How to Setup Manual Cache - Microsoft Flight Sim 2020 (Includes Comparison)
Learn how to properly add a Manual Cache to Microsoft Flight Simulator. You can also see my detailed comparison between the 4 different levels of cache. Hope you enjoy!
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Thanks. Your video helped me learn how to use the manual cache option. It would be helpful also to mention that before you can move to this stage you have to setup a Maximum Overall Cache Size otherwise the Cache New Region remains greyed out. That’s certainly what I found. I chose to setup a maximum overall cache size of 500GB because I installed a 1TB SSD dedicated to MSFS 2020. Probably because I chose such a large size when I’d entered 500GB as my maximum cache size just as an experiment, it took nearly 35 mins to create just the cache envelope. So not advised unless you really intend to use 500GB. Once my PC completed that task the Cache New Region lit up and I was able to follow your helpful guide.
That is a great point! I should have covered this. I wish I could add to videos, however once they are out, it is too late. I will make sure to add something about this in the description. Thanks!
For now, I have pinned your comment to the top, so people will see it.
I did the same (dedicated 1TB ssd), but after seeing how small the cached regions were, I deleted it and went back and made the rolling cache 250 and the manual only 50. You can increase but not decrease size. The entirety of NYC and half of LI was only around 20GB. What I want now more than anything is the ability to append an already cached region without having to create a new scenery file.
James Hall I now plan to do that for the same reason. Interested to know how you went about deleting the initial 500GB cache?
@@tonyvelupillai2728 Look at the manual cache page. Wherever it says to create it, that's where it is. It'll be a huge 500GB file. When you delete it you'll have to start over making a new smaller cache and selecting which regions to put in there. I chose for a bigger 250GB rolling cache and the manual cache I'll just expand as needed. I started it out at 50GB.
They need to change it so when you are zoomed all the way out you can still select high quality. Zooming all the way in to map an entire city in high quality is a pain in the ass.
I agree. It is a pain.
100%! This feature definitely needs a refactor. Is this a way for them to avoid people accidentally downloading 800 TBs of data (made that number up)? Either way, you'd think a better UX could be engineered with alerts put in place if you are selecting too much when zoomed out in high quality mode.
@@travisneids yeah, and if someone has 800tb of hard drive, let them download 800tb of cache !
I completely agree. I’m trying to create a corridor from AZ to MN and it’s taking forever even in medium resolution. My pc has 4 terabytes of space on a SSD so that’s not a problem.
i found a tip if it can help to resolve this problem. do supersampling ! enable dsr factor in your gforce driver, enable the x4.00. launch the game and now you can select new resolution, 4k or maybe 8k on your 1440p monitor, now you won t need to zoom a lot to see the grid. you can cache a full country with just one or 2 selections. ( and you can try to launch the game in 8k if you want to take pictures ! )
Stumbled upon this setting and it’s amazing. Take a ton of kid of the CPU and GPU. Your the first video I’ve seen that has explored the feature.
The difference between cached cities and areas is amazing, no more nuked buildings. Thank you.
Wow, this is great! My house is auto-gen at the moment and now it looks 100% better!
2 very informative videos in a row... subscribed
DLing this right now and I'm VERY excited to know I can do this inside the game. I'm predicting a HUGE cache file, but I just bought a 2TB SSD to put this game on. I wish my flight instructor was still alive so he could see this.
I just did this... WOW! No joke, soooo easy! Unlike X-plane (what a pain to do the same thing). MSF is so good stock, but when you enhance your requent areas? Holy Molly!!! THANK YOU!
I like flying around LA, and found that just by adding a few scattered spots of high detail cache, especially around tall buildings etc, made my gameplay so much smoother. EDIT: I have a 50meg line and nvme drive.
I will have to try some experiments like this. Glad it makes your sim run better!
Am I to assume that you turned off data dl b4hand? Otherwise higher res data will still be downloaded in places you might rather have at medium.
