Guru3D MSFS Benchmarks

[Mongrelf 9]

Guru3D posted MSFS Hardware benchmarks.  

https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/ms-flight-simulator-(2020)-the-2021-pc-graphics-performance-benchmark-review,1.html

[DylanM 1,069]

Thanks for sharing - it does really show how the sim scales with GPU hardware...

https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/ms_flight_simulator_(2020)_the_2021_pc_graphics_performance_benchmark_review,8.html

[Av8ing1 46]

Thanks that was a good read. I'm pushing for max eye candy and 4k. Looks like nothing to be done to my machine to increase performance but to upgrade the GPU. Crazy that my 2080 Super isn't enough. Even the mighty 3090 is barely adequate. 

[Nedo68 533]

there is allready a thread about this:

 

[zihmer001 67]

47 minutes ago, Av8ing1 said:

Thanks that was a good read. I'm pushing for max eye candy and 4k. Looks like nothing to be done to my machine to increase performance but to upgrade the GPU. Crazy that my 2080 Super isn't enough. Even the mighty 3090 is barely adequate. 

I run an i7 with a 3090 at 4k. I could get you exactly, but I’m between high and ultra. My FPS is between 30-60. Realistically in upper 40s/low 50s. Part of me says this simulator really pushes the envelope so that’s great. The other part of me says that’s disappointing because my rig is nearly as good as you can built. Just my two cents. 

[Av8ing1 46]

23 hours ago, zihmer001 said:

I run an i7 with a 3090 at 4k. I could get you exactly, but I’m between high and ultra. My FPS is between 30-60. Realistically in upper 40s/low 50s. Part of me says this simulator really pushes the envelope so that’s great. The other part of me says that’s disappointing because my rig is nearly as good as you can built. Just my two cents. 

Thanks for the feedback. I can get acceptable frame rates (30-40) sometimes and would have no issues if I would lower settings from Ultra across the board. I want it all though and while disappointed that such high end hardware can be brought to its knees by MSFS at 4k, I'm glad they built a sim that pushes the limits. I think if I insist on 4k, this is to be expected. Overall very happy with things and thankful that MS finally gave us a shiny new sim! Hopefully further optimizations will be forthcoming and I can eventually get ahold of a 3080 or 3090. 

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

VRAM usage is interesting at 4K

[Mike S KPDX 597]

Still hard for me to determine what RAM, CPU and GPU combo to get that allow for me run at a mix of 1/3 high and 2/3 ultra, at 1044 and be able to hit comfortably at around 45 FPS (that will allow headroom for the future addons).

[omarsmak30 4,068]

MSFS is still needs a lot of performance optimizations, I don't know if DX12 will be the solution but I really hope it will just get better and not worse.

On the side note, the reviewer is surprised about the price of the sim and there are an average 20$ airports in the Marketplace, he/she has no idea how much do we spend on this 😂

[fogboundturtle 2,708]

1 minute ago, omarsmak30 said:

MSFS is still needs a lot of performance optimizations, I don't know if DX12 will be the solution but I really hope it will just get better and not worse.

On the side note, the reviewer is surprised about the price of the sim and there are an average 20$ airports in the Marketplace, he/she has no idea how much do we spend on this 😂

I think the sim was build for future proof. If you want that level of fidelity, it's going to be hard to do better than what Asobo is doing right now. The performance optimization question is always a bit of a red herring. Yes, any games can be tweak but for what you get, this game is actually pretty darn good if you have a good cpu. I am flying with the CJ4 right now at about 50 fps.  I can live with that.

[Av8ing1 46]

19 hours ago, Mike S KPDX said:

Still hard for me to determine what RAM, CPU and GPU combo to get that allow for me run at a mix of 1/3 high and 2/3 ultra, at 1044 and be able to hit comfortably at around 45 FPS (that will allow headroom for the future addons).

Not sure if 1044 is a resolution reference? If so, at lower resolutions fps will be CPU main thread limited. Get a CPU with the highest IPC and frequency as possible. At least four core, more core count than that will not help much, its the single thread performance you need most (thus Intel might be a good choice.) SSD and 16GB of fast memory (say 3600) would be beneficial as well. At lower resolutions the GPU will be less important in this sim. No need for 3080 or 3090 sort of power as those cards will be waiting on the maxed out CPU main thread and not be fully utilized. However, all that is applicable to MSFS, if you do other things or play other games then priorities might be different.   

[Noel 4,492]

When you look at benchmarks for 3090 v my 2070 Super there is only 14-20% lower in GPU performance (excluding bus width, VRAM).  As say only because of the cost involved for that extra perf.  This must be why I run almost all sliders at Ultra, save a few of the GPU-intensive ones like shadows are run at High, and sometimes I dial back volumetric clouds to High else the GPU is overloaded.  LOD are 200/200 at 100 render scaling.  I have been trying to pick up a 3090 but to me this is one hugemongous waste of $$ in terms of improvements now that I look at this article.  Oh sure, there will be way more VRAM than you will use, and you might need to install more system ram to get everything out of the 3090.  Plus, the 3090's all vent heat directly in the case.  Not too compelling any more really.  Maybe a 3080Ti if that ever makes it to US gamers.  I paid $499 for the 2070 last year.  

[MrFuzzy 2,118]

"16 GB really is enough". Screenshot of task manager with 16.4 GB used and 26.7 GB allocated follows.

Moreover, with what amount of RAM did they take the 3-minute frametime data? This, much more than the average framerate, would have made sense if measured with 16, 32 and 64 GB.

Finally, having used a 5950X it would have been wise to disable 8 cores / activate CPU game mode.

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

That stuff might make some difference, but it would usually be neglible after 16GB with the speed of the drives and memory as fast as we have them. The memory cache is likely just wasted memory from the programmers, increasing/reducing the amount of memory something uses is no guarantee it will even alter the performance. 

For instance, I can write an algorithm that reads in a million dates into memory and then convert that string to a date which is then setup as a specific type of date. The funny thing is just converting all those dates to a specific time format from a string would be slower than the entire time it takes to read the file, thanks to NVME sequential read speeds. Now changing it to a double or a lower-bandwidth type format would help, but just using it raw is literally 30x slower to process the dates than the file read and it is several thousand times slower than the speed at which you could shift the edges of the memory in a C++ or DirectX buffer that was pre-allocated, now maybe not if you were doing a full flush, but the game doesn't need to constantly flush the entire buffer. Since buffers aren't fully flushing and renewing constantly, so it's a limited amount of data being cached newly within a given time span, that's why the memory buffering almost never gets behind the CPU or GPU.

Graphic algorithms are FPU intensive or at least mathematically intensive, so the time it takes to process the numbers and image formats like rendering polys and shaders is generally much longer than the shifting of the memory cache. So the memory cache can generally STAY AHEAD of the GPU/CPU regardless of the timing of it all, not always, but usually.

Memory shifting in cache is so fast these days that your GPU or CPU is likely the bottleneck before the memory gets shifted. Of course faster memory helps the CPU go faster, but that is more of an architectural reason AMD vs. Intel, and can actually (to a degree) be programmed around those limitations, but programmers have limited time and don't optimize everything properly. So in the unoptimized sense, yes it may affect it. Yet, of course your GPU memory is more important for performance, but this is because it's right there on the GPU and we don't have FPGA-like assisted hardware threading, otherwise it too wouldn't help much.

Edited March 9, 2021 by Alpine Scenery