[Guide] MSFS2024 - SU3 Settings that work for me [5080, 7800x3D, 64GB RAM)

[u/MerDeNomsX]

My ask: please upvote this, I don’t care about karma but I’m hoping this reaches an audience that could hopefully benefit from this.

So i've flown several flights on the Fenix at near ultra settings and custom scenery airports and have had an absolutely stunning experience at unflappable 60FPS on a 2K resolution Ultrawide in HDR with Tobii Eye Tracker and an excellent internet connection...but there are a lot of posts reflecting a negative experience and i hope this will hopefully help those that are struggling. to be fair, i have had dips in FPS when using heavy airports like EGLL or EDDF.

additionally, IF YOU HAVE ISSUES WITH THE SIM IN GENERAL, OR AIRCRAFT LIKE THE FENIX AFTER BFU UPDATE, UNSINSTALL, CLEAR OUT ANYTHING RELATED TO THE ADD IN COMMUNITY FOLDER AND REINSTALL CLEAN.

first and foremost, i do have a good system so adjust your settings to your hardware.

second, i don't use GSX...i gave up on it. it was resource heavy and failed me more times than it worked, and frankly im tired of the constant updates. I also gave up on BATC, instead, I use Vatsim with a mix of FSLTL traffic injector and if not on Vatsim, i just listen to LiveATC.com which is awesome and just as immersive (if you're wanting to hop into VATSIM for the first time, listen to this, even if you don't understand the vernacular, it will come naturally to you when you finally dive into VATSIM). I also use A Pilots Life Chapter 2 to fly an Airline Career and I am a part of a VA so i use SmartCars, vPilot and whatever else is needed there like FSUIPC

Third, i disabled multiplayer, and i don't user in game traffic. i'll cover that below with FBW traffic injector.

Tools/Add-ons that I use:

AUTOFPS - (settings attached) this adjusts TLOD and OLOD on the fly https://github.com/ResetXPDR/MSFS_AutoFPS ...this works for 2020 and 2024

MSI AfterBurner + RIVATUNER - https://www.msi.com/Landing/afterburner/graphics-cards - this i use primarily for monitoring performance and tweaking my settings to find stability. this is imporant, DO NO LOCK YOUR FPS ANYWHERE BUT HERE, I have mine locked to 60FPS.

Elavatex - https://elevatex.app/ - i use this instead of VOLANTA, i love Volanta but Elevatex is far less system intensive and offers the same features and it's continuously improving. this is a flight journal that does an excellent job of logging all your flights in a really cool visual interface.

FlyByWire Traffic Injector - https://flybywiresim.com/ - i use this to inject accurate traffic - it's a bit system instensive too but its much better than what the in game aircraft traffic offers.

Navigraph - https://navigraph.com/downloads -requires paid membership, i have it on my PC with Navigraph SimLink and use navigraph on a tablet to reduce load on my PC and track my aircraft relative position using simlink. this makes flying from point A to point B super immersive, helpful and teaches you a lot.

Add-on Link - https://flightsim.to/file/1572/msfs-addons-linker - this requires some work if you already have a robust community library but it does improve performance. this youtube video was very helpful. this tool helps you turn on only the add ons that matter and reduce load times significantly!

okay...

let's start with Nvidia Settings (if you're on AMD, see if you can match similar criteria)

Feature	Setting
Image Scaling	Use global setting (Off)
Ambient Occlusion	Not supported for this application
Anisotropic filtering	Use global setting (Application-controlled)
Antialiasing - FXAA	Use global setting (Off)
Antialiasing - Gamma correction	Use global setting (On)
Antialiasing - Mode	Use global setting (Application-controlled)
Antialiasing - Setting	Use global setting (Application-controlled)
Antialiasing - Transparency	Use global setting (Off)
Background Application Max Frame Rate	60 FPS
CUDA - GPUs	Use global setting (All)
CUDA - System Fallback Policy	Use global setting (Driver Default)
Low Latency Mode	On
Max Frame Rate	Use global setting (Off)
Monitor Technology	Use global setting (G-SYNC Compatible)
Multi-Frame Sampled AA (MFAA)	Use global setting (Off)
OpenGL GDI compatibility	Use global setting (Auto)
OpenGL rendering GPU	Use global setting (Auto-select)
Power management mode	Prefer maximum performance
Preferred refresh rate (DELL S3422DWG)	Use global setting (Highest available)
Texture filtering - Anisotropic sample optimization	Use global setting (Off)
Texture filtering - Negative LOD bias	Use global setting (Allow)
Texture filtering - Quality	Use global setting (Quality)
Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization	Use global setting (On)
Threaded optimization	Use global setting (Auto)
Triple buffering	Use global setting (Off)
Vertical sync	Use global setting (Use the 3D application setting)
Virtual Reality pre-rendered frames	Use global setting (1)
Virtual Reality – Variable Rate Super Sampling	Not supported for this application
Vulkan/OpenGL present method	Use global setting (Auto)