@@Level10Productions I left dl data on. Problem was that I was getting stutters while downloading, caching some data took enough load off the downloading, so was getting less stuttering that way. However if I fly somewhere it will cache that area automatically, then when I fly there again there is very little download stutter. So, manual cache only really helps the first time you fly in that area, unless your rolling cache has been over-written (mine is set to 60GB, for now).
Great thank you, exactly what I need. When my physical arrives off to my Sons unlimited internet service with rig in hand and a swag of TB storage and save/cache my regions where I fly regularly. I have a smile on my face. Appreciate you responses, fantastic.
No problem. Glad I could help!
As always it was the best video on this one. Thank you very much It was really great
Thank you. I was desperately looking for that!
I'm glad I could help!
I have seen many KZheadr out there asking for likes etc. But here again you deserve a like.❤️
Very informative man. Thanks.
I will try this, thank you for sharing.
I was wondering how to use that. Thanks a lot Doing my own stuff now :-)
Mate what s Great video! Thanks alot really. Im subbing right away!
Thanks! I appreciate that.
Very helpful video. Thank you.
Awesome vid. Going to buy this tonight. Just deciding on what edition to go for. Cheers.
buy xbox game pass
Premium Deluxe!!
Went basic but will upgrade one day. What an amazing game!
The initial load time is much less using manual cache. Makes sense as it's loading from hard drive instead of having to download.
Thanks VR. This will be very useful especially if you're flying in limited area's. There are also great suggestions in the comments below (and above). Happy landings ;-)
Dude.. out of all of the horseshit msfs 2020 videos. This one is just an awesome way of enjoying the flight without the data lag! Thank you for posting! Really helpful!
this solves my weak internet issue a lot this is going get me busy downloading
“Not sure” is a good enough answer thank you. You understood... Equal to the initial downloaded version would have to do. I was curious and hoping the discs carried the optimum resolution. I wanted to cache a region and fly in max resolution to unload my rigs processing. I don’t have internet. Hope this makes sense, I’m not that tech savvy. Thanks you for your answer.
Yes. It makes sense. So they definitely will not have the top resolution on the discs as they have said it is multiple petabytes of data. But it will definitely be usable.
Do cached regions survive shutdown then restart ie cached and saved for use off line for later use ?
They do. They are saved to your hard drive. At the end of my video I am running them all offline. That way my internet didn't stream higher quality when I was using the lower quality cache.
Excellent video. Thanks.
Thanks. Good comparisons :-)
Thanks. Glad you like it
I don't know how I missed this until now, end of May 2021! I probably watched over a hundred videos on FS2020 and they were all done by people who have connection speeds of 50 or higher. My connection speed is 7 and it took me 4 days just to download the FS2020 package. So after watching this, I cached Manhattan in high resolution and wow, nice difference. However photo grammetry needs to be turned on to get a lot of the actual buildings, like the Chrysler Building, and while paused, I did that and waited about 8 minutes and then Manhattan looked more realistic. I never knew it was possible with a connection of 7, but it works if you wait long enough. Now I don't have to feel sorry for myself that I can't afford Starlink, or don't want to own that expensive equipment.
Thanks for the great video!
No problem. Glad you like it!
Fantastic, your efforts here will help me immensely. One question, do you know if.... off the physical copy are the same caching quality levels available to store?
I'm not sure if I understand your question. If your asking about the disc version of the sim, I am not sure. I believe the discs would be equal to the initial downloaded version. To get the medium and high quality you will need to download the more detailed cache or have your system stream the higher quality. Hopefully that was your question. If not, please refrain the question and I'll do my best to answer. Thanks.
This was very helpful. Thanks so much for your great video. Now I know that I’ll be able to run FS. Have you or are you going to do one on the different quality hardware?
I was planning to do some tests with the 1060 graphics card to see how it runs but I haven't been able to get to that. Other then that I don't have a ton or different hardware to test with.
Thank you that help me a lot
No problem! Glad I could help.
