For testing we used our new gaming test platform, equipped with a AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, cooled by an EK-XLC Predator 240 heatsink and flanked by 16GB of DDR4-3200 CL14 RAM. Below we leave you a table with the complete configuration.
The benchmarks were made by setting the Ultra quality presets, the “scattered clouds” meteorological scenario and the departure time at 12:00. Multiplayer has been disabled, while Air Traffic has been set to “AI”.
Ultra HD performance
Looking at the new Radeons, we notice that the technology Smart Access Memory does not affect performance: The RX 6900 XT achieves the same framerate with and without SAM active, stopping at an average 38 FPS, as does the RX 6800 XT (35 FPS) and the RX 6800 (30 FPS).
Taking a look at the older generation of video cards, the RTX 2080 Ti achieves an average 33 FPS, while the RTX 2080 goes a little beyond i 25 FPS. La Radeon RX 5700 XT instead it only scores 19,5 FPS, but it was never a card meant for 4K gaming. The RTX 2060 closes our ranking, with an average framerate of 13,7 FPS.
Quad HD performance
La RTX 2080 Ti slightly outperforms the RTX 3070, recording 55 FPS. The old Radeon RX 5000 and the RTX 2060, with the two AMD solutions slightly exceeding 30 FPS (33,4 FPS for the RX 5700 XT, 32,1 FPS for the RX 5700), while Nvidia's card stops slightly below, at 28,2 average FPS.
Full HD performance
The Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT and RTX 3090, 3080 and 3070 all offer virtually the same framerate, which is between 58 FPS and 60 FPS. There Radeon RX 6800 it is the first card in the chart to have no bottleneck problems and has an average of 55,3 FPS, followed by the RTX 2080 SUPER us 54,8 FPS and from the new one RTX 3060 Ti, which stops at 53,7 FPS. The RTX 2060 it is also in this case the worst, but with its own 40 FPS medium and a 99th percentile of 32,1 FPS allows you to play without difficulty.
Conclusions
Finding the best PC for Microsoft Flight Simulator is not easy: the title is very heavy to manage and, above all, the new generation hardware components are still unavailable. The situation will improve over the next few months, but if you intend to build a top-of-the-range PC to play the latest Xbox Game Studios simulator at its best, you will have to be very patient. True, digging here and there you can find next-generation CPUs and GPUs, but i prices are extremely high and we advise you to do not buy anything at these figures.
Going to change the graphics settings obviously you will get better results and you can play at 30 FPS even with lower-end cards, or at a higher resolution than that normally allowed by your GPU. While waiting for the market to repopulate video cards and processors, we leave you some below recommended configurations for the various resolutions; obviously you can make various changes, especially based on product availability, the important thing is that the processor and video card are those indicated.
The best PC for Microsoft Flight Simulator
