Discover The AMAZING World Of Realism In Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 Graphics.
Guide to Great Graphics Performance.
Getting the best Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 Graphics and performance is a challenge for both beginners and experienced flight Simmers alike. This fast guide is intended to deliver guidance and great results fast. This guide is all about determining if the Microsoft Flight Simulator Presets are worth using? It is worth the hours spent tweaking these individually or is there another way to achieve fast great results?
Nvidia GForce Experience
Graphical Presets.
Are they Better than MSFS 2020 Presets
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 graphics as we all know comes with a range of factory default presets from ULTRA to LOW Detail with many choices in between. There is an alternative path with NVIDIA and its Nvidia GeForce Experience which comes with its own myriad of graphical choices.
What I want to answer is one better than the other? Is it worth just choosing a preset from one or the other or is the long path of tweaking through he graphics settings taking hours of testing and reloading really worth it?
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 graphics settings are very comprehensive already. Its quite a mine field and you can spend literally hours fine tuning the settings for your system. Its possible to spend hours and still NOT get the results we are aiming for. I am one of those who has spent lots of time trying to achieve those amazing graphics from the Media pre release pictures and videos and still find my graphics wanting. I like you are looking for the answer. Does it fall in the lap of the Nvidia gods and their approach to optimizing games automatically. Maybe it does!
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 Graphics Comparison.
The Graphical Settings for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 graphics levels are displayed in the graphic created by ObstinantAnt YouTube Channel.
This really shows you the differences at a quick glance but it doesn’t tell you the full picture. Is it playable at any of these settings on an average Computer system.
I see a lot of comments on forums with the luck gamers letting us know they have the latest NVIDIA RTX 3090 or 3080 graphics cards. That’s fantastic for them but the most sold Nvidia graphics card is the RTX 2060 of now 3060 if you can find one right now.
The Baseline System for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 Graphics.
Lets start with what I tested with and the video will either be below or there soon as I am doing both this blog and the video for LetsFlyVFR YouTube Channel simultaneously.
My system is a Ryzen 2600 with an Nvidia RTX 2060 Super plus 32 GB 3200 DDR4 Ram. I hope this will give you something to compare with in the final results included below.
Nvidia Graphical Presets.
The Nvidia Experience graphical options can be found easily and the cog below the main representation of what the program is evaluating will give you access to the finer graphical control settings for any game it recognizes. (Note the Yellow Arrow)
Between Optimized Settings and either full performance or Best quality there are a range of presets so you can finer test and tune the performance of Microsoft Flight Simulator. Simply drag the slider by one dot at a time , save and retest.
The three basic settings for performance are the OPTIMIZED setting where the Nvidia Experience tries to predict the best graphical and playability performance by balancing the graphics settings for your specific system.
The next option is to select either the Maximum PERFORMANCE or the Maximum QUALITY preset and test your FPS. This is true of most games that are on Direct 11 or DirectX12. It is not currently available for VULCAN based games like X Plane 11. Lets home this changes at some point.
The graphics settings here have many options between the OPTIMIZED setting and the full performance or quality settings. What makes this a little easier for the beginner or time poor gamer (myself Included ) is the ability to slide the slider one step at a time to the right or left of optimized Default to get a great balance of both performance and enough FPS (Frames Per Second) to make the experience worth while.
The Developers Tool within MSFS 2020 can help with showing us a number of important performance figures. Certainly the top figure giving us the actual Frames per second readout in real time is extremely helpful.
The next important piece of information comes in the Limited by line. I personally depending on what setting I am using see it say CPU Limited by Main Thread which means the primary CPU core cannot perform fast enough and the GPU or graphics card is waiting for information and instructions making the system performance shower than is possible.
I also have seen Limited by GPU on higher graphical settings so there is a balance
MSFS 2020 Graphics Performance .
The Graphics options as I see it are both great and will depend on your preferences. Once your down at the low setting the clouds looks absolutely terrible which was one of the big part of MSFS 2020 graphically.
If you can run Medium setting up the sim looks pretty good and the smoothness is there even when the FPS shows as below 20 to low teens. I found the New York Landing Challenge to be pretty acceptable which I was shocked at X Plane 11 under 20 FPS becomes more a slide show but in this instance MSFS 2020 was able to keep the frames smooth without any jitters.
The overall best performance I see from the results came from using the Nvidia Experience optimized settings giving much better performance in the Medium settings Vs Optimized Nvidia ones which had a lot of Medium settings. The advantage of the NVIDIA Experience settings is there are more incremental steps between Optimized and either Performance where the graphics level will reduce and Quality which will give you the best eye candy.
MSFS 2020 Presets:
The Microsoft Presets available make tuning the sim relatively easy to get good performance. I have tested Ultra – Medium – Low presets in this test. I would suggest anything below medium presets are not very good. Especially the clouds become a joke.
Nvidia Experience Presets:
The Nvidia Presets are another option for tuning your flight simulator. I found the best results coming from using this tool. There are more finer options available between the Optimal setting and either Quality or Performance settings. The Optimal setting delivered the best results overall in my opinion.
AUTHOR.
Brendon McAliece is a multi lingual-expat who brings over three decades of flight simulator/PC building experience as well as over two decades of real world jet fighter experience as a weapons/egress technician. He holds a sport pilot certificate giving him real world flying experience. Hi travels have taken him from Europe to the Middle East, Asia and his home of Australia. He has a passion for travel, languages, flight simulation as well as guitaring and coffee. You can read more in his blogs below.
Learn more @
DreamingGuitar.com – DreamingCoffee.com – LetsFlyVFR.com
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