My 5700XT 1080p settings Solid 30fps with highest fidelity

User Support Hub Install, Performance & Graphics
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Let me preface the goal was a locked 30fps on a 1080p monitor with the highest fidelity possible.

I’ve never screwed around with a games settings as much as I have FS2020 in my search for an optimal experience, but I think I found it.

Last week I woke up at 4am to try and get in on 6800XT orders at launch… we all know how that (didn’t) go. Both AMD and Nvidia have disclosed that demand was much higher than expected and regular stock won’t be available till likely February-April.

I’m not going to waste my time mashing F5 on my keyboard, and the scalpers can go F themselves. So I swung by Best Buy and walked out with a 5700XT.

After some tweaking, I’ve drilled my settings down to this: Maxed, with resolution scaling dropped down, but using AMD’s VSR to run my 1080p monitor at 4k to compensate.

I’m a big fan of supersampling, It’s the best way to do anti-aliasing, and it also improves detail of distant objects, even on lower resolution monitors. By running at 4K and having the videocard downsample to 1080, I’m not getting the overly aggressive sharpening artifacts the game’s new TAA algorithm enforces, getting greater texture detail for distant objects (photogrammetry is still iffy at distance), and I’m able to lock my fps at a steady 30fps in anywhere from rural Idaho, to downtown LA.

No OC, just (in the driver) set a frame locker for FS2020, use VSR (Nvidia calls it DSR) and dropping the resolution scaling in game to lessen the load on the GPU. Here’s a list of the settings in-game, along with some screenshots of a flight I just finished up going from KSBA to KSMO

No hiccups, looks smooth and natural, and most of the time I’m not above a busy metro like LA, GPU usage hovers around 80-90%, keeping everything quiet.

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4 Likes
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what CPU do you have?
I have 5700xt I ll try this thanks for share these settings
are you using image sharpening on amd sofware?
ill have to update my CPU soon case the 6700k is short with MSFS

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R5 3600. When 5800x’s become available, I’ll pick one up and the 3600 will go into my work machine to replace its 2200G

Full Specs:

AMD Ryzen 5 3600
MSI B550 Tomahawk
32GB G.SKILL 3600 CL16 4x8GB
PowerColor Red Devil 5700XT
Creative Sound Blaster Z
WD Black SN850 500GB NVMe
WD Black SN750 2TB NVMe
WD Blue 1TB SATA SSD
Corsair RM850x

1 Like
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I know the new Ryzen 5000 CPU’s have had a huge boost in FS2020 performance. No doubt from its strong single core performance.

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Wow- this is excellent! Thanks for sharing this. Been fiddling for so long with settings in this game.

This has massively improved the issues I was having running at native resolution (1440p) on a 5700XT- was getting really bad artifacting/shimmering on things like fences, pylons and airport windows from certain angles, plus the game just looked a bit ‘low res’ overall. Switched on virtual super resolution as you described- running at 5120*2880 with render scaling at 50%. Game looks awesome.

Any other settings you’ve tweaked in Radeon settings that’ve helped? I’ve found I get little difference in FPS if I don’t cap FPS using Radeon Chill. Game stays smooth in the low 30s.

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I’m a huge fan of supersampling, once you see how much an improvement it makes, it’s hard to go back. I’m really looking forward to AMD’s version of DLSS and if VSR and DLSS can be combined. That way instead of rendering at a lower resolution, you render at native res, but with higher fidelty, and less of a performance impact.

I think 30fps for FS2020 specifically, is the sweet spot because it looks real but fast enough not to make you sick. 60fps in FS2020 just looks like a soap opera to me.

Aside from custom fan curves, that’s about all I do.

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Thanks for these settings. I’ve done what you said in the fs2020 menu. But where and what do I change outside of MSFS. I am using Nvidia. Please can you point me in the right direction.

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Nvidia calls it DSR, you’re going to want to set it to 4.00X and add a fair bit of sharpening too.

On AMD, you can do an overlay of the drivers and make these tweaks in-game, with Nvidia you’ll have to open and close the game for every change you make.

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After you’ve enabled DSR (Your monitor will flicker on and off while it enables), make sure you set your in-game resolution higher than your native res, and turn the resolution scaling down to 50 or 60.

2 Likes
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Thanks I’ve done this and changed the MSFS settings as well. Please do let me know your smoothness settings.

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Hi, sorry to keep pestering you. Ok , so the settings made a huge difference and I like it overall. Slight issue that it introduced is . Clouds are stuttering … Sim is not. It’s butter smooth but clouds move in frames which is clearly visible… Like stutter…

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You can put smoothness at whatever, but anywhere between 20 and 30% should be good. For the clouds stuttering, that I’m not sure about. Did you reboot your computer?

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Yes , I did that . I’ve fiddled with sharpness in DSR.

