Interpreting MS FS 2020 System Specs

[Chock 17,769]

4 hours ago, wim123 said:

from Chock 'Thus if you've got a PC which can run decent games at an okay frame rate, this is a better indication of whether it will run the new MS sim reasonably well, rather than basing your expectations on how it runs FSX or P3D. Most five year old flight sim PCs will have better internals than an XBox, and since the new sim is designed to run on an XBox, it'll be no surprise to learn that even a fairly old PC will probably run the thing pretty well. You don't have to be a PC guru to work that one out.

This is very incorrect, the new to come xbox(fs wont run on the now in use ones at all) has capabilities of a very good pc

graphical card equal to a 2080, so i think the minimun spec is going to be pretty meh.

ypou need a good system if you want it to look like somethimng of the promovid..and remember later the addons...

 

Nah, you can take pretty much any half decent work PC, throw a 500 quid GPU in it and it will wipe the floor with any console you care to name, and you will always be able to do this. Yes, the makers of consoles can stick some fairly decent hardware in them by virtue of being able to use the economy of scale, and by making a system which doesn't have to do anything unusual other than run a few specific applications, but they aren't magic, you can't put 1500 quid's worth of components into a box, then sell it for 500 quid.

Edited July 28, 2020 by Chock

[KenG 492]

10 hours ago, Chock said:

Even before FSX came out, we all knew that what an MS flight sim really needed was a complete rewrite from the ground up which ditched the CPU-bound architecture. But  because it didn't get that, we were barreling down a road with a dead end in front of us as far as MS flight sim was concerned. Sadly, that was largely because the main patron for MS flight sims -

It didn't because as ACES admitted they anticipated during early development that Moore's Law would continue to apply to the speed of processors and that 5Ghz processors would be released at the sametime as FSX. Boy did they miss the whole multicore phenoma and it took over a decade for the 5Ghz to be realized in consumer PCs. So FSX and every iteration there after was designed around a 5Ghz machine that only recently has been achieved and has been patched to try and make the software more multithread aware. ACES guess wrong on the future of CPU design and we paid the price every since, until now.

[Chock 17,769]

Whilst it is true that it was a bad bet on their part, it was also a hugely uninformed one as well. Although as noted, some of the decision was based on a forthcoming reduction of funding so we cannot entirely lay the blame at a lack of foresight.

But it is true that the phenomenon of quantum mechanical tunneling occurring through thinly-sliced silicon was well known even at that time, so it was apparent even then that the ability to develop speedier processors by simply making them smaller and shoving more switches on them was reaching an impasse. Even then it was common knowledge this was prompting two things - the development of CPUs which sidestepped the problem by basically gluing two or more processors together, rather than trying to make one do twice as much, and the shift to a separate processor for the visuals.

However, it's one thing to know that stuff is on the way, it's quite another to know exactly how it will be implemented so that you can write software which can make use of it; for that you usually have to actually have the hardware, or at least have the specs of it.

[goates 576]

56 minutes ago, Chock said:

Whilst it is true that it was a bad bet on their part, it was also a hugely uninformed one as well. Although as noted, some of the decision was based on a forthcoming reduction of funding so we cannot entirely lay the blame at a lack of foresight.

It wasn't uninformed at all as that was that Intel was saying when the development of FSX started. At that point only high end workstations and servers were expected to use multi-core processors as many of their workloads could more directly make use of the new design. Gaming, on the other hand, is much harder to design for multi-core and people didn't see the benefit of putting in the effort just yet. The problem hit when the shift on the CPU side happened much too far into FSX's development to change. And as I mentioned earlier, FSX was not the only one to be caught out as Crysis was similarly handicapped.

[goates 576]

6 hours ago, wim123 said:

This is very incorrect, the new to come xbox(fs wont run on the now in use ones at all) has capabilities of a very good pc

Microsoft has said all first party titles (basically the ones they are publishing) will come to the current generation of consoles as well as the upcoming Series X, at least for the next year or two.

[KenG 492]

You are a little ahead of history and using foresight of the future to try and predict what ACEs should have known.

FS2004 was released in 2003 and according to ACEs work began shortly there after. Even if you give them a year to button up 2004 and start X then you are talking about 2004.

From 2000 to 2004 ACEs watched cpu speeds go from 1Ghz to 3Ghz the Pentium D and Athlon X2 would not come out for another year (2005.) While the silicon barrier was being discussed just as many professionals was claiming there was ways to prevent electrical leakage and continue to increase the speed of processors. Below is the chart that shows up until 2003 CPU speed increase was averaging 40% per year.

 

So you are going to bet on the future with software, do you use historical norms or this little know process of gluing two processors together. It is easy now to sit back and criticize the team for making the wrong call and saying they should have known better. As we are now living in the world where massive cores with little CPU speed increases are the norm. By the time 2006 rolled around and we started to see Quad core processors the dirty work was already well coded in the software and fixing it would have been a fundamental rewrite. Not to mention they missed the opportunity to take full advantage of parallel processing in GPUs. Sort of a one - two punch and a complete miss on the DX10 haymaker. 

Since FSFW95 the team had basically followed the same path, add more stuff to take advantage of new and faster hardware. Well by 2006 that approach to MSFS had failed. 

