection, M.2 SSD, etc) to load the main menu, because it seems to download the scenery for the stuff that is vaguely visible in the background scenery every time. Then another minute or two for actually getting started with your flight. And when going back from flight mode to the main menu: yeah, another 1-2 mins.

Fourth: When you actually get to start the aircraft:

- There are loads of bugs that cause insane FPS drops/frameskips.

- There currently seems to exist an issue that causes FPS slowdowns when the Azure-based geometry servers are slow. Did they do blocking networking in the same thread as the rendering? :) No idea, but the propblem is for for real. The typical FPS is higher when fewer people are playing. All of those gorgeous youtube videos you've seen from before the launch? Yeah, those are no longer representative. Also, I think most of them have been carefully edited. There are just way too many random FPS and frame skipping bugs abound. It's a mess.

I recommend looking at a recorded live stream (from recent days) to get a better understanding of the simulation performance.

(I've spent maybe 6 hours with MSFS2020 so far.)

Fifth: This is a very complicated application. There is no documentation.

Sixth: I'm running on a GTX 1070 with 8 GB of video memory, so sadly I can only run this at 1080p. When everything is working perfectly it's kinda smooth - about 40 fps. Most of the time though, something is causing a severe FPS slowdown, so closer to 5-10 fps. It's all kind of random. It seems like most of these issues are bugs, rather than the hardware meeting actual limitations. Changing the display quality (ultra/high/etc doesn't really impact these random variations in FPS much.)

Seventh: The in-game credits start with this sequence: DESIGN, UI DEVELOPMENT, PROGRAMMING. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive here, but to me this order could sort of explain why this disaster shipped in its current form.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. So many insane bugs.

Most infuriating of all: The constant social media spam about how this is fantastic. Talk of framerate issue issues/slowdowns/bugs is constantly downvoted e.g. on reddit.

Anyone thinking about getting this game should first read through https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftFlightSim/comments/ic3o90/...

Of course there are also many positive aspects of this app/game. I just wanted to bring attention to what I think should have been showstopper issues.

[racingmars]

Welcome to the world of flight simulation! I've been in to flight simulation for a long time, and while there are definite rough edges that need to be improved, this really does represent the next leap forward in what's available for this hobby. X-Plane with ortho scenery installed on my system has much longer load times. Prepar3d has lower framerates when you get some good scenery and a good aircraft loaded. I wish flight sim performed like AAA games. But this really does represent a significant improvement to the genre relative to what we've had before. It'll be a while before the high-quality add-on aircraft are ported over and available, as well as other types of content where hand-made airports and such are much better than the mostly-auto-generated content that comes with the game... but out of the box the new MSFS really does look so much more realistic (not just the earth but the sky: weather) and performs better than what we're used to.

So from the perspective of existing simmers, a game that seems to be pretty bad relative to mainstream AAA titles is actually looking really great compared to that status quo.

As for the download system -- yes, there's no excuse for that. I'm not sure how they got that so wrong given the abundance of prior art that does it better. The seeming relationship between Azure load and FPS/stutters is concerning and certainly a new condition that didn't exist in existing sims. Overall I do think the new sim suffers from being released prematurely, as we see so often with software now. But the reason for all the hype and praise is because the flight sim community really is excited about the potential this represents because we've been stuck with such ancient platforms for so long.

[tpmx]

Thanks! I did spend lots of hours in Falcon 3.0 in the early 90s, so I'm viewing this as a comeback. :)

I remember being saddened about how first person shooter games took over from flight sims as being the ones which the smartest people worked on, starting circa 1993 with Carmack's master piece.

I think you flight sim enthusiasts have been so starved for atttention since FSX that you've kind of lost perspective. ;)

[user_501238901]

According to many long-time flight simmers, the performance of this title is about the same as previous ones, with the addition of 10x improved graphics. So that's why they don't care and you're getting downvoted on Reddit.

PS: It's a next gen game built for the future in mind, GTX 1070 is basically outdated. Expect to require a 3xxx series graphics card for good performance.

[tpmx]

This game has been marketed to a much, much wider crowd with a massive online media campaign. So it needs to work. It doesn't.

(Also 3xxx series cards aren't released yet.)

[Stevvo]

But it's not. In X-Plane 11.50, I get 100fps+. 30 in MSFS.

[garaetjjte]

I must have different expectations for games, 'minute or two' loading times sounds completely fine to me. Bugs are probably fairly typical of modern 'release broken now, patch later' development.

[g_p]

For me, the biggest issue is the complete lack of visual feedback you've actually launched FS... It's at least 30 seconds on a fast SSD, on a fast PC that is suggested to use the high spec profile!

At least some progress screen to show you've started the program would help.

One major issue is that sitting in the menu seems to use 100% GPU. I can't see any reason for that, especially when the game often runs at 90% GPU for me.