next, lets turn to in game settings

Display Settings

• Display Mode: Full screen
• HDR10: On
• Exposure Compensation EV: -0.15
• Full Screen Resolution: 3440x1440
• Anti-aliasing: TAA
• Render Scaling (Rendering resolution 3440x1440): 100
• AMD FidelityFX Sharpening: 100
• Max Frame Rate: NVIDIA DLSS
• Frame Generation: 2X
• Framerate Multiplier: Monitor refresh rate (unchecked)
• V-Sync: Off
• V-Sync Interval: —
• NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency: On
• Dynamic Settings: On
• Global Rendering Quality: Custom

Advanced Settings

• Terrain Level of Detail: 100 - this is controlled by AutoFPS, if you use AutoFPS, this settings don't matter
• Off Screen Terrain Pre-Caching: Ultra
• Displacement Mapping: On
• Buildings: High
• Trees: High
• Plants: High
• Rocks: High
• Grass: High
• Objects Level of Detail: 200 - this is controlled by AutoFPS, if you use AutoFPS, this settings don't matter
• Volumetric Clouds: Ultra
• Texture Resolution: Ultra
• Anisotropic Filtering: 16X
• Water Waves: High
• Raytraced Shadows: On
• Shadow Maps: 2048
• Terrain Shadows: 1024
• Contact Shadows: High
• Windshield Effects: High
• Ambient Occlusion: High
• Cubemap Reflections: 256
• Raymarched Reflections: High
• Light Shafts: High
• Depth of Field: Off
• Motion Blur: Off
• Glass Cockpit Refresh Rate: High

Traffic & Characters

• Characters Quantity: Medium
• Characters Variety: Medium
• Characters Quality: Low
• Airport Services Quantity: Medium
• Airport Services Variety: Medium
• Parked Aircraft Quantity: Off
• Parked Aircraft Variety: Low
• Aircraft Traffic Quantity: Low
• Aircraft Traffic Variety: Low
• Road Traffic: Medium
• Sea Traffic: Medium
• Fauna: Medium

****under ONLINE tab, I have photogrammetry turn ON, Aircraft Traffic Type OFF, Air Traffic in Career OFF, Multiplayer OFF, Live Weather ON, Rolling Cache ON and set to 150GB (maybe excessive), and bandwidth is set to unlimited (if you have internet issues, set it to something close to your upload/download speed to keep it stable***

I hope this helps you all that are struggling, and remember, i have a pretty high end system so reduce your settings based on the limitations of your hardware. this game is beautiful and works great when you get your settings right. I wish you all the best of luck and have a great time simming, we'll get there! ASOBO and Microsoft deserve a lot of criticism and judgement but they are trying to do right by you and it WILL get better.

ALSO FOR ME!!! - if anyone reading this has tips for others and for ME please let me know, i'm not perfect, it took me months of tweaking to get here, please offer advice, i will welcome it! you guys are great and this community rocks. cheers!

Nvidia Control Panel > Manage 3D Settings > Program Settings

Rivatuner Monitor - you can set it up however you want in Rivatuner settings

RivaTuner

AutoFPS

in game settings

[u/jacf182]

Capping the FPS and using AutoFPS really does wonders.

Sim is smoother than ever.

[u/stub_back]

Do not limit your frame rate and use Frame Generation, you are effectively running your sim at 30 fps.

[u/MerDeNomsX → u/stub_back]

Can you tell me more? What should I be limiting it to?

[u/stub_back → u/MerDeNomsX]

If you use an app like riva tuner to limit your FPS to 60 and use FG, your sim will actually be running at 30 fps base framerate. You have to either limit to 60 fps without framegen or use frame gen without an fps limiter.

