Hi - sorry if this has already been covered, but cannot find the answer I’m after.
I am planning to buy (or build?) a new PC in January and have been researching the latest CPUs and GPUs being released.
My initial thought is to buy the latest and greatest, however as I only use my PC for work (standard office stuff) and MSFS 2020, I’m not sure whether I really need the best! I’m currently running the sim on an iMac via boot camp, so performance is not great for me today.
I would be very happy if I could run the sim in max settings (Ultra) on a 4K monitor and get 30-45 FPS all the time, but not sure if i need the latest and greatest to achieve this.
I would love to hear from any of you who are achieving this level of performance and what spec machines you are running. Many thanks in advance.
Ultra in 4K and a cheap GPU doesn’t really work together.
RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 3070, RTX 3080, RTX 3090, Radeon RX 6800, 6800XT, 6900XT are probably the GPUs available or soon available that can handle it reasonably.
You really should take a big step down in resolution to get away relatively cheaply. 1440p High at 45 fps will probably work on a 2070 Super or similar, but that’s not exactly low-end either.
I am using an MSI GTX 1070 OC which works surprisingly well at 1080P settings on an i7-2600K CPU. I can get up to 50FPS at Chicago Meigs in a Cessna 152 with high simulator settings. If you want to work at higher screen resolutions including 4K, you will need something like an RTX as Aeluwas suggested. I am happy with my 1070 for now. Charles
if you are not flying in 4k then i recommend following (my configuration):
i9-10850k (overclocked to 10x 5Ghz), SSDs for sure, 32 GB RAM (DDR4 3200MHz) and my good “old” GTX 1070Ti
I fly in 2k, Setting are all at highest settings (“ultra” in german), renderscaling at 90
I have always above 30fps (often 40 fps) except in those well know areas with big cities and flying low altitude, then it decreases to 25-30 fps (i find it playable, it’s ok for me)
If you want the best visual quality + high(er) frame rates at 4K, you’re going to need the best hardware available to run it.
10900k or Ryzen 9 59x0 + RTX 3070 or better or 6800XT/6900XT(when the latter launches), 32-64GB of RAM and at least a 1TB NVMe.
If you’re not willing to fork out much money for top tier hardware, you’re going to have to adjust your expectations when it comes to visual quality and frame rate performance. Either you’ll have to settle for slightly lower visual fidelity or lower frame rates.
That said, higher frame rates are nice, but If you can get 30+ fps consistently, you’re in great shape for a civilian flight sim. It may go well above that in some cases, but if you can keep it above 30, you’re laughing.
in the new world update, with a 2080Ti and R9 3900X, I’ve been getting around 40 fps at DFW in the 320neo which, for me, was more than alright considering the size of the airport.
Granted, I’m running on 1080p, but I’m able to max the game out and get a locked 30fps (which is kind of ideal), on a Radeon 5700XT, Ryzen 3600, and 32GB of 3600MHz CL16 RAM
5700XT is faster than a 2060 Super, slightly slower than a 2070 Super, but retails for $400, not $600. IMO a 2070 Super is a poor value in comparison
But MSRP for RTX 3070 is $499 US. You can’t really find them right now, but that’s how much they are. And they’re faster than a 2080Ti.
Considering the massive leap in performance we’re getting this time around with both the nVidia 3000 and AMD 6000 series, it would be kind of a waste to buy a last gen card at curent prices when the current gen are either the same price (or just slightly more) and offer a massive performance boost.
Now when the new series of cards become more widely available and last gen drop in price significantly, then they’ll be worth the money. Right now, buying last gen is basically throwing your money away.
Unless you absolutely need a card RIGHT NOW for whatever reason, buying the old gen is kind of a bad idea.
Like I said, if you absolutely MUST HAVE a new GPU right now, then sure.But if you can wait 30-60 days, you’re basically throwing your money away getting last gen at those prices right now.
Once the new gen are available at normal prices, your “new” last gen card is basically worthless on the used market because of the performance differential with the new gen.
EDIT:
Just to emphasize - I was stuck buying a GPU in the great crypto-mining GPU drought a couple of years ago. My old GPU died, and I was stuck having to buy one. I got a 1070 at 50% above MSRP because I didn’t have a choice. I was already in the market to replace my old R7 280, but was waiting. The GPU going up in smoke (literally) forced my hand into buying 4 months sooner than I would have otherwise. It sucked, but I had to.