It seems to be multi-core aware, but multithreading is definitely leaving a lot to be desired. Modern CPUs with 8 cores (16 vcores) seem woefully under-utilised.

Turning on vsync tanks frame rate by about 6 or 7 fps for me. "Popping out" a navigation window and putting it onto my second screen also causes around a 4 to 6 FPS drop.

This is definitely a "release broken, patch later" build. I do like the game, but I fear the extent of "patching" might not fix the fundamental performance issues that probably need a rewrite of much of the core simulator engine itself. No software should take 30+ seconds to appear on screen with any indication it's loading. I get the feeling the devs have focused so much on feature development that no time at all went into performance optimisation, and that's a shame as this game has such real potential.

[garaetjjte]

>complete lack of visual feedback you've actually launched FS... It's at least 30 seconds on a fast SSD

Eh, splash screen wouldn't hurt but I'm surprised that anybody is strongly bothered by that. Maybe even it is caused by some DRM-silliness.

>One major issue is that sitting in the menu seems to use 100% GPU.

Without vsync? I guess its shifts from being more GPU-bound to more CPU-bound when running simulation proper, thus changing load percentages.

>Turning on vsync tanks frame rate by about 6 or 7 fps for me. "Popping out" a navigation window and putting it onto my second screen also causes around a 4 to 6 FPS drop.

Vsync delays game loop to next screen refresh, so excluding these newfangled Freesync/Gsync monitors framerate reduction is expected. Also managing multiple windows/contexts from single applications is quite inconvinient, might clash with system compositor, etc, so I wouldn't hold that against them.

Note that I didn't actually play the game and cannot comment on game performance itself. Certainly omission of DX12/Vulkan rendering backend is rather disappointing.

[g_p]

> Without vsync? I guess its shifts from being more GPU-bound to more CPU-bound when running simulation proper, thus changing load percentages.

Yes, without vsync, idling in the main menu uses 100% GPU in task manager. GPU fan confirms this. Clearly a bug, as nothing in the menu looks to me to tax the GPU in even the slightest.

> Vsync delays game loop to next screen refresh, so excluding these newfangled Freesync/Gsync monitors framerate reduction is expected.

Interesting - my setup has freesync screens and GPU, although admittedly I'm not too sure about any of these newfangled display things. I have 2 displayed enabled, tomorrow I'll try it with just 1 display in case that helps.

And absolutely agreed, lack of DX12/Vulkan is a real shame and missed opportunity.

Regards lack of splash screen, perhaps I'm getting old, but this is a regression from older versions - FSX took a while to load but had a progress bar. If I had to ship a game in this state, I'd quickly write a shim executable to show a loading bar immediately. There's an exe that loads it (without startup intro videos) in the SDK, so clearly possible.

I guess maybe my expectations are out of line with the modern "release broken, patch often" mindset, but it seems disappointing they didn't optimise for multi core CPU, or handle regressions in basic UX, or do performance optimisation. But nonetheless, there's clearly some great work in this sim, and hopefully they'll have the confidence to try address some of these issues in patches - perhaps even moving to Vulkan or DX12. Nothing is impossible in a world where the entire game is downloaded and updatable, I guess.

[ohgodplsno]

>es, without vsync, idling in the main menu uses 100% GPU in task manager. GPU fan confirms this. Clearly a bug, as nothing in the menu looks to me to tax the GPU in even the slightest.

"I told my GPU to work as hard as possible and it did so! The game is so poorly optimised".

That's kind of the point of Vsync. Not rendering unnecessary frames.

[g_p]

Was meaning from the perspective of "I'm viewing a menu, this shouldn't max the GPU out". From another comment it does seem the video running in the background is being rendered in realtime, and maxing out the GPU.

I am not sure vsync would help in the menu, since the FPS is sitting below 60 in any case. Otherwise I'd agree with you that vsync should be turned on. It seems for FS that vsync is generally causing more issues than not at this point.

[tpmx]

> For me, the biggest issue is the complete lack of visual feedback you've actually launched FS... It's at least 30 seconds on a fast SSD, on a fast PC that is suggested to use the high spec profile!

It's just one of at least 50 similarly severe P1 showstoppers, sadly. But, yeah, I definitely agree.

[anotheryou]

to return to the menu?

[joezydeco]

Also: ignore the 8GB minimum RAM requirement. Whoever built that chart ignored the fact that Win10 needs a gig or two of its own to run. And FS20 needs about 7.5GB to boot.

Get 32GB and give yourself some breathing room.

[tpmx]

16 GB should be fine based on what I've seen in terms of actual memory usage so far. To be clear - that's not what caused the issues I mentioned though - I've got 64 GB.

[joezydeco]

Oh of course, your observations are totally spot on. But even when you get through the grind of loading this game, the performance goes completely to hell once Windows starts swapping out RAM pages.

