Hi, I’m a MSFS 2020 newbie and this is my first post here. I love this sim and Squirrel’s YouTube instructional videos!
With my present PC system I’m crawling at a miserable 10FPS with the sim set to minimum settings.
I will be replacing my whole system to get me to an up to date system worthy of this sim. Because of my present income I will be updating my GPU first from a AMD Radeon™ R7 360 Series to a PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB GDDR6 first and then replacing the rest of my system next month.
My present system is an Asus M4A88T-V-EVO-USB 3.0 (PCI-E 3.0) MB, AMD Phenom™ II X6 1055T processor and 16GB 1333MHZ RAM.
Understanding my new GPU RX 5700XT is PCI-E 4.0 compliant and my present MB is only PCI-E 3.0, can I still expect any significant increase to my present 10FPS until I replace and significantly upgrade the rest of my system next month?
Thanks for your educated best guesses!
My card is arriving tomorrow or Monday, can’t wait!!!
I’m afraid you won’t see a big increase in FPS, because even though you’re upgrading your GPU, your processor is the next bottleneck. The Phenom series were good for their time, but if you’re planning to stick with AMD you can get a much better processor for around the same price today. The example I’ve used below is on average 43% faster than what you currently have (which is huge in CPU terms).
I’d recommend you do both upgrades together if you want to see any real change.
Despite all the attention on CPU/Graphics, the biggest gamechanger for myself was jumping from 16GB to 32GB of DD4 RAM. (This sim is such a memory hog - I’ve never had a RAM upgrade give me such a boost) .
Plenty for you to think about, I’m sure. I’m afraid none of this comes cheap!
Your processor will definitely bottleneck you, its almost 10 years old. I think you will do fine and get decent FPS in rural areas and medium settings, but if you fly into a large city or photogrammetric area your processor will likely not be able to keep up and you will probably get the fps you have now in those areas. I have the same GPU and VRAM you are using, it made a huge difference when i upgraded. My processor is a Ryzen 5 1600, which is kinda lower tier nowadays, and it definitely caps my FPS in the analyzer at around 40fps 1440p on high, and id probably be able to do ultra everything at 1080p and get about the same frames. 16GB ram should be just fine, I played with 8GB system ram at 1080p with an old Radeon 580 4GB and I was able to keep 25-30 fps outside of big cities. One thing that helped so so much was give your computer all the ram it can handle, because the stuttering will be real if you cap system ram and page file.
32 is more than enough if you are just running MSFS. If you have multiple screens and you are running skyvector in chrome or other things at the same time, thats where anything over 16GB of ram will come in handy. I have seen MSFS use a max of about 22GB on my system.
While it’s practical to assume the sim will only be further optimized with time, it may be worth considering minimum system requirements. An upgrade to both your GPU and RAM would go a long way towards ensuring a smoother experience.
I suggest waiting until the end of October once AMD has announced its new CPUs and GPUs. Even if the new series is too expensive, it should hopefully push down the prices of the current AMD chips. So you could end up saving a little bit of cash.
You’re really going to need to upgrade your CPU before you’ll see any real performance difference. Your current CPU will likely bottleneck any new GPU upgrade - so don’t worry if you find that upgrading your GPU doesn’t have any impact at first. Once upgrade your CPU as well you’ll be all good.
Well I’m glad to say with my PowerColor Red Devil Radeon™ RX 5700 XT upgrade I’ve pretty much increased my 10FPS to about 30 FPS in th PowerColor Red Devil Radeon™ RX 5700 XT e low setting and can actual get about 24 FPS in the HD mode with a few tweaks. I just finished so I have haven’t had much time to really check it out but it is soooooooi much better and enjoyable. Can’t wait for the rest of my upgrade!
