(Note that we tested the settings with a Core i9-9900K, however, so some of the settings may have a more noticeable impact on performance with a slower CPU.) We appreciate the attention to detail on one level, but when numerous settings have almost no visual or performance impact, why bother with providing the option to turn them off? There are 26 advanced graphics settings, but only nine of those actually cause more than a tiny difference in performance. There are a bunch of settings to tweak, easily reaching the point of information overload. Microsoft Flight Simulator Settings Analysis It's entirely possible to find more demanding ways of testing performance, so consider this a baseline measurement rather than the final statement of how fast any specific hardware combination will run the game (for example, flying in stormy weather would be more taxing). I left the flying to the autopilot just to ensure consistency of the benchmark. I'm in western Washington state, so there are lots of trees in view, plus some hills, rivers, buildings, and clouds. The test sequence consists of the autopilot coming in for a landing at my local regional airport. You can see the full specs of our testbeds to the right. Testing is also done on a 'clean' PC, so there aren't a bunch of background tasks potentially hogging resources or causing interference. As usual, I cleared out all the old GPU drivers (via Display Driver Uninstaller) and installed the latest versions for Microsoft Flight Simulator, both of which are 'game ready:' Nvidia 452.06 (opens in new tab) and AMD 20.8.2. I had to exit the game and relaunch to get it to run. However, a prompt came up before the main menu telling me to insert my Microsoft Flight Simulator disc, with no way around it - not even reconnecting to the Internet helped. I set up one PC as my Microsoft Store designated offline PC, disconnected from the internet, and the game launched okay. If there's a way around it, I couldn't find it. Unfortunately, a bigger issue than the storage and download requirement for some people is going to be the game's always-online requirement. At 4K ultra, dual RTX 2080 Ti performance dropped by nearly 10%. At present, SLI is not supported, and because of CPU limitations adding a second GPU into the mix is unlikely to help. (I cranked that up to 64GB, just because I could, plus I wanted to avoid any extra downloads happening during my benchmarks.) I'm not sure what the use of the local user's AppData folder means if there's more than the one user on a PC, though - I wouldn't want a shared PC to end up with multiple copies of the game data, which at 100GB or more each isn't exactly storage-friendly.Ī single RTX 2080 Ti may not be able to crack 60 fps at ultra settings, but what about two RTX cards in SLI (via NVLink)? Think again. The game also downloads 'live data' that it caches locally, with a default cache size of 8GB. That's a win for hardware testers, at least. Normally, this would all be protected data under the WindowsApps folder, but for Microsoft Flight Simulator, all of this data resides in your user AppData\Local\Packages folder and can be freely copied to another PC. However, an additional 95GB of data gets downloaded when you launch the game the first time. (I know, most people only have one, but I ran the game on four different PCs for this article.) That's less than the size of the latest AMD and Nvidia drivers (combined), and I'm long since past the point of worrying about a 1GB download. The Store download is only about 1GB and needs to be installed from the Microsoft Store on each PC. MSI MPG X570 Gaming Edge WiFi (opens in new tab) Ryzen 9 3900X (opens in new tab), Ry(opens in new tab), Ryzen 5 3400G (opens in new tab) Except, in the case of Microsoft Flight Simulator, there is. It's far more finicky about starting downloads, and there's no good way to transfer game downloads between PCs. In my opinion, the Microsoft Store remains one of the worst digital distribution platforms imaginable. We're skipping ahead, and you certainly don't need ultra settings (the high and even medium presets look quite good), but the point is that this is a game that will punish both CPUs and GPUs for years to come.īefore we get into the testing, let's again note that we're using the Microsoft Store version of the game, which Microsoft kindly provided to us for testing purposes. CPU bottlenecks are likely to keep you below 60 fps even at 1080p ultra, but at 4K ultra? The RTX 2080 Ti managed 33 fps. In a similar vein, you're not going to be running Microsoft Flight Simulator at 4K and maxed out settings with anything close to 60 fps - not on today's hardware. Hyper-X 32GB DDR4-3600 (opens in new tab) (2x 16GB) Intel Core i9-9900K (opens in new tab), Core i5-9600K (opens in new tab), Core i3-9100 (opens in new tab)
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