Awesome 👌
Amazing!
hi @VR Flight World if my sim settings are low will the manual cache be able to show the chosen area better than the rest? i mean my problem is specs not bandwidth. thanks
THANKS GREAT
I may need to just get a dedicated drive for this. I am liking it all so far. Just want some better detail over my home area.
This. I have a dedicated m.2 drive for dcs and msfs 🙃
I set the entire New York City area in the five boroughs on the high quality setting. Approximately how much space is that gonna be? I’m thinking that’s way too much space? Also, two part question if let’s say we manually cachet as certain area maybe for let’s say the low setting, when I fly over it will always remain on low graphic or will it load up beyond that with just a little graphic setting loading up from the start is what it is?
Yes, caching can save your data downloads from your broadband provider, but your graphics will still have to render the resolution? Stuttering will not go away because you've downloaded scenery to your hard drive?
If I do the manual cache storage in a HDD, the experience still will be better than the no cache with just internet and lags? I dont have too much space in my ssd to do this.
I’m doing a manual cachet of the entire New York City area in five boroughs on the high setting. Is that possible or is that going to take up like way too much space? I’m guessing around 200 GB? But if I remember correctly just one building on the high setting will be about 1 GB? Thanks
Well unfortunately my local stadium remained the same :-( pity. I believe this works for very popular know areas. Thanks.
If I have rolling cache, is the sim downloading high or medium or low qualities??? This is the most important question! Does the game auto load high or medium or low? Also when I tried to download this stuff the game crashed 4 times! 1st time when I was still choosing the area. 2nd time during download when I hit 90%. 3rd and 4th time when I tried to resume download when the game runs at freakin 3 FPS. 7% GPU and 13% CPU usage and I get 3 FPS cause when I first re-enter the manual cache page it focuses on some EU city and tried to download that city!!!
Im sorry, how much the size of the whole manual cache that you did ? Is it more than 10gb on high ?
Fun fact: The low quality version of the Colosseum represents exactly what it looked like when it was brand new.
Its true, it used to be a tourist office taking booking for trips around the colosseum, the tickets were postdated for 2,000 years time !
This is a great idea, but my FS's Manual Cache function is greyed out, so I can't make the changes you are suggesting. I've tried turning on the Developer mode, and that didn't make a difference. Do you, or anyone else, know how to turn the Manual Cache function ON? Thanks for the great video
When i select a quite important portion of grand canyon it makes no difference and download size is just 2mb (in high quality). Any idea why? Same with other common places
Will the Xbox version support this? If I was to use a 4tb external, or a 1tb SSD memory card, could I save the maps on them to play offline? or to stream into the game faster?
Does it use cached even when playing online if available? And does it update automaticly?
If I paint a large area in low where I usually only flight hight altitude will I have shit graphics if I ever go low there or is this where the streaming data comes in? Like am I limited to low forever in that area or not?
Great Video. Really helped me out. Can i also ask something, can i re-upload this video on my channel cause i wanted to do such a video and my game keeps crashing. No hard worries if its a no. Anyways thanks for the video and all the best. U got a sub 👍
That sucks to hear that it keeps crashing on you. But for re-uploading the video. I would have to say No. I appreciate you asking but these videos take a ton of my time to produce and I would like to be the only channel posting them.
@@VRFlightWorld Its ok,Thank you so much for replying.Sorry to ask !!
Hi. Manual cache is my settings in greyed out and i can’t click « view »... any idea why?! Thanks
There appears to be a way to move the Cache file in settings General/Data/Rolling Cache Settings. I'd prefer to have this caching on external drive.
Hey there, I somehow wrecked the manual cache option and I cant get into the wolrdmap selection menu. Does anyone know where the manual cache is saved on the harddrive? Maybe I can get rid of the things inside and it works again.. I appreciate all help!
Hi, when you set an area of low and medium quality, will it only show that area in low and medium quality, or will it still try to pull in as high quality as possible when flying?