But if that hadn’t happened, I would definitely ahve waited it out.
When it comes to 4K, for sure the more powerful GPU the better when it comes to pushing that many pixels, though the bang for your buck certainly drops off quickly at the very high end.
The latest Ryzen’s are very impressive, but as it stands right now, apparently MSFS doesn’t seem to benefit much from more than 6 cores / 12 threads, so there’s not much in the way of FPS to be gained yet over a 5600X, though I’m sure Asobo will be looking to change that in the future.
Is there much to be gained in performance from 32-64GB over 16GB? I’ve not seen any data on that myself.
Similarly do you gain anything from 1TB+ drive space? NVMe for sure is worth it for the bandwidth, but even Seb was saying on the Developer Q&A this week that he only uses the default cache size of about 8GB IIRC. Though, I guess that depends on how much other content you end up purchasing; it’s never fun to be drive-space constrained.
Core count matters a bit less atm, although that said, I’m seeing a healty load on all my 16 threads of my Ryzen 2700X when using MSFS. I’m pretty sure it’s using everything I have. Only 1 thread is loaded down heavily, but I see them all being used when the game is running. One of the beautiful things about DX12 (which will be in MSFS in coming months) is that it makes spreading workload across cores far more efficient and easier for devs. It would be a shame to cheap out on core count only to have it matter a whole lot more than it does now in the near future.
32 GBis the minimum RAM I would recommend if you’re running MSFS. 16 GB is really is the minimum for even running Windows efficiently right now. But if you’ve got a bunch of plugins for external hardware, LNM and other stuff running, you can quickly run up to close to 32. But 64 is likely serious overkill, I’ll admit. Just 32 would be enough. 16 is definitely NOT enough.
NVMe is really the way to go these days. They’re getting cheaper. The absolutely obliterate hard drives, and they’re 5x times faster than SATA SSD. Even more if they’re PCIe Gen 4. Once you get your OS, other programs, MSFS installed, you’re very quickly going to find yourself running out of space if all you have is a 500GB, hence why I suggest just getting 1TB. And you’re basically killing the gains of having the main core MSFS files on an NVMe and putting the data files on a hard drive. A SATA SSD is not a bad choice for a secondary to store game data. It’s definitely cheaper per GB than NVMe and faster than an SSD, but it’s still comparatively quite slow if you’re comparing to a PCIe 4 SSD. And we know it can take a while to load MSFS. Of course, this isn’t necessary to get high fps at 4K. But would you really splurge for a top of the line, fully loaded Mustang only to have it loaded with a 4 cylinder engine?
Granted, the drive and memory (above 32GB) won’t help with actual frame rate. But they’re going to help overall system performance and make loading everything up a whole lot faster.
Really depends on what you are trying to achieve. There is no current hardware that will give you “best” graphics at an acceptable frame rate on an 8K TV. Multiple 4K monitors once the game supports it will likely have similar issues.
Yeah while more cores is likely sensible for future performance headroom, OP did ask for “minimum CPU/GPU” for 4K, and the extra cost of a 59x0 isn’t going to buy you any more performance at the moment. The 5600 also comes with a stock cooler, whereas the higher models don’t, so there’s another saving there too.
I too would hope that DX12 will bring performance improvements for the reasons you say, but Asobo have been pretty clear that they are going DX12 for the added graphics effects it opens up to them (and Xbox), not for performance reasons (though I don’t think they have said that it won’t bring a boost).
I’ve not looked too closely at the new AMD GPUs, but if it were my money, right now, I’d go with a 5600X + RTX 3080 + 32GB. You can always upgrade the CPU later if the sim starts to make use of more cores in the future.
Very much agree. People tend to think DX12 is some magic sauce you can just pour into a program and have it run faster. While it does have tools that can help optimize multithreaded processing (which will likely bring very small gains at best if properly implemented), it will just help balance the load on the CPU better, allowing more efficient use and letting it do more per clock cycle.
But with those efficiencies, that’s when new DX12 effects can be implemented that won’t be as expensive in terms of CPU time. And I look forward to that.
Microsoft Game Studios won’t let asobo release to xbox unless it can sustain 4K60/30 anywhere in the game smoothly. Microsoft won’t sell a console game that makes their hardware look garbage. The devs know this and hopefully these changes make there way to PC.