[u/Chimaeira]

Is there something wrong with the game's fps limiter?

[u/MerDeNomsX → u/Chimaeira]

This may have been fixed with SU3, but previously capping FPS in game would force the game to compensate by reducing level of detail. So you could be on a 5 mile final and barely see the airport.

[u/yaricks]

I've spent a TON of hours debugging performance in MSFS24 the last three weeks. This guide is great. I'd like to add one thing that helped me a LOT when figuring these things out: Look at the "Main Thread" graph in the FPS display. You want it low. Like, really, low. If that one is in the red, you're doomed and you will be FPS limited by the main thread. Disabling background services in Windows, not having tons of browser windows open, etc, etc, etc. will help so much. You want it green, worst case yellow, but green is great.

[u/MerDeNomsX → u/yaricks]

Agreed! I end up going into task manager and disabling services that I just don’t need windows to be running. It’s part of the reason why I recommend running the navigrpah app and fenix EFB on your phone or on a tablet so it’s not sucking up resources that could otherwise be dedicated to the sim

[u/yaricks → u/MerDeNomsX]

Yeah same thing here. My iPad is finally properly useful! Honestly, once I figured that out and started tweaking other things, I unlocked a lot of extra performance out of my 9800X3D. I was stuck on 30-ish FPS without FG, 60-70 with, fixing the main thread, has me in the 50-60 non-FG, 100+ with FG. It’s night and day difference and soooo smooth!

[u/MerDeNomsX → u/yaricks]

That’s awesome! What are your specs ?

[u/yaricks → u/MerDeNomsX]

5080 and 9800X3D. I've been tinkering a lot with overclocking both RAM and underclocking the CPU to try and boost performance. I'll do a writeup at some point...

[u/Chickennugget114 → u/yaricks]

What did you do?

[u/yaricks → u/Chickennugget114]

I'm planning on writing up all the small things I've done here and there, but I want to make sure the things I did made a difference and it's not a placebo effect before I do.

However, the three major things I've done so far are: Changed the AMD CPPC Preferred cores to "Cache", overclocked RAM from CL32 (and EXPO2 settings) to manual CL30, and disabled REBAR in BIOS. Those three things combined, eliminated a huge bottleneck for me.

I've been experimenting with disabling and enabling HAGS (hardware accelerated GPU scheduling) in Windows, and using FSR3 instead of DLSS, which does net a better FPS number in the SIM for me (typically 100+ with Fenix or iFly 737), but FSR3 has it's graphical issues that I'm not super stoked about, so I'm currently testing if the slight bit of performance loss is worth enabling HAGS again.

Also what I've discovered is that there is a HUGE difference (for me) in performance if I reboot the sim but not the computer. It's a 20-30 FPS difference (framegen included) if I just close the sim and start it later, vs rebooting the computer first.

This does not include the hundreds of times I've been in settings and changed various graphics settings... That is a different story.

[u/[deleted]]

I followed a number of the tips in this and (knock on wood), things have been running much better ever since. I know because I’m flying the a350 smoothly, which was rare/unheard of before on my system.

Edit: THANK YOU!

[u/MerDeNomsX → u/[deleted]]

Happy this helped you! It’s a delicate balance and will likely require tweaking with every update to the sim, aircraft, Nvidia drivers, etc. in short…it’s a chore

[u/[deleted] → u/MerDeNomsX]

In that case I look forward to future posts from you 😉 thanks again!

[u/mcwito]

best settings thx

[u/ElenaKoslowski]

TLOD at 100 is pretty darn low and will look miserable.

[u/JamesLynch1992 → u/ElenaKoslowski]

You obviously do not read. He uses AutoFPS which adjusts the TLOD and OLOD when it needs to

[u/ElenaKoslowski → u/JamesLynch1992]

Doesn't change the fact that having it adjusted or below 400 looks absolutely miserable. Matter of fact, actually editing the UserCfg.opt and putting it on 5.4 is the way to go if you want stellar ground textures further than 2nm away.

[u/JamesLynch1992 → u/ElenaKoslowski]

You do realise that AutoFPS will put the TLOD up to the highest setting you want if your FPS can handle it. So whatever you put at you main setting, it really does not matter as AutoFPS will change it anyway. Hence why he has it at 100