

With those expectations set, let’s dig into the numbers and see what we can learn:Įvery test in this article followed the same pattern. There is a planned migration to DX12 in future and we’re hopeful this will bring substantial optimizations with it. In particular, it relies on the aging Direct X 11 API, one of the reasons it’s so constricted to 4 cores. Hopefully, such performance inconsistencies will be ironed out as the sim matures. We experienced this across almost all configurations and have witnessed it in others testing too so it appears to be an ingrained issue with the code, not the hardware. You shouldn’t be surprised to see frame rates in the low teens in this situation but it smooths out after a few seconds. There are also still some consistency issues particularly as the sim initializes at a busy airport or when you overfly a complex urban area.

Where we’ve demonstrated a playable 35FPS over a busy city it translates to a buttery smooth 50 FPS+ flying high over less complex terrain on the same configuration. Frame rates are variable and we conducted our testing under the most challenging conditions because these place the biggest demands on the underpinning hardware.
#GOOD GRAPHICS CARD FOR LIFTOFF SIMULATOR FULL#
That said, no current hardware will exceed around 60 FPS in this game using the full flight model. Our testing shows that the game uses just 4 threads (and yet can still max out 8 core CPUs at times) and performance is primarily dependent on the single-core speed of the CPU. Ultimately it is this physics model that constrains performance. There is a complex flight model running behind the scenes, calculating the physics that dictate whether you’re flying or falling. The first major issue is that whilst it can be achingly beautiful Flight Simulator 2020 is a simulator, not a game in the traditional sense.