I also tried something weird. DSR 4.0 on.

Screen resolution in sim at 1080p.

Render scaling at 4k.

Sim ran smoother , clouds have almost none shimmer/dots around the edges and cockpit reflections on windshield have little or no pixel effect.

What have I done?

I’ll go back to the original method and try and fix cloud stuttering.

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Keep us posted.

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Ya I’m pretty happy with my 5700XT, I run about 40 - 60 FPS on a 1440P 34" ultrawide at High End/Ultra Blend. Definitely a good compromise if you can’t get your hands on one of the brand new cards. I don’t see any need to upgrade for a long time.

System:
Ryzen 3700X
MSI 5700XT Gaming X
MSI B450 Carbon Pro Max Wifi
Corsair Vengeance 32GB 3600m Ram
WDB 1TB Nvme

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If you turn on DSR, but don’t set your screen resolution in FS2020 to greater than your monitors native res, then you can turn DSR off since you’re not using it.

Experiment and tell us your findings! I’m all about tweaking this game to get max performance out of it.

The new TAA algorithm released a few months ago works well when turning down below 100%, MUCH better than it did at launch.

Having the render scale at 200% and native res, has yielded a poorer framerate and inferior visuals vs running VSR/DSR at 4x and render scaling at 70-100% in my experience. I run at 60% render scale and I’m pretty happy with it. It gets a little muddy when doing super fast camera movements, but it’s not anywhere near as bad as if I ran at my native 1080 and 100% render scale.

Again, the new TAA system is not as bad as it was at launch. At launch 1080p @ 100% straight up looked bad and lo-res for whatever reason. Kind of like Red Dead Redemption 2, it’s one of those games that straight up requires supersampling for it to look good IMO. It was mostly noticeable in lights and trees looking like blobs and lacking definition.

2 Likes
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My experience so far seems to be opposite.

For some very odd reason. If I leave my native res at 4k in the game. DSR 4x and and go 60% on the render scale. I get choppy clouds. And shimmering on the cockpit window at night.

But by doing the opposite. FS at native 1080p and render sale at 140. Gives me solid 30fps at payware airports such as Zurich, dusseldorf. Clouds are smooth , no pixels on the clouds. Window shadows for the most part are smooth with very few dots . Overall it’s much improved picture quality than running everything at 1080p which I tried just to compare and my fps went down to 20-23fps with micro stutters.

I’ve also changed some more settings in the Nvidia control panel. Such as

Anisotropic filtering sample optimization OFF.
Negative LOD bias CLAMP

Continuing testing , I do short 1hr flights with live weather just make sure no CTDs happen. Unlike many people I’ve never had a CTD ever since I bought FS. I guess lucky me.

3 Likes
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Dear, the first thing to do is congratulate you on this excellent job, it is incredible that with a medium card, you can run the whole game at Ultra, commendable.
My average Fps range goes from 24 to 42 despite having an RTX3070 card, which in other games works very well, but it is true that I have seen an RTX3090 on YouTube and if true it runs everything in ultra, but its Fps are quite mediocre .
I would like especially in demanding airports to have at least 5 or 8 more Fps, I wanted to ask you in which sections would you sacrifice something to obtain them, I understand that with what you have tried and investigated you can guide me in this more than anything by your experience, I would appreciate.
Excellent work and I thank you for sharing it with us, it honors you.
A greeting.

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This video is perhaps one of the best starting points to go with for settings and then tweak from there, it’s NVIDIA based so not for everyone. One big difference in the settings war is the plane you are using, for that video it’s the basic Cub(?) plane over New York, change the plane to something more complex then the frames will drop.

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Hmm, somehow this isn’t working for me. I’m on a 1440p screen.
I activated Virtual Super Resolution in the driver menu (Is there anything else to set?).
But as soon as I activate any resolution in game > my native resolution (tried all) and drop down the render scaling, text and everything becomes all jaggy and unclear.
Anything I’m missing here?

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On an AMD card, if you enable VSR, you should be able to set to any resolution without it looking jaggy, and be done with it.

On an Nvidia card, if you enable DSR, it’s more complicated. You need to make sure you set your resolution to the correct ratio, so if you’re on a 1440p screen, and you set DSR to 4.00, you need to set it to 5120x2880, and then tweak the DSR smoothness until you reach a satisfactory image quality. DSR smoothness should be between 20-40% most likely.

ALSO ON NVIDIA CARDS…

Sometimes if FS2020 is at a different resolution than your desktop, it’ll look odd. So if you’re running a 1440p monitor, you need to set your desktop to 5120x2880, adjust scale a little bit maybe, and THEN launch FS2020 and set it to 5120x2880. This isn’t a problem with AMD cards, as AMD’s VSR seems to be a more practical application, similar to how MacOS handles HiDPI scaling.

1 Like