It will try to pull the higher quality data from the internet unless you are offline.
Wait a sec, is that map you're using also the one that's used in the main flight planning menu in FS2020? Because the map I have looks like it's from FS2002, and the entire planet is just a pretty generic low-res camo pattern that only vaguely matches the parts of the world they're representing.
It starts out with very low detail but as your system and internet catch up, it will begin to add more detail. Especially when you zoom in.
@@VRFlightWorld Weird, I've tried zooming all the way in and waiting awhile, but nothing ever updates. I know it's not my internet speed, so I have to chalk it up to this game being inexcusably broken, which it still is after today's massive patch according to dozens of people on reddit. If Steam had an option to give mixed reviews, this game would get it. It's certainly an improvement over FSX in some ways, but the number of bugs and new ways they're finding to break it is ridiculous. We expected filet mignon and they gave us discount ground beef.
Ya. That is too bad. It definitely has its bugs.
Hi, im little confused. Im playing flight simulator high graphics and with 250mbps internet connection so my setup is pretty okey. But still some houses looks in Finland Helsinki little unrealistic. So can this make those houses look even better? Or is this only for those who are playing offline.
It should be mostly for people with slow internet and offline however their is a chance that it could make a small improvement to FPS. Seems like a few people have had the low quality building problem. Not sure what the solution is. Might be a graphic setting that is causing this.
Can i download some cache places from a other PC and copied the data to the offline PC?
So, I am curious, if you download an area in medium or low settings then choose to fly online, will MSFS still use data to put even more detail on top of it to match high quality or do you guys think it just says, "I have this area, don't need anymore data?"
It will increase your quality when required. If you look at the comparison portion of my video. When I was doing the medium on my first take I forgot to turn off the internet. It then made the medium look like high. I redid that scene for the video but it showed me that internet will bump up the quality if you allow it.
Go to Google type where you want, get the co ordinates, copy and paste into game, takes you straight there!
Thanks, I appreciate the tip!
My manual cache window looks weird, instead up looking fairly straight down like a satellite would, it is at an extreme angle facing from south to north. It makes it completely impossible to do anything. The terrain slides all other the place and where you have painted in does not stay there, but constant slides north or south. Forget it! Please help, I don't get what I see in the videos.
So does this fix some areas where the game just throws in auto gen buildings? Also this video is very helpful!!
Yes, it should fix this depending on what kind of detail they have in that area. Glad you liked the video!
VR Flight World ok I will definitely try this!
Do I need to you use manual cache if I have a 100Mbit connection?
Is the quality and FPS increased ? I’ve got fibre internet ( 50mb/s) would it make any difference I’d obviously store the data on an ssd ... thanks
I haven't noticed a quality or FPS increase if you have a good connection. Maybe others have had a different experience but I don't think it will make a big difference with a fast connection.
One question : I have one old PC at my office with a really good internet connexion. My gaming PC ok for FS2020 has very, very bad connexion. Will it be possible to transfer my cache datas file from the HD drive to the SSD of my home PC ?
I don't believe that would be possible since it is all done in game.
So, maybe will i think to try a 200 meter wifi antenna
Hi thanks for the video. When flying online rolling cache im seeing building that look just like your medium close up. All my settings are on high/ultra, even when i manually cache they look like your close up medium. Could I be doing somthing wrong? Cheers
Likely your Rolling cache is set too small or perhaps you don't have fast enough internet to stream in the higher detail data.
@@Gamekod3 its strange as I fly over my local area Moorabbin Australia, then onto Sydney looks amazing. However Goldcoast complete opposite looks like Somthing from I AM LEDGEND. Wierd
you're the second person to say they have had that problem. I haven't had this problem yet. Make sure you go through each setting manually, as I have had some settings stay on low, even though I switched the global setting to ultra or high. Other then that, I am not sure why you would get the medium quality in an area where you have manually cached.
