So I my PC currently has nvidia rtx 3070 graphics card, with 16GB of RAM would it be worth upgrading them? If so can anyone recommend a decent card only I haven’t a clue what would be a good card and what isn’t a good one. Can currently run the sim on Medium settings
I also have a 500GB SSD (this will be getting upgraded only have 85GB left)
What CPU do you currently have, and how big is your PSU?
As well, what speed is your RAM?
Knowing your budget would help too.
And resolution would be good to know too.
Hi my here are my specs
cpu is 11th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i7-11700K 3.60GH
Graphics card NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
Ram 16GB speed 3001MHz
Struggling to find the PSU
Display res is 3840x2160 recommended says on screen
I can go up to the £1000 mark but don’t want to if I can help it
You mention you run on Medium now - what kind of performance do you get if you go up to High presets? Ultra? Is the FPS loss dramatic? Is FPS something you particularly care about?
What you should upgrade first kind of depends on what you want to achieve. If it’s higher FPS, that’s one thing; if it’s smoothness (no stutters), that’s another; if it’s higher settings, that’s yet another. They’re all related but not the same.
In the dev mode FPS display, are you mostly ‘limited by main thread’ or ‘limited by GPU’? I suspect it will be the latter but would be useful for you to test and see, if you haven’t already.
If main-thread limited then my approach would be to upgrade the CPU and RAM. A 13th gen Intel CPU would also mean a new motherboard. Ideally a move to DDR5 as well, which would mean replacing your RAM entirely (you could buy a Z790 board with DDR4 support, but you would probably benefit from faster RAM speeds anyway, so again, if it were me, I’d go to DDR5). You could upgrade mobo, CPU (let’s say 13700K) and get 32GB DDR5 just about within your max budget, with careful component choice; you would probably need a new cooler due to the new socket.
If GPU-limited, then I would upgrade the GPU, but given where you are now that means 4000-series and that gets expensive quickly. The new 4070 Ti would be a significant uplift on your existing card and should have a reasonable RRP but will be hard to get hold of (Scan has some in stock at about £840). 4090s can be bought easily enough now but at well over £1K it’s probably not where you want to be. The 4080 is running at about £1200 in the UK from what I can see.
The theoretical best upgrade would be to do all of the above, but for a bit-by-bit upgrade my own gut instinct would be to go CPU + RAM first.
Edit: FWIW, my own best upgrade was to go to intel 13th gen + DDR5 and stick with my existing GPU, but that is a 3080 Ti and is no slouch as it is, and I generally a) run on High presets just for headroom in complex scenery, and b) I lock at 30 FPS and that’s fine for me, I know others are not happy with that.
You want some advice? Don’t bother buying a new graphics card. Why pay 1000 pounds for a marginal 10 to 20 procent better framerate.
MSFS isn’t really taking advantage of the gpu because it’s still for a great deal CPU bound.
Try to get a 2tb ssd and upgrade your ram to at least 32gb and you’ll save some money too.
Also, try DLSS, you’ll still have a NVIDIA card that, in my opinion, must cut the cake, especially with DLSS on you must reach above 60fps easily…
Ps, lower your resolution
Your GPU is plenty capable if you aren’t using VR. There are articles out there about optimizing GPU performance in MSFS that will help all users.
I would definitely buy 32 GB of 3600 MHz RAM (CAS 14 if you can afford it, but CAS 16 is fine.)
I use HP V10 RAM, which is a Samsung B-die chip running with XMP-2 set to 3600 MHz/CAS 14. It wasn’t cheap, but it’s really among the best performing DDR4 on the market.
Having 32GB is the most important thing. RAM speed (including CAS level) is next.
I did a lot of research of power supplies, and ended up with an EVGA SuperNOVA 850 G6 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX. $190 from Amazon. The extra cost is worth it, IMHO. Right now I’m using about 650W when pushing the sim. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you need a power supply with double the current draw of your system. The only thing a 1300W P/S would do for me is generate unnecessary heat. The general rule is to get one around 125% of your max static current draw. Gold/ Platinum/ Titanium are measures of efficiency. I could have gotten a Titanium P/S, but for me the extra cost wasn’t worth the added efficiency.
Yes, you’re so true…
All great advice above, if you’re looking at an incremental upgrade, ram is an obvious one to 32gb and ssd to 2tb, it’s surprising with updates how quickly 1gb is taken up
if you’re in the uk over clockers are doing 32gb 8pack ram for 140, which is good value and arguably as good as it gets for ddr4
Ive upgraded a lot in the last 3 years, the returns are incrementally diminishing. It can be a bit of a space race at the moment and you’re current spec would be in the top x% anyway, so I’d follow the advice of what developer mode is telling you and also look at what areas of the sim you would like better performance.
I moved to vr a while ago which was the biggest move in terms of enjoyment in msfs but did require a few upgrades.
Beyond that the next biggest leap was moving from a modded saitek yoke to a honeycomb, so there some argument when upgrading to think about controllers etc improve overall experience
power supply unit. It’s not listed in Windows, you’d have to open your computer and have a look what’s on it. I assume it might be around 600W if your PC was prebuilt by a store.
Your GPU is too weak for 3840x2160
Its mainly smoothness I’m after, sometimes I get a stable 30fps sometimes jumps high then it’ll drop down to 20-25FPS maybe even 17-18FPS. So I don’t know if it’s a case of a new cpu or just adding more ram . When on the high settings theres a lot of stuttering
Put your settings to DirectX 12 and restart MSFS Then, in AA options, choose DLSS balanced option and enjoy smoothness…
Please watch this… (it’s the very cheap solution to your problem, really! )
That seems quite high for main thread timing, and it wouldn’t take much of a graphics card improvement to turn this into a massive CPU bottleneck that would cause stutters as well. I currently run on an i5-8400 and have frame times in the 15-22ms range with mostly medium settings, so my first suggestion would be to try finding out why yours is so high.
I would first shut down any extraneous programs you don’t absolutely need at the moment, especially RGB software to free up whatever resources you have. If you’ve already done this, are you running a lot of mods or any extra AI traffic? Those can eat into CPU resources as well, so trying to optimize those may be in order. I personally shut down Razer Chroma and LG’s on screen control program for my monitor, have the game’s AI traffic turned off, but do run FSLTL on light settings. The only thing I run low in my graphics settings is TLOD 55 and OLOD 75 because of their impact on the CPU, and I’m ok with that because I typically don’t fly right in the middle of downtown where it can kill photogrametry objects.
I’m using a 6600XT GPU on a 4K monitor with my render scale at 70, and have much better frame rates than what I see there, and I doubt my visual quality is much worse than yours. So I would additionally suggest playing with the render scale to bring your GPU frame times down at no cost.
I wouldn’t bother spending money on a GPU upgrade until you can get those CPU frame times a lot lower, even if it means upgrading the CPU or other hardware.
In terms of mods I mainly have liveries and maybe one airport, pushback tool bar and lukeairtool and FS Live Traffic. Don’t have anything running in the background (that I don’t need) like web browsers. Though I did notice sometimes there is a frame rate drop when FS Live is running