I also agree with that note on how the credits were stacked up. And that’s literally how this game got built. Asobo came to MS with this awesome visualization tool and MS pretty much said “ok, why don’t we hand you FS14’s code and we can call it FS20?”

The product was literally built backwards.

[tpmx]

> The product was literally built backwards.

Yes, exactly. I't infuriating. I hope there is a strong enough enough backlash to get Microsoft to spend 50% more than they intended to, to fix the product so that it matches what they sold it for.

[g_p]

It also seems the menus were designed by designers that had no "performance budget" cap - looking at performance, the menus only hit a sensible FPS when on the loading screen. The sheer amount of animation and transparency in the main menu seems to be the cause of poor performance and GPU fans resembling jet engines, and totally needlessly at that!

I can't see anything else bottlenecking the system elsewhere on performance - it really does seem like the overall game missed out on any real performance optimisation.

[joezydeco]

The hangar animation behind the main menu is a big part of that GPU hit.

[golergka]

I've experienced most of the issues you described, and yet, I have to conclude that the game is absolutely fantastic despite them. The visual clarity is mind-blowing, and the UI and all the helpers make all the difference between this game and all other sims that I've, as a completely casual player, have tried before.

But more importantly, it's not a game that's defined by it's release; developers are clearly following the service model, which gives me confidence that most of the bugs will be sorted out and game polished.

[tpmx]

> But more importantly, it's not a game that's defined by it's release; developers are clearly following the service model

Are you sure? Got a source for that?

The french developer company Asobo has typically been launching one great-looking, abysmally performing game per year so far:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asobo_Studio#Games_developed

Why would they spend more than a year on MSFS?

[zakhaev17]

They’ve been posting weekly development updates. Here’s one from last week that has a roadmap based on feedback from the beta - https://www.flightsimulator.com/august-13th-2020-development.... It definitely seems this will be more of a service model.

[golergka]

Because it's a different kind of game with a different kind of audience. Simmers are accustomed to paying for additional content, and this is a much more stable and lucrative strategy than abandoning the title. Just look at Paradox.

[dperfect]

I'm on a fairly new machine (i9-9900K OC'd to 5.1 GHz, 32GB RAM, NVMe, RTX 2080 Super), and I was expecting smooth, stable frame rates at 1080p. Unfortunately, the game seems to be limited by one or two CPU threads consuming a constant 90-100% of those cores, while the other cores hover around 10-25%. As a result, I get fairly decent frame rates (25-50fps, depending on the area), but even in the best cases, it has a really annoying "micro stutter" that randomly - yet consistently - interrupts what would otherwise be an amazing experience.

I'm hopeful that an update could improve performance, especially with respect to spreading CPU load over more cores, but it sounds like a lot of other simmers are mostly content, so maybe that will never happen.

[g_p]

The inability to take advantage of large numbers of cpu cores is my biggest disappointment from a technical perspective. I don't know why you'd rewrite the game and fail to design it for modern core counts.

The micro stutter is very much real (AMD gpu here, Ryzen CPU), and annoying. I have tried to do some tracing to see what's going on. The fact sitting idle in the menu takes gpu usage to 100% doesn't inspire me with confidence. Frame pacing seems to be causing the stutters but I haven't managed to link it to an IO delay or similar yet.

My fear is the developers will focus on fixing functionality and never really optimise performance - I suspect getting good usage of 8 core CPUs (16 vcore) would require another full rewrite, which doesn't feel too likely.

[georgespencer]

Edit: no longer a problem!

Original comment: I've seen reports that the Steam refund window of a few hours of 'gameplay' is used up by the mammoth download time. Steam only downloads the installer, and the installer then downloads the game data. Steam considers the installer to be the game itself and starts the clock ticking.

[mrcarrot]

Valve have said they will (somehow) not count the time taken to download the game content against the 2 hour refund clock [1].

[1]: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-08-20-valve-assu...

[tpmx]

I will still take more than two hours to figure out if this game is playable or not, especially since everything is so random/buggy. And the framerate when loading scenery (looking in a new direction) currrently seems to depend on the the time of the day, because the geometry servers are overloaded or somthing.

After 6 hours of game play (sort of - half of that been spent looking at loading screens and trying out different settings) I'm still not sure. It's oh so promising but also so insanely buggy and random.

[mrcarrot]

You could just sign up for a month of Game Pass and get the game for 1 £/€/$.

[rkangel]

Valve have explicitly stated that that won't be a problem:

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/amp/valve-says-the-time-it-takes-...

[danielrpa]

Maybe you are new to the Flight Simulation scene. This is the game that FS fans have been waiting for over 10 years. Yes, it has problems but we're talking about absolutely groundbreaking technology that didn't settle for incremental improvements. There are very few games, if any, that look like FS2020 with full detail on. It absolutely blew me away to fly over my home town and point to my high school, malls and other recognizable parts of town.

