New computer needed for MSFS 2020?

[Noooch 1,084]

Wait, maybe MSFS will be playable via the XCloud, the Cloud computing service which will be launch in 2020 for PC. This would mean any PC will run the sim in ultra graphics if your bandwith is stable.

[Superdelphinus 718]

5 minutes ago, Noooch said:

Wait, maybe MSFS will be playable via the XCloud, the Cloud computing service which will be launch in 2020 for PC. This would mean any PC will run the sim in ultra graphics if your bandwith is stable.

I think this is very likely at some stage. 

[DocBird 79]

On 11/19/2019 at 9:43 PM, DocBird said:

So wait as long as possible and you will safe a lot of money (or will be tempted to buy the next gen grafic card...).

... on the other hand:

Who knows when MS will release FS 2020. And if we have to wait until Christmas 2020 it could be tempting to make use of some good "Black-Friday-Offers"...

I trust a good graphic card will do no harm. Do we know anything about if AMD or Nvidia will perform better?

[Brandon01110 407]

On 11/19/2019 at 4:22 PM, MatthewS said:

AMD 3950X...  See reviews on Youtube.

I'm gonna wait til Zen 3 which will hopefully be available within 1st half 2020.  pair with  a 3080ti.  maybe 64GB ram

[G-RFRY 1,712]

Project Scarlet may turn out to be the cheapest option if it runs it at 4K an a large 4K TV, cheaper than a MB and CPU upgrade. Only time will tell.

[mesaba 116 10]

I need to build a new PC, but can't afford to wait until the recommended specs come out for FS2020.  (Can't get the in-place upgrade from Win7 to Win10 to work, and end of Win7 support is only a couple months away.

Does anyone know when the XBOX Scarlett specs will be out?

If I'm being frugal, I'm trying to figure out the balance of what I spend on CPU vs GPU - but I'm not sure if there's any software out there to compare it to. Anyone have any ideas?

P.S.  The Microsoft SideWinder Forced Feedback 2 is coming along for the ride!

 

Kevin Y.

[Highmike 68]

Yeah, but there's nothing like drooling over the latest gear to get you enthused for the new sim. I'm going to set aside about $4500 AUD for a new rig sometime in 2021, but if the xCloud server is going to do most of the rendering them my R7 1800X / GTX 1080ti could be good for a long time.

[HarryVoyager 21]

34 minutes ago, mesaba 116 said:

I need to build a new PC, but can't afford to wait until the recommended specs come out for FS2020.  (Can't get the in-place upgrade from Win7 to Win10 to work, and end of Win7 support is only a couple months away.

Does anyone know when the XBOX Scarlett specs will be out?

If I'm being frugal, I'm trying to figure out the balance of what I spend on CPU vs GPU - but I'm not sure if there's any software out there to compare it to. Anyone have any ideas?

P.S.  The Microsoft SideWinder Forced Feedback 2 is coming along for the ride!

 

Kevin Y.

Is the issue that you can't run Windows 10 on your current machine? Or that you can't get a transferable license? If you get a retail license and link it to your MS account, you should be able to transfer it to a rebuild machine at a later date. 

What are your current computer needs and current computer hardware? 

I ended up doing a rebuild earlier this month so I'm still fairly current on the trade space. 

[JonP01 104]

On 11/19/2019 at 10:47 PM, topatov said:

Actually they are running at 40 50 fps on 4K all settings maximum but without Ai traffic  with 8700K + RTX 2080 ti + 64 gb DDR4

It will be interesting to see what sort of performance hit the AI traffic will have. One would hope that in this version it can completely run on a dedicated core (if that is technically even possible). My ancient machine running FSX was a state of the art 4 years after FSX originally came out, but the FSX stock AI could easily cut the frame rate in half even at middling settings. And even though a state of the art CPU circa 2019 per core is 90% faster than the one in my old machine, they would still want to have dramatically improved the frame rate hit of traffic in the new version.

[simtom 495]

10 hours ago, mesaba 116 said:

Does anyone know when the XBOX Scarlett specs will be out?

Launch period is Holiday 2020 but they might already reveal the specs in Summer 2020 (maybe E3?).

[mesaba 116 10]

 

22 hours ago, mesaba 116 said:

I need to build a new PC, but can't afford to wait until the recommended specs come out for FS2020.  (Can't get the in-place upgrade from Win7 to Win10 to work, and end of Win7 support is only a couple months away.

Does anyone know when the XBOX Scarlett specs will be out?

If I'm being frugal, I'm trying to figure out the balance of what I spend on CPU vs GPU - but I'm not sure if there's any software out there to compare it to. Anyone have any ideas?

P.S.  The Microsoft SideWinder Forced Feedback 2 is coming along for the ride!

 

Kevin Y.

22 hours ago, HarryVoyager said:

Is the issue that you can't run Windows 10 on your current machine? Or that you can't get a transferable license? If you get a retail license and link it to your MS account, you should be able to transfer it to a rebuild machine at a later date. 

What are your current computer needs and current computer hardware? 

I ended up doing a rebuild earlier this month so I'm still fairly current on the trade space. 

I've tried to run an in-place upgrade to Windows 10, and have got one of the black screen errors which I haven't been able to resolve.  I am due for a new build anyway, but with Windows 7 support ending on January 20th, the timeline will be tight to research and build a new desktop. (I'm an IT Business Systems Analyst by trade, so I tend to be pretty structured in my research.)

This will be my third build.  Current specs are Intel i5 3570K@3.40 Ghz; NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660; 8 GB RAM, win Windows 7 running on dedicated SSD, and FSX sitting on its own partition on a SATA drive, with the rest of the SATA drive holding everything else.

