Flight Sim 2020 keeps crashing even with the a beast of a PC and Video card?

Hi Jeremy, thanks again for the ongoing updates, which are very helpful. Regarding the refund issue, after much researching and several phone calls, I eventually got some sound advice and, currently being part of the EU, I have submitted Complaint via the EU’s disputes system. Miscrosoft gave me the link, which is AKA.MS/EU-ODR (for anybody else in the EU who wants a refund). It was sent off yesterday and I will let you know what they say. If I do get a refund, like you I intend to re-purchase it, but will do this through a MS Game Pass, which costs £3.99 a month in the UK. Its only the basic game, but I can cancel the game pass anytime and can then play with the game to see if I can get to run properly and not feel as frustrated that I had wasted £109.99 for an non-working game.

That ariticcle was excellent and I now understand much more - thank you. Last night I reduced the game settings to low and it ran on a flight for over hour, but then crashed after I landed and was planning another flight. This morning, I have changed the FPS to 20 in the Nvidia Control panel and I am currently in a one hour+ flight and will try to do another one after that to see how long before it crashes, or maybe not at all, although I have low confidence for that. Its a bit jerky on th external graphics, especially out of the side window (TBM 930), but for now that’s ok.

As to the future, I am hoping that the next patch helps. Although my system is not bad, I am thinking of upgrading after Christmas to an i7- with the new 11-series and also a new 3070 graphics card. That will be an expensive option (whole system £2500) but also tracking the new Xbox X due release in the UK in November  and which will eventually have FS2020. They say you can plug in keyboards, mouse and hopefully my controller, as I don’t want to use the standard XBox controller. The Xbox X is under £600 and this might be a great option, espeiclaly if it runs FS2020 in the high-end spec, as there would not be any issues. I am going to continue to monitor both options so that I can happily keep flying regularly. I am retired Royal Air Force,  but not the flying branch and have always loved flying. What part of Oz are you in? We should have been there now on a 2-month house swap with mates in Kineton (one hour north of Melbourne) followed by a month in NZ, but hope to now do it in 2022.

Good to know you have cracked it. Agree re VSync, but stilla djustinga testing to try to get it to run without crashing. So far I have managed one hour before a crash, which is a big improvement.

I think we can only vent at Microsoft because they are the ones who are selling it. They alone need to fix the bugs, which hopefully will be done in Patch 2 - we shall see.

I'm glad to report a breakthrough.

After Microsoft refunded my purchase price, I decided I couldn't wait until the next update to re-purchase MSFS2020 because the update was forecast to be at the end of September.  So I purchased MSFS2020 again, hoping that if I did a clean install which included the 2nd September 2020 update, it might work this time (that would assume the problem was that my original installation was not updating properly).  However, when it crashed twice during download and then continuously crashed when starting up as it had done before, I thought my decision had been a very stupid one.

I went through all the usual recommendations again, updating everything in the manner suggested in the various forum messages, adjusting Windows Defender etc.  Then in desparation, I tried the Xbox advocates through the "contact us" page.  I am thankful for your help, and although none of the advocates actually fixed the problem directly, one of them, Vicente N, did say something which triggered a thought in my mind.  He said that although he couldn't prove it, he suspected it was a "performance issue" and asked whether I had changed the FPS (Frame Per Second) rate.  I had in fact reduced this to 30 in MSFS2020, on one of the two occasions I was able to get into its "options, general" screen before it crashed.

Then I read this useful article describing the adjustments which can be made to the video output, some of which were essential to ensure that MSFS2020 actually ran on your system.

Now, my graphics card is a GTX 980 Ti 6GB, which is not the highest spec, but I believe it is much better performing than the recommended minimum hardware requirements for MSFS2020.  Despite that, I decided I needed to reduce the FPS and rendering quality as much as possible to see if that was the issue. 

But how to do this?  The problem I was having was that MSFS2020 was crashing as soon as it had started to work in earnest (when it had finished loading and started to show the menu screen).  So I was not able to get to the "options, general" screen to adjust the FPS which might suit my graphics card better than the default settings. 

However, from the above useful article, I realised it may be possible to do some adjustments using the NVIDIA tools before MSFS2020 even started.  I had actually removed those tools because in one of the forum messages someone said that the NVIDIA software seemed to interfere with MSFS2020 and that it was best only to use the driver (version 452.06) and nothing else from NVIDIA.  Because of that, I had removed NVIDIA Control Panel and so it was not obvious to me that it was possible to adjust the max frame rate using that application.  

Once I reinstalled NVIDIA Control Panel, I was able to change the max frame rate to 20.  This stopped MSFS2020 crashing and I was able to reach the menu screen.  Therefore I was able to get into the "options, general" screen.  I turned off vsync, and turn down the "global rendering quality" to a minimum. 

This means that I can now experiment to get the best settings for my system.

I have pretty much the same setup as you, and tried all the stuff you did, what worked for me was enabling vsync in the graphic options for the game, also I noticed if you have a bluetooth controller it can cause it to hickup. I have a gsync monitor so usually I disable vsync in games and let nvidia drivers override software graphics settings. I enabled vsync in MSFS2020 and I've pretty much been playing for hours no problem.