I know I’ve been stressing the sim a bit with all of these extra background tasks. I pretty much always play with the sim on my secondary monitor while I perform other tasks like writing, photo editing, or just watching YouTube videos on my laptop screen. Really, this has been my typical flight sim setup since launch. Actually, as I’m writing this line of the article, I’m about halfway there. All in all, the sim purred along quite smoothly as I reached my destination of Cold Bay, Alaska.įor a second test, I left Cold Bay for another short flight, this time heading to Perryville. I flew around for an hour in this geographically intensive area with some decent weather also present. This is very reminiscent to the decent performance of the sim from several months back, and arguably even better. The counter leveled off in the low-to-mid 40s, sometimes even hitting the 50s. Once airborne, however, things smoothed out. I did notice that panning the camera both internally and externally around would cause a very big drop in performance for a few seconds.
With these settings intact while going into Sim Update V for the first time, I was pleased to see the framerate counter jumped into the 40s, all while still on the ground. To note, my graphics settings are all “High,” minus a few very minor settings that I have to “Ultra.” The only “Low” setting is the Glass Cockpit Refresh Rate, which I haven’t changed yet prior to publication. Prior to the update, I was getting no more than the mid-30s in framerate here. I fired up the sim with the new update in False Point, a miniscule airport in a remote part of Alaska. Microsoft Flight Simulator performance party Now, with Sim Update V, all of these little cues that I would look out for are gone, for the most part. On that note, I definitely saw that it would only be after takeoff that the framerate would gradually begin to improve. I noticed this, in particular, when standing at a gate. Without even having to fly very low or in a complex aircraft like the very resource-hungry Aerosoft CRJ, the framerate would often tank and the sim would stutter frequently.
To get past that, it would only be at very high altitudes. On my end, I certainly noticed that the fps counter would typically never go beyond the high 30s, if that. The sim’s average performance before the update.Īs 2020 transitioned into 2021, performance degradation became very apparent yet again across systems of all kinds. But, somewhere along the line, things changed. My enormous screenshot album contains shots from that point that show the framerate counter happily hitting the 40s and even 50s. For a while, particularly around the time when the first World Update was released, the sim ran relatively well. In a matter of weeks, Asobo was able to address it. That said, the cries for fixes came quick and loud. Haphazard performance has been an unfortunate commonality in the flight sim space for eons, so it wasn’t exceptionally jarring for me. The pre-release build was not too kind to my gaming laptop (an Acer Nitro V with a Core i7 and RTX 2060).
At that time, it was already clear that the optimization needed some work. I reviewed Microsoft Flight Simulator when it was initially released back in the summer of 2020. For myself, I’m happy to report that this holds up - really well, at that. Overall, Microsoft Flight Simulator is making much more efficient use of system resources, which allows it to retain its insane visual fidelity, yet run at better framerates with fewer stutters. The update includes improved memory management, as well as better usage of both the CPU and GPU. This ultimately boiled down to creating the build on PC that players now have via Sim Update V. But, it also revealed that it’s the team’s work on the Xbox version of the sim that helped Asobo discover what really needed to be done to the code. Interestingly enough, it took the Xbox release of the sim to do so.Ī few months ago, the studio revealed that big optimizations would be coming to the PC version of the sim. Some players have claimed to have few to no issues, yet others have complained of low framerates and frequent stutters, despite having hardware that matches (and in some cases, even exceeds) the recommended system requirements.Īfter several fixes and updates both large and small, it seems like someway, somehow, Asobo has finally found the right formula.
Players far and wide have shared their experiences, good and bad. In the year since Microsoft Flight Simulator has been released, one of its biggest issues plaguing it has been performance.