Aerofly GPU/CPU Usage

For all the performance that Aerofly provides in VR, I've noticed that it doesn't seem to tax the CPU and GPU much. I never hear my fans spool up when running Aerofly (unlike MSFS 2024 and X-Plane, which very noticeably increase fan speed). Looking at the Nvidia app CPU and GPU utilization percentages, the GPU load never exceeds 60% and the CPU is mostly at 10%. This seems counter to the prevailing narrative that flight sims are generally CPU-bottlenecked. I have an i9-14900/RTX 4080 combo with 32Gb and fly at Aerofly Ultra settings in VR using Virtual Desktop and a dedicated 6E router. Even though the utilizations don't appear maxed out, it seems that the performance in terms of frame rates and stutter isn't entirely effortless, making me think there are setting optimizations s that could increase performance further.

Is there any reason Aerofly FS4 performs so well without maxing out CPU/GPU utilization? Both MSFS and X-Plane seem to tax both much more without anywhere near the performance.

Quote from Jet-Pack (IPACS)

The bottleneck isn't how much the CPU or GPU could perform whilst doing their own business (CPU/GPU usage), the bottleneck is when the CPU needs to tell the GPU what to do and what data needs to be processed next (VRAM upload speed). When this process isn't implemented correctly then you're wasting a lot of performance and have stutters and low FPS regardless of the CPU/GPU usage. So the actual CPU/GPU usage doesn't really tell you much about the actual performance that you can get. The fact that there is plenty of CPU and GPU usage left to spare is a sign of the high amount of optimization we have done and how little extra code needs to run to get a fluid simulation. If the load is higher for the same result then you're just wasting unnecessary clock cycles and do the task inefficiently. So the goal is to get the CPU/GPU usage down as much as possible if you want to optimize a game to be able to be run on a handheld Steam Deck, Nintendo Switch or low end hardware like a mobile phone. This also shows that the RTX 4080 is probably overkill for Aerofly FS because we're not using it to it's full potential for ray tracing, voxel cloud shading, AI supersampling etc.

Thanks for the perspective on this. When shopping for a PC (specifically to run Aerofly FS4 in VR) I tried everything from an RTX 3060ti to both an RTX 4060 and RTX 4070, with at least an i7-13700 CPU. The performance was not as good as with the RTX 4080 (granted that I did not do a lot of trial and error with the various settings as I did with the 4080). My impression was that I needed a more powerful GPU. I also noticed that the performance in terms of fps did not seem to change much when I went lower than "Ultra" settings, just a decrease in visible objects and terrain complexity.

After trying VR, there's definitely no going back to a 2D screen. I have to thank your team for the incredible VR experience, especially when compared to the other guys. Having pretty much solved the fluidity and stutter issues, I'm now trying to optimize cockpit clarity. I've tried increasing the render resolution in Aerofly (going above 150 did not seem to provide any improvement), but found that leaving it at 100 and increasing the render resolution in Steam VR settings gave better fps performance with the same clarity. Any recommendations on that would be appreciated.