Just a quick one, maybe I didn't understand correct but am I right that the local cache thing is the best quality to get? Does the internet 100+Mbit connection would achieve the same result? I don't care about streaming, that's why I am asking... Thanks for the video mate!
Having a strong internet connection should give you the same results as downloading the manual cache on high.
@@VRFlightWorld Cool, Thank you!
I have a 500 Mbit connection currently and seen the game use 250 Mbit from time to time. Just decided to check this while cruising over Madagascar so not sure if it uses even more in the big cities like New York etc...
Thanks. Does manual cache result in better quality as realtime streaming?
If you use the high quality setting it can result in the same quality as real time streaming. If you have slow internet, then this will bump up the quality higher then streaming because streaming might not keep up with the demand.
How much of a difference does it make when the game is on D: drive and the patch to scenery is C: drive? I didn't set it that way. What is the correct path to make it work?
It shouldn't make a difference
can we set local areas with a wider angle ? I would like to cache a whole country (switzerland, not that big ahha) but have to scroll so much because i can't select the areas from a wide angle... really long and painful
Yes. It would be tough to do and there is currently no shortcut for this. I have also heard that if you download too large of area the map becomes painfully slow. Just a heads up on that.
Try using gps coordinates. Works great
Thanks. I will give it a try.
Hi ... Some how my manual cache button has greyed out I have latest update 1.15.8.0 ...Can u please help
It works for me ,RTX 2070S,HDD,I set rolling cache to 10GB,the loading time is 3mins,if I set to 50GB,it is 12mins,because it effects the loading time too much,and manual cache it doesn't effect loading time,it spend me 3mins to get into the map.
i have my rolling cache set to 500gb which would explain why the game takes ages to load
My primary C: drive is a 500gb SDD drive and a second D: internal drive is a 1tb SSD drive. I have MSFS2020 installed on my 500gb drive. My question is, can I set the rolling/manual cache to read from my secondary 1tb drive? If not, what if I used a symbolic link back to the default folder?
I don't think there is any problem with doing that. I haven't tested it but it does let you pick the location. I have my cache in a different location on the same drive.
You can set the cache folder on whatever drive you like.
Awesome, thanks! I'll be sure to test it out and see how it handles.
I tried this and it looked exactly the same. Do you think that is just a problem with the maps? And yeah I agree with one of the comments that you need to be able to select more with high settings because I literally want to render the world in high now as I feel I need my monies worth LOL!!!!!
Ya. If you have a good internet connection it shouldn't make too much of a difference. A good internet connection should produce the same result as high setting.
You can search by using gps coordinates. You can find the codes from google maps.
Thanks. Appreciate the tip. I will give this a try.
What’s that music sounds great!!
How much cache for the whole of the UK I would have maybe 300 Gb on my SSD to spare.
What's the background track on this video please?
I reinstalled the game already and it took hours but if i go to manual cache i cant do anything. It says my maximum overall cache size is 0gb and i dont know hot to change that. Help pls
Microsoft should really sign some sort of a deal with Google to import/use their high quality satellite imagery & 3D rendering of many cities & landscapes. You can do some of it manually but I doubt if the 3D part is doable.
Does caching make the area more detailed than it already is or does it increase performance? Thanks great video!
I'm not sure about the performance yet. Still want to do some testing on this. I would think it could have some performance gains. It's going to make the biggest difference if you have a slow internet connect or no internet since your sim won't be able to keep up with the data being streamed to your system.
im using rolling cache 300gb on ssd, with only 8mb internet, after i fly on some area alot, the game run way better, more fps, less stuter, so caching a place before u go there is much better for slow internet.
@@ericsilva7430 Damn 8mb internet?! It's good to see you can enjoy the game while having slower internet :D
@@brownalfie Isolates areas look fine without preloading(slow plane), big city got preload or look like ''blur clay'' util i fly a lot on the area, preload on medium dont take that long and don't look like shit, and the game keep trying to get high quality, try that on hawaii, works great.
