Yes I'm buying a 6800XT if I can find one, but not just for MFS, and no, not upgrading to zen 3.

4 hours ago, Maxis said:

I still went ahead and bought an Ryzen 3700X based rig knowing that they (AMD) would catch up  to intel eventually and their platform is more modern overall. (They already dominate in multicore and productivity applications.. i could deal with a few less frames in games at the moment and next year i am getting one of those Zen 3 chips anyway

my exact strategy/gamble too.  Thank goodness our gamble paid off and the new chips are better than Intel.

45 minutes ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

You don’t need 64GB of ram. Not for MSFS, under any settings. 

in a couple years with this sim you might need more than 32GB.  i've seen 29GB used.

20 minutes ago, Brandon01110 said:

in a couple years with this sim you might need more than 32GB.  i've seen 29GB used.

Exactly. I have seen RAM usage in the 20s as well, with FS2020, Plan-G, TrackIR and a couple of browser windows.
Now add a complexity aircraft from PMDG and I think RAM usage could go above 32 GB. 

And RAM is really cheap right now, so it's a good time to buy.

MSFS is a unique beast.  It needs high single core performance for the main thread, lots of cores/threads for photogrammetry and LOD, large quantities of RAM and VRAM to hold all the data, and a good GPU to render it all.

You can be GPU limited one minute, CPU limited the next, and both being bottlenecked by the main thread the next. There's no quick and dirty solution to performance with this game.

13 minutes ago, Republic3D said:

And RAM is really cheap right now, so it's a good time to buy.

unfortunately a lot of people are gonna have to repurchase all their ram..many have 4x8GB.  I knew better and got 4x16GB

2 hours ago, Virtual-Chris said:

MSFS is a unique beast.  It needs high single core performance for the main thread, lots of cores/threads for photogrammetry and LOD, large quantities of RAM and VRAM to hold all the data, and a good GPU to render it all.

You can be GPU limited one minute, CPU limited the next, and both being bottlenecked by the main thread the next. There's no quick and dirty solution to performance with this game.

Throwing money at it seems to work haha.

On 11/19/2020 at 9:28 PM, ryanbatcund said:

Throwing money at it seems to work haha.

I'm living it the past few days!  Would have bought a 3080 if they were available any time soon.  Instead, I did the unthinkable and splurged on a 3090.  ...and on a 5600x (not listed as available anywhere. Literally noticed it on the shelf behind cashier when paying for something else.  They just received stock).  ...which led to needing a few other parts (new motherboard (surprise, no support for B450 yet!) and PSU).  ...then there were incidental extras.  In the end I spent way more money than a more-sane me would ever consider 😁 

Flying smaller aircraft is butter-smooth now.  Graphics settings maxed out.  Car, boat, etc traffic is set to 10, but haven't yet checked if bumping numbers up eats much into performance.  Also didn't yet test many airplanes but cockpit refresh rate set to high doesn't seem to affect performance much - at least not enough to need to go for medium.

Airliners are still a workout, but play with a few sliders and smooth framerates are achievable.

The reason I'm replying in this thread is that I think it might make sense to go with an all AMD setup for MSFS. 

My new hardware is SATA SSD, 32GB DDR4 RAM, 5600x CPU, rtx3090.

Can't imagine running this monster on anything other than an SSD.  Wonder if NVME M.2 would cut load times...

32GB RAM is more than enough.  Whole system running this sim never comes close to filling it up.

AMD part -> 5600x seems to be a huge step up from a 3600.  Still able to bump up against 'limited by main thread' pretty much at will, but I'm not sure that will ever change (even after coming CPU optimizations).  Curious for tests of this CPU against higher-tier AMD parts in MSFS.

Now for the graphics card part:

From my limited time looking at usage stats, it seems that the sim likes the VRAM rtx3090 from NVIDIA has to offer.  I run at 1440p rendered at 150% (4K).  Flying small aircraft over Tokyo, photogrammetry on, VRAM usage averages 12GB, jumping to over 13GB on occasion.  This is significant because the general consensus is that 3090 is overkill and a 3080 is the card to get instead - even when running native 4K.  Someone correct me if my reasoning is wrong, but if MSFS takes 12GB from a 3090, wouldn't 3080 run up against maxed out VRAM?  Also not sure if having 'only' 10GB as opposed to slightly more would translate to degraded user experience.  There's also the allocation vs actual usage issue (at the moment not sure how that works with video cards - will read up on it).

What if one went with an AMD video card instead?  They all sport 16GB of VRAM.  Rasterization performance is as good, if not better than NVIDIA parts.  Prices are competitive.  Could turn out that Big Navi is the way to go for MSFS.  Other titles would suffer from weaker ray tracing performance and lack of DLSS but this wouldn't matter for the flight sim.  Another factor will be how fast each brand chews through VRAM and and what do capacities actually translate to in performance.  Haven't seen in-depth benchmarking for these aspects in MSFS yet.

It might turn out that putting together an all-AMD setup with MSFS in mind is the way to go.

 

Composite of screenshot with OSD overlay and graph from GPU monitor

 

 

Edited November 24, 20205 yr by ivng

Main core speed is the key....Here is an i5-9600k playing with the big boys in 4K Ultra...

A320 @ Manhattan in 4K Ultra

Edited November 24, 20205 yr by Pulsepowered

1 hour ago, Pulsepowered said:

Main core speed is the key....Here is an i5-9600k playing with the big boys in 4K Ultra...

A320 @ Manhattan in 4K Ultra

Anyway, I'm curious about what GPU you have there ? Wow ! Great performance, and yes I even get puzzled by the way my old rig with a 2500 k @ 3,3 GHz behaves, and GPU only GTX 960 4 GB card ...

18 minutes ago, jcomm said:

Anyway, I'm curious about what GPU you have there ? Wow ! Great performance, and yes I even get puzzled by the way my old rig with a 2500 k @ 3,3 GHz behaves, and GPU only GTX 960 4 GB card ...

It's an RTX-3080FE

Ah! Well, I believe that too makes a whole LOT of a difference ;-)

On 11/19/2020 at 3:13 AM, jcomm said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-OZQfV_Xag

Well that was a really useful post. How about a single word even describing what the link is about and explaining it? The link doesn't even work.