After a few days of testing and a lot of blog reading, I discovered the trick to significantly reduce the amount of Pauses and Freezes when flying on VATSIM with a Payware plane like the Flight Factor B757-200.

I read on a blog that a few options need to be altered in the 3D Settings of the Nvidia Control Panel:

1- Power Management Mode: Set to “Prefer Maximum Performance”
2- Thread Optimization: Set to “OFF”
3- Vertical Sync: Set to “Adaptive (half refresh rate)

These settings will LOCK the frame rate to 30FPS in X-Plane, which is all you need to have a smooth experience. It will also reduce the amount of Pauses and Freezes by nearly 80%!!!

Essentially, the CPU and GPU Loads are kept at much lower levels which helps to run several other processes in the background, such as plugins (Skymaxx Pro), Extended DSF’s and other X-Plane rendering settings that you would not be able to set if the frame rate was not capped at 30fps (HDR ON, more objects,more roads, etc…).

My experience with 10.40b5 has been absolutely amazing since I set these preferences yesterday!!!

A couple of other tips:

1- In the Xsquawbox preferences, please set the Reload Weather to 60 Minutes.
The concept is that you will get the initial weather update as soon as you log on the network and then you’re in charge to reload the weather manually during flight (which can cause up to 3 pauses/freezes every time). Since all my flights are under 2 hours, I reload the weather one last time just before the descent phase which should gives me adequate weather without any pauses until I land.

2- If you have the Saitek Yoke, Rudder Pedals & Panels and use Sparker’s Xsaitekpanels plugin, please make sure you use a powerful USB 2.0 HUB and also make sure that you never plug the HUB in a USB 3.0 Port on your PC.
Many Pauses and Freezes can be attributed to a lack of power on the 5v rail or by using a USB 3.0 port!

My setup has the Saitek Yoke (and Throttle Quadrant) plugged directly in of the USB 2.0 port on my PC.

The Saitek Rudder Pedals & Panels (Multi, Radio and Switch) are going through a Plugable USB 2.0 HUB with a 15W power supply.

I hope everyone will see the same results!
Cheers,
Benoit

Regards

Personally, I’d prefer to see atmospheric flight get done really really well (which is probably what >99% of x-plane users got x plane for anyways, not that it isn’t already really really good) before any focus went to improving the basic space flight already present. Honestly I don’t think very many people would be disappointed if laminar just let other simulators tackle space flight…

I can’t comment on the version of X-Plane that comes after X-Plane 10, other than to say that X-Plane 10 will not be the last version of X-Plane.

No.

Keep up good work!