Oh of course, your observations are totally spot on. But even when you get through the grind of loading this game, the performance goes completely to hell once Windows starts swapping out RAM pages.

I also agree with that note on how the credits were stacked up. And that’s literally how this game got built. Asobo came to MS with this awesome visualization tool and MS pretty much said “ok, why don’t we hand you FS14’s code and we can call it FS20?”

The product was literally built backwards.

> The product was literally built backwards.

Yes, exactly. I't infuriating. I hope there is a strong enough enough backlash to get Microsoft to spend 50% more than they intended to, to fix the product so that it matches what they sold it for.

It also seems the menus were designed by designers that had no "performance budget" cap - looking at performance, the menus only hit a sensible FPS when on the loading screen. The sheer amount of animation and transparency in the main menu seems to be the cause of poor performance and GPU fans resembling jet engines, and totally needlessly at that!

I can't see anything else bottlenecking the system elsewhere on performance - it really does seem like the overall game missed out on any real performance optimisation.

The hangar animation behind the main menu is a big part of that GPU hit.

That's the same conclusion I reached here. I also think when you pause (i.e. hit escape, not talking live pause where the sim keeps running), the game continues to render the full scene in the background, even though there's content in front. This just feels wasteful to me - the power delta on my GPU between active and idle is something like 100 W!

The intro sequence is a pre-rendered video - I reckon if Asobo used a pre-rendered hangar video, they could swap that out in a patch and nobody would notice or care, but it would knock GPU utilisation to < 5%.