MSFS Required Specs

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

14 minutes ago, Noooch said:

@ChaoticBeauty Since you seem to know a lot more than me about hardware, what motherboard  would you recommend? Is the MSI B450 TOMAHAWK MAX a good choice?

Yes, that is actually considered the best B450 choice at the price point. It is very feature-complete for anyone but the absolute enthusiasts, and the VRMs are pretty much top-tier (the Ryzen 5 3600 will not stress them, but it's a good idea to be safe).

If you do decide to wait though, the B550 chipset will launch in 16 June, offering PCIe 4.0 support to mainstream selections. You will not need it unless you go for the top-end GPU of the next generation or an expensive SSD this year, but it would make the system more future-proof.

[Noooch 1,084]

@ChaoticBeauty that is great because I read somewhere that B450s from MSI may have VRM issues, but maybe if associated with a bigger CPU. Thanks a lot !

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

3 minutes ago, Noooch said:

@ChaoticBeauty that is great because I read somewhere that B450s from MSI may have VRM issues, but maybe if associated with a bigger CPU. Thanks a lot !

This might be true regarding the cheaper models, but you can be assured that the Tomahawk, the Gaming Plus and the more expensive MSI options have the best VRMs among B450 boards. With the B450 sadly most manufacturers skimped on the VRM quality, which can create issues with the more expensive CPUs. All B350 boards from MSI were rather subpar, and it remains to be seen which manufacturer will create the best B550 boards. Sadly for the motherboard selection you have to do a lot more research compared to the past, as yesterday's trusted brands can be mediocre choices today and vice versa.

[soloraj 38]

4 hours ago, PWJT8D said:

From my quick search, an i7-9800X is not even available to purchase anywhere. So why they would list it as Ideal I don't know. Doesn't seem to ideal to me if I can't buy it. As we have been made aware, it has way more maximum memory bandwidth. The weird thing is if you look at current i9 X series processors they don't list the max memory bandwidth for any of them so it's hard to compare. I play other games as well so I may just say forget about the X series and go with a K.

If Microsoft could provide insight into how the specificificatons were established, it would help resolve the queston of why the X series CPU was chosen.  This might also help a lot of folks who are asking whether a particular configuration is a good choice.

[PWJT8D 446]

1 hour ago, soloraj said:

If Microsoft could provide insight into how the specificificatons were established, it would help resolve the queston of why the X series CPU was chosen.  This might also help a lot of folks who are asking whether a particular configuration is a good choice.

I'm just going to buy everything for the build minus the CPU/GPU and see what happens with the next release of those on the horizon. 

[Dominique_K 10,133]

3 hours ago, PWJT8D said:

I'm just going to buy everything for the build minus the CPU/GPU and see what happens with the next release of those on the horizon. 

If you buy a SSD, remember that the size of the cache is left at the user’s discretion as observed in the alpha. It could be as big as several TB...

[Dominique_K 10,133]

11 hours ago, michal said:

It is all theoretical, in real life applications may amount to little or no advantage.

There are well known benchmarks that compare the best I9 "K" CPUs against the best I9 "X" CPUs and the "X" only wins in professional applications like encoding, compression, encryption, transcoding, etc.

The "K" wins by larger or smaller margin in all games.

If MSFS2020 would all of a sudden be an exception - that would make huge headlines in the computer world, I don't see it happening but if it does - you bet we will hear about loud and clear.

Thanks.

It would indeed be interesting that the FS20 team gives some insights on the unexpected choice of the 9800X. The sim will have to move fast huge amounts of textures and these will partly come compressed from the MS servers. Few games have the same constraints, I suppose. Would the 9800x and its associated chipset more suitable than the top K line ?

At that point difficult to dismiss the X as an error in the announcement.

 

Edited April 25, 2020 by Dominique_K

[captain420 3,099]

I will hold off on the motherboard, cpu, gpu, ram and ssd while I get the rest of my other parts for my new build then.

