Aerofly FS 4 September Update Now Available

  • I've retired my Rift cv1 over a year ago and don't miss the SDE, lol! I still have a very hard time believing that you can maintain 90fps with Ultra settings using your setup. The only way I can achieve Ultra with FS4 is if I use 45 Fixed (no asw) with my Quest or use SteamVR famerate throttling to 45fps with my OG Vive Pro. This works ok but with a heli you get a lot of motion blur in fast turns. With FS2 I was able to get smooth 90fps performance with mainly Ultra settings.

    Anyway, as long as you're happy with your results that's great mate. Personally, because I have quite a few FS2 DLC's and user content from Flight-Sim dot org, I'll probably continue to mainly use FS2 and monitor FS4 development. Cheers.

    I would assume that with your setup you would be able to use everything on full Ultra without any issues. Yeah the cv1 and setup is quite old, would be nice to get the Varjo Aero headset, would probably be quite an improvement in clarity😀 Anyway the performance in VR in Aerofly compared to some other sims is quite amazing.

  • Ya, of course you can 1/2 your headset frame rate for improved performance. Try flying a heli around LA Heliports and you’ll notice lag and building blur. As long as you’re happy with this result that’s great though. Cheers

    I have never chased 90 fps in any flight sim in VR. I've always used forced 45 with tray tool and the visuals are stunning! I have used that setting in FS2, especially with the Hawaii mod, in xplane and msfs. No complaints! Even with 30fps you can get by in VR. I tried LA in the chopper and it ran solid. Everything looks fantastic. That's just my experience though. Good luck!

  • I have never chased 90 fps in any flight sim in VR. I've always used forced 45 with tray tool and the visuals are stunning! I have used that setting in FS2, especially with the Hawaii mod, in xplane and msfs. No complaints! Even with 30fps you can get by in VR. I tried LA in the chopper and it ran solid. Everything looks fantastic. That's just my experience though. Good luck!

    The beauty of FS2 is that most decent PCVR systems (say gtx1080 or better) can easily maintain 90FPS. No other flight sim can do this and the experience of a smooth 90fps is fantastic. If you haven't experienced this you don't know what you're missing imho.

    With FS4 in complex areas with a heli this is no longer achievable even with a rtx3090 unless you drop all graphics down to low, which then looks terrible. While thing look pretty good at 45fps fixed, you get a lot of building blur during fast turns (esp. with yaw). As long as that doesn't bother you that's great mate.

    i9 13900K water cooled, RTX4090, Z790 MB w/wifi6e, 32Gb 6400 ram, 2x2TB SSD, 1000W PSU, Win 11, QPro w/Air Link, Vive Pro

  • BUGS:

    1). Flying the F15 and F18 when you press #6 on the keyboard the SIM crashes to desktop !

    2). Sound issue: Press #6 on keyboard and as the aircraft (doesn't matter what your flying) passes by you inflight, it doesn't have that gradual fly past sound from low to high when it goes by !

    3). black patches only in cockpit view !

  • @douglas55: If you use the Nvidia GTX 1660 Super with 6GB of RAM and your resolution is set to 4K, then you will definetely get a bad performance. Your 3D card is simply not able to achieve higher FPS at this resolution with Aerofly FS 4.

    As for the bugs you mentioned, we will take a look at it.

    @TomC RLG: Like we mentioned before, highly detailed areas in FS 4 like the Los Angeles region are very demanding and even a NVIDIA Gefore 3090 doesn't deliver the power to achieve 90+ FPS in VR mode, it's just too much that is being rendered.

    @FrankLFRS: The visibility distance of buildings has not changed between the different updates, however the lights are rendered in a much larger distance this might give you the impression that something has changed. We might adjust this in a future update, but for now the visibility distance for buildings is a good trade off between performance and visual quality. Any larger rendering distance would increate the GPU Ram usage significantly and would also degrade performance at the expense of only a minor quality improvement.

  • @douglas55: If you use the Nvidia GTX 1660 Super with 6GB of RAM and your resolution is set to 4K, then you will definetely get a bad performance. Your 3D card is simply not able to achieve higher FPS at this resolution with Aerofly FS 4.

    As for the bugs you mentioned, we will take a look at it.

    Agreed, patches and sound issue I can live with. It's the dynamics and flying that's the main thing for me. As long as I can do that I'm good. :thumbup:

    As mentioned before I will have to get a new video card but, my god man, they are uber expensive...Yikes ! I can't believe how much they are. Grrr :(

    Admin, any suggestions on the right card.....?

  • @douglas55: Our recommendation is to wait a little more before buying a new graphic card. Prices are still too high in our eyes and price are currently still falling. Also NVIDIA is about to come out with new graphic cards as well. But in general with 4K rendering your really need a good graphic card either from NVIDIA or AMD. In the mean time, reduce the 'building density' quality setting all the way down to preserve GPU memory, all other settings are fine at HIGH. Also disable the special anti aliasing setting in the graphic settings.