Each build I've done has focused on Flight Simulator (on a budget).  I flew subLOGIC's sim on the Apple IIe - I sometimes have nightmares I'll pick all the wrong components and see something similar with Flight Simulator 2020. :-}

I don't do any other gaming on it.  This will be the first time where I'm in the position of not having specs on the Flight Sim version I'm trying to build for.  That's why I'm trying to figure out if there is any other app/game that might be comparable in terms of its resource requirements, and start picking parts based off that.

I won't be doing 4K.  Between the imagery being pulled down, and whatever Azure is going to add, I don't have a sense about that old question that comes around with each iteration of any flight sim -- Is it more CPU or GPU intensive?

Thanks,

Kevin Y.

 

[HarryVoyager 21]

@mesaba 116 Given that we're not entirely sure what the requirements will be, I'd lean towards the Ryzen CPUs right now. They're using a common socket for everything from the Zen1 chips from 2016 to next year's Zen3 chips, so you have a couple of options in the CPU side and on the motherboard side. 

On the motherboard side, you can go with a more budget oriented MSI B450 Tomahawk or Pro-Carbon, or if you prefer the features and simplicity, you can go with pretty much any of the X570 boards. Anandtech has a round up of the X570 boards and features here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14161/the-amd-x570-motherboard-overview

The MSI boards are the only B450 boards you want to go with if you go that route. The Voltage Regulators (VRM) end up being very important in Ryzen, since they range from dual core budget parts to sixteen core behemoths. In the B450 iteration, MSI was the only maker that put in good enough VRMs to handle the future processors. The tricky but is with a B450 board you may need to update the bios to use the Ryzen 3000 series chips. I believe the MSI B450 Tomahawk has a way to do that without a CPU. 

 

 

On the CPU the questions are Second Generation or Third gen Ryzen and six core or eight core. 

From what we know on project Scarlett, it sounds like it is going to be a slow, eight core, sixteen thread Ryzen 3000 type CPU: https://www.techradar.com/news/xbox-project-scarlett

Weve heard its coming to Xbox, and we've also heard in interviews that it will be multi-threaded,so I'd try to get an eight core chip. That said, it's expected to be at a much lower clock speed than the desktop units, but they are also using ram and SSD tricks to boost the speed. 

On how the different generations perform: 

Given all of that and the current prices I'd say the safe bet is a Ryzen 3700X ($328) and the budget bet would be either the Ryzen 3600 ($194) or Ryzen 2700X ($190). I think I'd personally lean to the 3600 myself because it does better in the synthetic benchmarks, but the 2700X will be compatible with the B450 out of the box. 

 

For ram, probably 16Gb of DDR4-3600 CAS 16, or DDR4-3200 CAS 14 or 16 if you can get it significantly cheaper. Ryzen CPUs tend to be tied to ram performance due to the way the architecture was designed. 32Gb might be worth it too; flight sims have a tendency to be ram heavy. 

 

Since you've already got a 3D card that meets your current needs, until we know more, I'd recommend just carrying it over into the rebuild. GPU prices are still mostly completely jacked up at the moment due to the combination of the Bitcoin mining craze happening right when AMD had nothing that could challenge nVidia at most market points. That appears to be changing, and I would expect, if AMD is able to deliver a competitive high end card, GPU prices to have come down significantly by the time we know what it really needs. 

Of you want to get a card right now, from current leaks, Project Scarlett is running on a an AMD Navi based GPU that appears to be a newer generation than the Radeon RX 5700 XT 3D cards, and we're told that the most recent demo was being run at 4k, 60fps, on an RTX 2080 or 2080 Ti, so that puts an upper bound in minimum hardware. We also know MSFS 2020 does not use hardware Raytracing, so RTX is not required for best gralhics. Based all of that, I'm referencing these two videos for 2080 TI at 4k rescalled to 1080p:

 

I would guess that a used Radeon RX 580 8Gb version is the minimum budget option, or an RX 5700 if you want to buy new. Flight sims tend to be heavy on textures, just die to the view range and texture variety, so I'd look for at minimum 6gb or video ram, and preferably 8gb.

Used 8Gb RTX 580's are running around $100 due to miners converting their rigs away from GPUs, so they're artificially deflated at the moment. 

 

On new cards, the GTX 1650 Super performs better than the Radeon 580, until its texture memory gets filled up, and then has trouble. Since its got only 4GB, Id avoid it for flight sims.

The 1660 Super performs as well as the 1660 Ti, and costs $50 less than the 5700, but their price to performance is similar, and flight sims have historically been much more texture heavy than most games, so the extra 2gb video ram would be beneficial.

Still, I would strongly recommend hiding off on getting a GPU as long as possible. AMD should be releasing 2nd generation Navi next year, which is what's going into Project Scarlett as well. If it's competitive with nVidia's cards, that will drive prices down. Further nVidia is expected to release their next wave of Geforce cards next year, which will push their entire line up down the price point. 

 

If you need a new hard drive, it's the Intel 660p in the size you need. Basically it is the price/performance king, and for our use case is very nearly the performance king too. 

 

I'm referencing a lot of Tech Deals, mostly because he goes into the most detail by far, but the results from Linus Tech Tip, Gamer's Nexus and Anandtech have very similar results. 

Hope that wall of data helps (and is coherent given the gaps in writing it 😅). Good luck on the computer build. 

Harry Voyager

[mesaba 116 10]

@HarryVoyager Thank you so much for the insight!

With Black Friday deals, I've been able to get a 3600X for $199, and continue to piece together the build components (that's half the fun of the build).

 

Thanks again,

Kevin

[Wobbie 938]

ALL the above is pure speculation...

Wait a year & well will know!