[FlyBaby 659]

Does anyone know for sure if MSFS is optimized for multi core processing?

In other words, a 4 core vs 6 core wouldn't matter if the sim only uses 2 cores for processing.

[goates 576]

5 minutes ago, KenG said:

two punch and a complete miss on the DX10 haymaker.

This had a lot to do with the mess that was Vista's development, which delayed DX10's development. In turn this delayed the GPU designers which meant there wasn't any hardware for developers to use designing their games or sims until too late as well. And even when the GPUs did start showing up, the first round of drivers from Nvidia in particular were terrible.

Your chart is a good visual of what happened with the CPU designs. ACES did apparently talk with Intel at the start of the FSX development cycle, and faster single cores were very much still on the drawing board. Evidently, Intel thought they could still solve the problems they were running into.

[shawty1984 106]

6 hours ago, wim123 said:

from Chock 'Thus if you've got a PC which can run decent games at an okay frame rate, this is a better indication of whether it will run the new MS sim reasonably well, rather than basing your expectations on how it runs FSX or P3D. Most five year old flight sim PCs will have better internals than an XBox, and since the new sim is designed to run on an XBox, it'll be no surprise to learn that even a fairly old PC will probably run the thing pretty well. You don't have to be a PC guru to work that one out.

This is very incorrect, the new to come xbox(fs wont run on the now in use ones at all) has capabilities of a very good pc

graphical card equal to a 2080, so i think the minimun spec is going to be pretty meh.

ypou need a good system if you want it to look like somethimng of the promovid..and remember later the addons...

 

How many times does it need stating. 

Microsoft have already stated it's coming to Xbox One (that's the current one). 

[shawty1984 106]

6 hours ago, G-RFRY said:

As for XBOX just like present games some are being remastered for the XBOX Series X and some of the new games will not run on the older consoles, if it does run on the XBOX one it will not be the same version as the new XBOX which can match a high end gaming PC, Microsoft have developed it to do just that. 

What do you mean it will not be the same version? Why are we commenting on things that we don't know about. MFS is designed to run on low to high end machines, there is no reason why that's not the same for the Xbox consoles. 

[KenG 492]

18 minutes ago, FlyBaby said:

Does anyone know for sure if MSFS is optimized for multi core processing?

In other words, a 4 core vs 6 core wouldn't matter if the sim only uses 2 cores for processing.

We are still guessing until Aug 18. However, hardware wise I have been happy with my i7 4770K oced to 4.3 Ghz all core and 4.5 Ghz single core. Meanwhile my 1070FE is working hard.

I am huge on the fence here as AMD 4000 or i9 10900K as my new desktop. I am leaning heavily toward the nextgen Ryzen 9 based on what I have seen with the preview. 

Once the add-on developers have time to figure things out I suspect having extra CPU ability will be a good thing. If not I can always put the extra CPUs to work with folding@Home while playing MSFS. 😄 

[shawty1984 106]

2 hours ago, Chock said:

Nah, you can take pretty much any half decent work PC, throw a 500 quid GPU in it and it will wipe the floor with any console you care to name, and you will always be able to do this. Yes, the makers of consoles can stick some fairly decent hardware in them by virtue of being able to use the economy of scale, and by making a system which doesn't have to do anything unusual other than run a few specific applications, but they aren't magic, you can't put 1500 quid's worth of components into a box, then sell it for 500 quid.

What you fail to realise with the 1500 and 500 comment is while it might cost you 500 for a gpu, it won't cost Microsoft close to that considering they will have a contract with the supplier to supply millions of that gpu. 

[edpatino 1,971]

In my opinion, it's not wise to choose a new system based on the information on MFS's recommended hardware. Additionally, most probably people won't have MFS alone, but other sim(s) installed as well, so at the end it'll be the most demanding platform that will dictate the hardware needs. Apart of this, except the lucky ones that have alpha tested MFS far enough, nobody really knows its needs, until the thing is finally released.

If you're planning to upgrade your hardware, the best option is to wait a bit to better know what exactly you'll need, until MFS is released and tested.

Cheers, Ed

[Brandon01110 407]

7 hours ago, G-RFRY said:

I don`t plan on upgrading for MSFS but will later this year now my system is getting old.

your specs: i7 7700K 4.8 \ MSI RTX 2080Ti GAMINGX TRIO \ M.2  Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB C Drive \ 2TB Samsung 850 EVO \ 2TB BarraCuba \ 32GB G.SKILL Z DDR4 3600MHZ \ Windows 10 Home\ ASUS 28" 4K monitor\ 4TB Portable Drive\P3DV5

are you just trolling by saying this?

[fppilot 4,391]

I as well am preparing to build a new system this Fall but want to wait for newer GPU's as well.  My current concern is that  the minimum spec is Windows 10 version 18362.0 or higher. 

My current system is stuck on Windows 10 version 17763.437 (1809) and refuses to update.  Windows Update fails with Error 0x80070005.  I have on multiple occasions exhausted every suggested fix for that error I can find.  Even Microsoft's Windows 10 Update Repair Tool fails to correct the error.  So I have no idea what influence that will have on MSFS 2020.