Edited April 25, 2020 by captain420

[RALF9636 1,890]

4 hours ago, Dominique_K said:

If you buy a SSD, remember that the size of the cache is left at the user’s discretion as observed in the alpha. It could be as big as several TB...

 

I wonder if an SSD (or even an M.2) gives any benefit at all over an HDD when it comes to the scenery cache (which can be a different drive than the sim itself as far as I understand).

 

I am no expert at all, so anybody with more knowledge would you please clarify:

 

As far as I understand the concept of the scenery rendering in MSFS works like this:

Scenery data is

1. streamed from the internet

2. cached locally (if the defined cache is large enough and/or you keep flying in the same region, no streaming from the internet is needed anymore)

3. processed by the sim engine from the cache using the RAM, CPU and GPU.

 

This probably is very simplistic so please correct me if that's wrong.

 

Now in this chain of workflow it is the slowest element which defines the overall speed.

 

The ideal internet bandwidth which MSFS is optimized for is stated to be 50 Mbps - which still is significantly lower than the data transfer speed of an HDD. So the slowest part is the streaming. So isn't the HDD speed more than enough to to provide the ideal scenery data transfer speed which is 50 Mbps?

So wouldn't it be smarter to get a much larger HDD for the cache for the same price instead of a smaller SSD?

 

 

Edited April 25, 2020 by RALF9636

[Amon1973 1,421]

7 hours ago, Dominique_K said:

Thanks.

It would indeed be interesting that the FS20 team gives some insights on the unexpected choice of the 9800X. The sim will have to move fast huge amounts of textures and these will partly come compressed from the MS servers. Few games have the same constraints, I suppose. Would the 9800x and its associated chipset more suitable than the top K line ?

At that point difficult to dismiss the X as an error in the announcement.

 

Time will tell if more cores will also help, with AMD's Ryzen 9 3950x having 16 core's it could be a monster if MS utilise all the cores/threads.

[PWJT8D 446]

2 minutes ago, eaim said:

Time will tell if more cores will also help, with AMD's Ryzen 9 3950x having 16 core's it could be a monster if MS utilise all the cores/threads.

I'm starting to lean that way myself. Had Intel CPU's my whole life but now I'm spec'ing out a Ryzen build. This is a tense moment, ranks up there when I made the Mac to PC switch 10 years ago. 

[threexgreen 3,133]

7 hours ago, RALF9636 said:

The ideal internet bandwidth which MSFS is optimized for is stated to be 50 Mbps - which still is significantly lower than the data transfer speed of an HDD. So the slowest part is the streaming. So isn't the HDD speed more than enough to to provide the ideal scenery data transfer speed which is 50 Mbps?

So wouldn't it be smarter to get a much larger HDD for the cache for the same price instead of a smaller SSD?

Since the scenery data which is streamed is really only data, I would assume that's much less overall than what the sim has to put together on your computer, otherwise the bandwidth requirements would be a lot more if the entire scenery package were streamed. So the hard rendering work is still done locally on your machine, which is why you should still be getting better results with an SSD over an HDD, considering the sim still needs to load the cache content from the drive to depict it in the sim.

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

7 hours ago, RALF9636 said:

 

 

So wouldn't it be smarter to get a much larger HDD for the cache for the same price instead of a smaller SSD?

 

 

If the SSD is large enough, the problem is solved.  No need for the larger HDD, I would think.

[michal 44]

7 hours ago, RALF9636 said:

So wouldn't it be smarter to get a much larger HDD for the cache for the same price instead of a smaller SSD?

The official requirements don’t say anything about SSD, you can be fine with HDD, SSD is always better if you want to avoid some potential micro stutter when the drive’s head has to be repositioned to read from another part of the disc. And the size may not matter anyway if you go above certain threshold.

Edited April 25, 2020 by michal

[regis9 3,996]

23 hours ago, Krakin said:

"X" ain't 'gon give it to ya.

My favourite comment in this thread 😁