sudden very short dramatic fps drops visible as stutters

Question

dear sir/madam,

i am currently experiencing a problem with my copy of X-plane: i get very short, sudden but severe fps drops that are visible as big and tiny stutters.
by short i mean not taking longer than a second. but it still really annoys me and kicks me out of the immersion. the drops can go down to about 13fps. and sometimes the drops are combined with audio pauses as well. a brief moment where the audio cuts out for like maybe a quarter of a second. really annoying to me.
i have tried many many things that solved other issues but said issue is still present.

here is a general idea of my specs and situation:
- central processing unit: Intel Core i7-3770k @ 4.5Ghz under a Corsair H110i ( yes, it still kicks A$$ )
- memory: 16GB DDR3-2400
- graphical processing unit: MSI GTX1070 8GB GDDR5
- storage: Samsung Evo 500Gb ( x-plane is installed on that, windows is on separate SSD )
- operating system: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
- x-plane: steam, version 11.25

other information:
- process lasso: x-plane on 3 cores, 3 threads
- plane: default c90b
- area: ICAO EHEH +- 100 nautical miles, default scenery
- performance is solid 45fps ( capped through Nvidia Inspector )

so, performance is NOT at all a problem. my "old" i7-3770k still kicks butt.

i would really appreciate it if someone can help me find the cause of the problem and fix it

Answer 1

There can be a lot of factors. Do you use a lot of add ons, such as custom scenery or plugins? Perhaps the rendering settings are a bit too high--you might want to review how to set them correctly for your machine. If you can find a specific set of steps that always show this issue (while using a clean version of the sim with no addons) you can file a bug here.