Please don't listen to the parent and go support this new technology. This is a game that needs more funding that many startups quoted and even celebrated on Hacker News. This is revolutionary stuff and, despite the glitches, I was able to have a blast with it even in my modest Core i5 with a $150 GPU. It literally brought tears to my eyes.

[ornitorrincos]

Second this, visually its impressive, but on the rest of the simulator it feels weird, specially the control sensitivity.

I haven't done a full comparison yet because the plane I could compare more directly would involve stock vs payware, which is not really fair.

I do think that they can improve it with time but definitively feels rushed.

[tpmx]

Flight sim noob, but that Cessna Citation CJ4 model behaves very oddly. It has this very weird pumping up/down behavior. The 747 model behaves a lot better.

This is not a tolerable release. My gut feeling is that Microsoft needs to get this french studio (Asobo) to spend at least 50% more time on making this work. I don't think they will.

[ornitorrincos]

Tbf, the cessna and the 747 will behave very differently. I do think some jerkiness is added by the head camera effects that have been added.

[mrcarrot]

Also the default controller profiles don’t include any dead zone, so at least on my setup, the control inputs were way too sensitive. Once I added some dead zone, and reduced the sensitivity curve in the options, it became much less twitchy.

[tpmx]

Yeah, the two subreddits are full of solutions for this for the most stereotypical controller (the xbox one controller). That would be another showstopper in a good launch, sigh.

[alkonaut]

Never, ever, buy a large game until it gets at least a few months of updates. You don’t want to pay to be a beta tester.

Just wait 6 months and if it’s not smooth by then it probably never will be.

[tpmx]

So true.

But it's also so, so tempting.

[alkonaut]

Luckily for me and many others it’s easier to resist the temptation when there are zero joysticks to be found. I guess by the time you can get a joystick they’ll also have patched the game.

[icedchai]

I signed up for Xbox Game Pass and downloaded this yesterday. I ran into the problem with the app hanging during the initial download ("update.") I had to restart it once, then it downloaded all 91 gigs. I'm not sure what it was doing the first time... I figured it was just a glitch.

The game does load very slowly. This is on a system with 32 gigs of RAM and NVME SSDs.

It looks amazing though!

[bluedevil2k]

Yeah, the load times on this are crazy. 1-2 mins to start the app and get to the main menu, another 30s-1min after you pick your itinerary to get to the runway. And I have one of the fastest chips (3900x), m.2 SSD, and RAM. How long are people willing to wait to play it, especially given how often I crashed in my first few flights.

[ornitorrincos]

Funny, I have the same loading times on an hdd with a 2700 and 64gb of ram, so the slowdown seem something relatively indenpendent.

[btgeekboy]

I’ve been running the task manager on a separate monitor to see where the bottlenecks are. Those long load times appear to be, for me, GPU bound. It’s probably pre-rendering something. I'm running a 3700X, 32GB RAM, M2 SSD, GTX 1070, gigabit internet.

[g_p]

I've been doing similar, although reached a slightly different conclusion. It seems to me that the menus (even idling in them) use full GPU. I'm not convinced it's necessarily rendering stuff (and if it was, it really ought to cache it after the first time!) - I think this is just the result of a really bad performance UI they got away with launching.

I don't seem to max anything out when flying - even GPU has a little headroom according to task manager.

Hopefully Asobo will spend time on performance, rather than just bare functionality, as there's definitely lots of scope to fix things like frame pacing and overall performance.

[bluedevil2k]

I was watching my task manager as I played. On my 4k @60fps on the Very High graphics settings and the GPU was spiked at 100% the whole time (GTX 1660). Sounded like the propellor was in my computer room. On my 1440p monitor are @75fps I was at Extreme graphics settings and GPU was at 40%.

[ornitorrincos]

I also been running the task manager, mostly to check when it seemed to hang it was using 100% of the transfer with the hdd, didn't look at gpu usage though, will have a look the next time.

[dawnerd]

Loads times don’t bother me, it’s the really buggy aircraft systems that do. Multiple times I’ve gotten the avionics bugged out where they flat out don’t respond anymore. Autopilot also flys like a drunk.

First thing you should do though is disable live traffic and no online players. It greatly improved performance for me. Visuals are amazing now.

[tpmx]

I disabled those two things. Framerate it still mostly random.

[dawnerd]

Damn, I’ve mostly had good frame rates except in large cities when it loads in. But I also set a huge rolling cache - which for whatever reason takes forever to change.

[AmericanChopper]

Your system is pretty underspec’d for anything other than 1080p on this game. It runs pretty smoothly on my 3950X/2080 TI. 4K is bit underwhelming, running between 30-40 FPS. But I’m expecting that to improve a fair bit when the RTX 3xxx cards come out.