Hello can you please do new york city buildings please? Thanks.
How do I zoom when setting a manual cache?
If your streaming data at 20mb/s would it be considered high quality or would it be like low quality
probably medium to high
Tika yeah i just tested it, its medium until you get really close and then it turns into high
May I ask how you moved the camera around the colosseum?
I use the showcase camera. It acts like a drone.
Does the cache activate whilst online?
That low level coliseum looks like the LG ATC from Warzone.
The game try to upgrade to high if i already got full medium on a area using manual cache? I wonder if using medium manual cache on a place can make it look bad forever because the game wont try to load high quality?
I don't believe it will. I had mine on a low cache when making the video. The one time I forgot to turn off my internet and the quality went up to high.
@@VRFlightWorld download full Jamaica island on medium, game still pulling data hard from internet, multiplayer, air trafic, real time weather, etc turn off, the game must be trying to get high quality. I guess it does try to upgrade to high if we preload medium on a area we wana fly.
How do you delete those cache file that you ve just created.
I have a new custom built pc built beyond the ideal specs for FS2020. I have poor internet (< 20 mbps download), so I installed a 4 terabyte SSD to give me plenty of space to cache large areas for flying offline. The areas I’m caching are mostly rural so they only average about 5 megabytes each at medium resolution with a couple of exceptions. I set my cache limit at 800 gigs but when I hit about 500 megabytes, and try to download new area, I get a window that says “updating cache, please do not shut down computer or exit game, but then it immediately shuts down the game (not computer) automatically! I tried restarting the pc several times but get the same response every time. Can anyone help me? THANKS.
Does this seem to help over all performance during the flight?
I haven't done any tests on this yet but I plan to. Another person in the comments said that it helped their flight run smoother but I haven't seen a huge difference yet. I plan to do a few tests in the near future.
@@VRFlightWorld Sounds great, Hoping it will help. Thanks for the reply!
YOU SAVIOR! I thought it was automatic!
Ya there is a rolling cache that is automatic, however if you want to manually download the specific area, then this is the way to go.
In Miami, Bing Maps looks more natural; Google Maps shows more detail, but the reflections on the water, the air, and the edges of the photo are unnatural. In some parts of the world, the default map is not good, so it is better to use Google Maps.
Slight issue... my manual cache button is grayed out. I have data streaming on and no data limit
My manual cache setting is greyed out! What setting enables this?
I believe the only thing that will grey it out is if you are in a flight when you try to use it. Make sure you are at the main menu. Hopefully this helps.
Funny , that With the lod tree Mod and eberything would be fine
For me this is the most frustrating issue with FS20. There should be a check box for which quality you want but allow you to scroll out as much as you want to more easily, and quickly select large areas. Just blows my mind that they can get so much, so right and then fail so miserably on such a thing like this.
Ya. It is definitely an odd way to setup the manual cache. Hopefully they fix this in future updates.
i did exactly as you did but i only get a few hundred KIB manual cache, whats the reason for that ?
Did you do it in a different location. I did it in a less populated area and it ended up being a much smaller file.
@@VRFlightWorld i tried it on SOLA ENZV AIRPORT. maybe thats why, but i thought satelite data would be downloadable in a good quality everywhere
Ya. It is still good quality from what I can tell. If you download the same area at low or medium you will notice that is a smaller file size.
@@VRFlightWorld but i downloaded in high for sola enzv but everytime i did it, it only has about 700 kib. If i go to los angeles airport and do manual cache it looks good as hell and then it goes about 50mb
Hi, where is says manual cache, its not highlighted so I am unable to click on it. Can you help please?
It is under options and then data. The only time I cant click on it is when I am in a flight. Make sure you are accessing the options from the menu before taking a flight.
@@VRFlightWorld Thank you I'll try that out.
Have you tried GPS Coordinates?
I hadn't at the time of making this video, but now I use it all the time. Thanks for the comment!