    If you want to stick with 4K rendering, experiment with settings the content_scale_factor in the main.mcf, located in 'Documents/Aerofly FS 4/main.mcf' folder. Look for this line

    Code
    <[float64][graphics_content_scale_factor][0.75]>

    The default value is 1.0. Setting it to less than one with reduce the resolution slightly.

    Again, this might or might not have an effect. Your best option here is to invest into a better graphic card in the future.

  • The beauty of FS2 is that most decent PCVR systems (say gtx1080 or better) can easily maintain 90FPS. No other flight sim can do this and the experience of a smooth 90fps is fantastic. If you haven't experienced this you don't know what you're missing imho.

    With FS4 in complex areas with a heli this is no longer achievable even with a rtx3090 unless you drop all graphics down to low, which then looks terrible. While thing look pretty good at 45fps fixed, you get a lot of building blur during fast turns (esp. with yaw). As long as that doesn't bother you that's great mate.

    That was a great aspect of FS2, that it could basically run on a potato. But 4080 cards are on the horizon. I think IPACS is justified in pushing the envelope with FS4. I honestly don’t notice any building blur. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough. What I do notice is how crappy MSFS and Xplane look in VR compared to FS4 right at this moment. I’m so pleased with the sim’s performance, it’s like a dream come true.

  • @douglas55: In the mean time, reduce the 'building density' quality setting all the way down to preserve GPU memory, all other settings are fine at HIGH. Also disable the special anti aliasing setting in the graphic settings.

    The reason I'm running in 4k @ 50Hz and "all" graphics "Quality" settings are @ "Low", is its the only way I can fly smoothly. "Vsync" is "On", and when I "cntrl+F1" its steady @ 50fps. My PC is set to 4k @ 50Hz (as recommended by Win10) in the graphics settings. Any other settings get ugly real fast. But as we talked about in our above posts, a new video card is definitely needed.

  • The visibility distance of buildings has not changed between the different updates, however the lights are rendered in a much larger distance this might give you the impression that something has changed.

    Thank you for your answer.

    How about loading building farther in low density area? There must be space enough in memory?

    MacBook Pro | M1 Pro | Thrustmaster Captain Airbus Edition | DualSense (for travel)
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  • Thank you for your answer.

    How about loading building farther in low density area? There must be space enough in memory?

    Ya, or at least provide a LOD option in the user config file so those with lots of GPU memory can take advantage of this. With my rtx3090 I have 24Gb of VRAM waiting to be used, lol! Cheers.

    i9 13900K water cooled, RTX4090, Z790 MB w/wifi6e, 32Gb 6400 ram, 2x2TB SSD, 1000W PSU, Win 11, QPro w/Air Link, Vive Pro

  • @ Admin: Does the CPU have a relevant influence on the achievable framerate when a high level of detail is selected in VR?

    Consequently is there any point in upgrading from a decent i9-9900k to something newer?

    The reason why I ask: I plan to upgrade from a GTX 2080ti to a GTX 4090 and wonder if the CPU will become the bottleneck then…

    Regards, Ludger

  • Aerofly FS 4 is a multi-threaded application with very high optimization...

    OK, I'll check this out again. Last time I looked it was only multi-thread when loading but generally only 1 or 2 cores mainly processing. I'll have anothe look and report back. Thanks.

    i9 13900K water cooled, RTX4090, Z790 MB w/wifi6e, 32Gb 6400 ram, 2x2TB SSD, 1000W PSU, Win 11, QPro w/Air Link, Vive Pro

  • OK, I'll check this out again. Last time I looked it was only multi-thread when loading but generally only 1 or 2 cores mainly processing. I'll have anothe look and report back. Thanks.

    Yes that would be the physics and graphics thread most likely. Still doesn't mean that an i9 would be a bottleneck in the rendering pipeline. There is a lot more happening which you can't observe by just looking at CPU usage.

  • Yes that would be the physics and graphics thread most likely. Still doesn't mean that an i9 would be a bottleneck in the rendering pipeline. There is a lot more happening which you can't observe by just looking at CPU usage.

    Ok, checked out my core temp app with both FS2 and FS4. I found that FS2 did spread core %'s around more cpu cores (4-6 cores, of my 8 core cpu, hyperthreading disabled), FS4 seems mainly uses 2-3 cores, So the difference in performance that I'm seeing with FS4 is maybe because FS4 has not been as well multi thread optimised yet. I can accept that if this is the case and I better understand why my FS2 VR performance is much better.

    i9 13900K water cooled, RTX4090, Z790 MB w/wifi6e, 32Gb 6400 ram, 2x2TB SSD, 1000W PSU, Win 11, QPro w/Air Link, Vive Pro