New PC setup for MSFS 2024 - Graphics card decission

@blackwizard154

No benchmarks from me. But using 2024 I have learnt:

  • A very fast NVMe drive is needed for the streaming cache.
  • The cache is the bottleneck loading an airport/scenery
  • Fast cpu to crunch the scenery and send it to GPU. The huge L3 cache on the X3D cpus may still help with fps.
  • The sim does DX12 magic. So ideally we want a gpu driver thats good with DX12.
  • Loading of new airport can peak at 300 Mbps for 1 or 2 seconds on my 380 Mbps broadband.
  • The flight only displays Start Flying when the final network packet is downloaded, and crunched by the CPU.
  • A rolling cache writes new data over the oldest data when full; the old data is lost. (Circular buffer - Wikipedia)
  • Considering all the above we want the cache as big as possible and as permanent as possible (on a PC)
  • For users with ample very fast storage, a permanent cache or set of caches may improve performance.
  • A PCI 4 motherboard is on my shopping list - it shuffles data around at twice PCI 3 speeds and is a good price point. (PCI 5 is more expensive and I don’t know if PCI 5 GPUs exist or if it makes a difference)

I hope that helps.

1 Like