THE LAST COMPARISON
This time I recorded leg number 148 of my round-the-world trip, flying it with a replay first on FS2020 and then on FS2024.
Just for reference, the system on which everything runs: 13900KF, 4090, 64 GB of RAM at 6400. Game Mode OFF, HAGS ON.
Flown in VR with Pico 4 at 143% resolution. I’m recording in the headset, so what you see is “real VR”. All the options (Virtual Desktop, OpenXR Toolkit, graphic settings in FS2020 and FS2024) are visible in the video.
I’ll start by saying that this will be my last test – from today I’m going back to flying. And this was probably my last flight with FS2020 as well: for how I use the simulator ( “free” flight in VFR), I have no more reasons to use it.
In the video, you can see the comparison on cities, mountains, hills, coasts, and rivers. In all situations, FS2024 emerges victorious (which is logical, after all), in some cases in a “stunning” way (look at the coasts and morphing, look at the rivers, look at the color of the lakes). Sure, there are still problems (speaking of lakes, the “milk lake” nearby Christchurch) and the colors in snow-covered areas are still too washed out, despite the “sunglasses” from the OpenXR Toolkit. However… look at the valley. There’s just no comparison.
And everything is complemented by a greater sense of graphic realism, at a general level.
As the icing on the cake, the performance: FS2020 is fully maxed out, FS2024 with optimized settings. The first is on DLSS Quality, the second Balanced but still better looking and running with an average of 20% more FPS (quite probably FS2020 would make up for the difference switching to DX11).
On my system, FS2024 is rock solid – no crashes in the last week, and quick loading times.
My dear FS2020, it has been nice. Indeed, beautiful. In fact: more than beautiful. But it’s time to fly towards new skies.
