How to balance the performance of Flight Simulator 2020 without losing the next generation gaming experience: the best settings on your PC. On the other hand, being able to sustain 60 frames per second while maintaining the brilliance of a new generation game requires extreme hardware, even for those starting from excellent foundations. It will therefore be good to start from a very clear assumption: the two highest preset settings in Flight Simulator 2020 add such a degree of precision and draw distance (*), that most PCs at higher resolutions will not be able to sustain a very high frame rate.
(*): Draw distance: maximum distance of objects in a three-dimensional scene drawn by the rendering engine. Polygons beyond it will not be drawn on the screen.
Once upon a time there was Crysis
Each generation has its own benchmark. In the 2020s, the revived Crysis, put the hardware of thousands of gamers to the whip, forcing them to forced upgrades. Flight Simulator XNUMX follows the trail, not only the aerial one, but with a guide to the best settings it will be possible to obtain a more than satisfactory experience.
But to what extent is it possible to reduce claims without losing the new generation viewing experience? Optimizing a game like this, mind you, is a monumental task as it has very varied graphics. Different settings in the menu will have lopsided impacts on performance depending on the type of land flown over, types of environment, weather situations or simple proximity to the ground. That said, Asobo Studio's amazing work in creating the graphic presets simplifies the user part considerably. Digital Foundry has tested various configurations in this regard with the usual professional input.
First of all, if you are using a very high resolution screen, do not hesitate to resize it. Keeping TAA active as an option anti-aliasing, the use of the resolution scaler also allows temporal upsampling. Essentially, on-screen information from previous frames is injected into the current one, improving image quality. The higher the display resolution, the greater the achievable depth. For example, using 80% native resolution on a 4K display looks very similar to the original benchmark performance, but to achieve similar quality on a 1440p screen, 90% is already eligible. At 1080p, on the other hand, you can leave it at 100%.
Best settings in Flight Simulator 2020: Ultra or High?
The scaling of the game graphics is pretty simple using the presets. With settings Ultra , the game focuses on extremely precise polygon densities and sample distances, where defects are hardly noticeable. All of this tends to be very GPU demanding on average. However, the settings High they already retain almost all of the effects and next-gen precision, reducing the load on the graphics processor immensely. Optimized settings are therefore simple: use upsampling via the resolution slider where you can, leaving everything else on high settings. The exceptions to the rule are simple: increase the anisotropic filtering to 16x and keep textures at Ultra, if your VRAM allows it.
As you probably know, graphics card performance is only half the battle. Microsoft Flight Simulator is in fact extremely heavy even on the CPU, where scalability is much more demanding. The game results from technical tests essentially optimized for physical 6-core CPUs, which means that hyper threading doesn't matter much. This means that single core performance is key, obviously benefiting Intel processors, especially Generation 10. However, even a six-core, six-thread Core i5 8600K would run similarly at the same clock.
Stuttering (vertical flicker) can also be reduced by using a high refresh rate display, preferably one with variable refresh rate, regardless of the v-sync option selected.
Ultimately, MS Flight Simulator 2020 is a really nice hardware test and needs constant attention to the best usable settings. Unless you are traveling on a Core i9 10900K with RTX 2080 that will easily allow you 60 fps in 4K, there are necessarily some tips and tricks to take into account in order not to compromise a new generation experience. And that's what we're here for. Be sure to let us know if you have devised or exploited others, in addition to those already described.
► Microsoft Flight Simulator is a Simulation game developed by Asobo Studio and published by Microsoft Studios for PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X, the video game was released on 18/08/2020
Microsoft Flight Simulator is a game to own at all costs: we decided to evaluate it with a 95%, if you are interested in learning more you can read the Microsoft Flight Simulator Review
