Hello everyone. This is my first post on Level1Tech forums. Could someone help me with ideas or suggestions to improve loading times of MSFS2020?
On my PC it takes around 4 min to load the game itself, plus 30 to 40 seconds to start playing in an airport or wherever.
I did a quick and simple datalog with HWiNFO (I deleted it afterwards…), which shows me the PC is doing something during the entire load time. I could see quite a lot of CPU, SSD, RAM and network activity during most of the time.
If I provide this datalog (I will need to do it again), can someone give ideas of what I could do to improve loading times meaningfully, or even out of the box solutions that could improve it dramatically.
I guess that getting faster components could help, but my concern is to spend a lot of money with them and get insignificant results. Example, I’ve seen many benchmarks showing that loading times in most games changes very little from low end to high end SSDs.
Hopefully someone here can give me some good advise =)
Because it’s not just loading, it’s downloading data as well, and it has nothing to do with your SSD speed. If you use the sim completely offline, it loads much faster. But in order to get the benefits of live weather, better scenery, photogrammetry etc, it needs to download a lot of data, both when you start the sim and when you actually load a flight. I noticed that if I disable all streaming, even on my Xbox the sim starts in just a few seconds. So it’s not the local loading that takes long but downloading things from the cloud, and it depends more on internet and server speeds.
apparently.
if you want faster load times play entirely offline.
Thanks for the reply HEXiT. I’m aware the online functionality makes the game take longer to load, and I’ve seen this topic (and others) in the game’s forum before.
I’m personally still not happy with the time it takes to load the game even without internet functionality. While I can’t control the speed of the servers from Microsoft / Asobo, I want to try something from my side to improve loadings.
I make the datalogs all again with HWiNFO and found the following loading times (I rebooted the PC between each datalog)
All Data Streaming Options On - 2:50 min (Total Internet Activity Time - 1:05 min ; 70 MB)
All Data Streaming Disabled - 2:36 min (Total Internet Activity Time - 1:16 min ; 1 MB)
PC Network Disconnected - 1:51 min
So that is still 1:51 min to load the game really without any network features. It was interesting to see that even disabling all streaming options from the game, I still had more than one minute of internet communication (which I’m 100% confident that wasn’t any other background process from the PC). It makes me think that This is mostly some basic connection between my PC and the game servers, and that takes some time. Again, it would be out of my control.
But what could I do to reduce time from that 1:51 min of loading with network disconnected? In this case I understand most of the hanging is caused by my PC doing stuff.
I have the datalogs for each case available, if someone has the patience to look at and give suggestions. I looked myself and I don’t know anything else apart from “get better PC components”, but I’m unsure if they even could be really effective.
Something that I though was - could it be a solution to get a dedicated SSD with the most available DRAM cache and leave it just for the game? Is it even posible?
Mine is the following:
Intel i7 10700K
RTX 3060Ti
HyperX Fury 32 GB with XMP profile enabled (forgot the exact clock speed)
Samsung 970 Evo 1TB
Asus ROG Strix Z490-G Gaming
Corsair HX850i
Doing some further research with the very few loading times benchmarks available out there, looks like that processor single thread performance is more important than having a very high end SSD compared to a basic SSD.
If you can, please share your PC specs once you did you own testing. Will be interesting to see in case you have a processor with better single thread performance.
OK, I’ll give it a go, just need a couple of days.
PC
B550 Aorus something
Ryzen 7 5800X3D
32GB 3600
GPU TBD
1TB Samsung 970 Evo plus NVMe
I went with 5800X3D because I was going to do VR and MSFS 2020 favors huge amounts of L3 cache. It still outperforms even 7950X as far as I know. I’m not sure if it will have any impact on loading times, I’ll check it out.
Oh and internet speed might be a big factor, mine is 100Mbps both ways.
Looks a perfect comparison based on what I said above. I was looking for a loading time benchmark with the 5800X3D because it really seems to excel in single thread performance more than any other processor. FPS benchmarks shows it is also the best for MSFS.
My internet is 250 Mbps down but a stupid 30 Mbps upload. Doesn’t look like upload is being a bottleneck, but no way to be 100% sure about it. If you have the interest, here is the datalog I did with HWiNFO (1 second pooling time).
I wanted to provide the datalogs, but according to this forum I am too newby to upload files, and it doesn’t allow me to include a One Drive link.
Well, I guess I should have known better…
So looks like I had something close to 300 GB of extra content for the game (all worth!!! ). I removed everything from the Community folder, stuff installed from third party apps, and from content manager in game. This isn’t an apples to apples comparison because there is no practical way to leave just the content from the standard version, I would need to select item by item. Doing the easy way and selecting all items removes even more stuff from the standard version and leave the game more “bare bones”. Anyway, these are the results from clicking to launch the game on Steam to get to the main menu:
All network features on - 1:25 min (from the previous (2:50 min)
All network features off - 0:56 min (from the previous 2:36 min)
Internet disabled - 1:07 min (from previous 1:51 min)
I didn’t bother checking how much time it would take to get in game because I understand it can vary more significantly due to the airplane you select, airport/parts of the world, etc etc.
Considering the activity from CPU and SSD, I guess that the main bottleneck is the CPU trying to process all the data from the game, which I thought it would be the SSD itself. And I guess the results makes sense, considering your SSD is basically the same as mine, but you processor is considerably better. I really though the game would load the content itself just as necessary to show in game, but clearly it isn’t the case.
I guess my next step will be doing some overclock on my processor and checking for load time improvements. Just to double check my suspect.
Other than enabling add-ons one by one nothing comes to mind, but I suspect that would be a tad tedious
Interesting… Network disconnected and it’s longer loading time than turning it off in game. I suspect maybe Steam was (re)trying to sync cloud save? I bet if you run it twice in a row the second one would be faster. Maybe.
So I changed plans a little bit for the test as I’m not home with my main computer that has been used for the previous tests. Instead, I’m using my second computer with the following specs:
AMD Ryzen 5 2200G (no discrete graphics card, yes, I’m using integrated graphics for MSFS2020)
16 GB of RAM at 3000 MHz
Gigabyte B450M S2H motherboard
WD Black SN750 SSD (500 GB)
It has waaaay less content than my other PC, it is almost game stock
Stock Frequency (max. of 3700 MHz), internet disconnected, time to main menu
1st Dry Run - 2:31 min
1st Cached Run - 1:50 min
2nd Dry Run - 2:22 min
2nd Cached Run - 1:53 min
Overclocked (3900 MHz fixed), internet disconnected, time to main menu
1st Dry Run - 2:08 min
1st Cached Run - 1:43 min
2nd Dry Run - 2:11 min
2nd Cached Run - 1:43 min
I consider it a success, for me, clearly processor clock speed is a significant bottleneck to load this game (and other, I supposed).
). I removed everything from the Community folder, stuff installed from third party apps, and from content manager in game. This isn’t an apples to apples comparison because there is no practical way to leave just the content from the standard version, I would need to select item by item. Doing the easy way and selecting all items removes even more stuff from the standard version and leave the game more “bare bones”. Anyway, these are the results from clicking to launch the game on Steam to get to the main menu: