[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.