The 9 Best Simulator Games That Aren’t Microsoft Flight Simulator
ERIC SCHOON @ericpschoon - AUGUST 29, 2020
ERIC SCHOON @ericpschoon - AUGUST 29, 2020
[SHOWTOGROUPS=4,20,22]
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020
Flying first class with Microsofts latest Simulator and 30 GPUs
Updated August 21st:
Please note that the installation size of the game passed 100GB. And even on our 500 Mbit/s connection, we've noticed exorbitantly sluggish download rates. We started downloading the game early in the morning, hours later looking to my right side monitor, we're at 60% of the downloads as the sim keeps fetching .fspackages. A nauseating wait for such a AAA title fetching from the supposably fast Microsoft Azure cloud servers.
That stated this article is not provided or sponsored by Microsoft. We purchased the most premium edition to bring you an unbiased review as tho what you will need for graphics hardware. We assume that any flight-simmer already has a decent PC, so once again we check PC graphics performance over many graphics cards. We'll test the game on the PC platform relative towards graphics card performance with the latest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards. Many graphics cards are being tested and benchmarked.
Depending on your set-up, PC owners can expect a range of enhancements from this port, including supporting ultra wide monitors, the ability to run the game at 4K, might be a bit of thing though
Also, and this has to be stated. In the pasty we have tried reviewing flight sims; however, it takes tremendous amounts of time and effort to even test one graphics card as you need to set up the plane, takeoff, test and move onwards. The underlying problem is that each run needs to be the same way to objectively test performance. And the past experiences have proven that to be complicated. Regardless we'll do our best.
Flight Simulator 2020 scores unusually well in the graphics area. The world scenery looks very good, the lots of cities and airports have been manually revised by hand. The ones that did not get ta premium treatment also look pretty good. The differential is the more personalized stuff, example if you fly over your own house, that's where you'll likely be dissatisfied. What is beautiful in-game is the weather system, real-time data is flowing into the engine, and as such, you get a physical simulation of the weather. That weather is not only beautiful to see, it will of course also have an effect on the flight characteristics of your simulation. The combination of beautiful modelled aircraft, gorgeous landscapes and the weather system that makes this Flight Simulator an excellent new edition.
Flight Simulator makes use of Asobo's in-house developed game engine and uses Bing Maps data, accessing over two petabytes of data from the cloud on-demand. Azure AI analyzes map data and photogrammetry to generate photorealistic 3D models of buildings, trees, terrain, and so on. This allows the simulator to depict most parts of the world in 3D photo-realism and other elements in high definition. The game's engine utilizes satellite imagery or fly-by image scans as the basis for height and terrain texture data. Offline procedural generation AI then reads these textures based on their own parameters and correctly populates terrain with materials, roads, buildings, bushes, trees and more based on brush set assets the developers have made.
For this article, multiple graphics cards are being tested and benchmarked. You are going to need a reasonably modern PC with at least a mainstream graphics card to run the game nicely. This article will cover benchmarks in the sense of average framerates; we'll look at all popular resolutions scaling from Full HD (1920x1080), WQHD (2560x1440) and of course Ultra HD. UHDTV (3840x2160) pixels which are four times as many pixels as 1920x1080. We test with the game based on the optimized and available AMD Radeon driver (Для просмотра ссылки Войдиили Зарегистрируйся) and for Nvidia their GeForce WHQL driver (Для просмотра ссылки Войди или Зарегистрируйся). We'll examine the game on the PC platform relative to graphics card performance with the AMD/NVIDIA graphics card drivers.
Welcome aboard Guru3D airlines, your pilot on this flight is captain Hilbert, this flight will go from Amsterdam Schipol Airport where we'll take-off, and gently Brexit into Heathrow Airport *coughs*
Concluding
I wanted to perform a review for our flight-sim fans on this title. But man-oh-man, how difficult and time-consuming this is To those that have requested a flight-sim benchmark for years now, yes we'll keep this one in the test suite as we can reasonably objectively script what we are doing/flying and thus somewhat objectively measure performance. We'll keep updating and expanding on this review throughout the week. It has been a long wait on a new revised Flight Simulator, and Microsoft simply put did a fantastic job from a graphics point of view. Applying a recommendation as to how precise the sim is, I'll leave the other experts. The graphics can be both normal and sometimes exceptional. The focus on more detailed cities and airports is a crucial factor here, which also influences performance.
There is room to tweak performance but at the cost of image quality. We could recommend High-end quality mode as the second-best option.
A cardinal rule with flight sims is that 30 fps (as repulsive as that sounds) is enough as a simulated experience. We're not stating that 30 FPS is a good thing, but the scenery in flight is slow-pacing and slow-moving; it really does not need 100+ FPS, at 30 to 60 FPS you'll feel very comfortable; it's your simulation FPS / refresh domain to look out for. This is not different from watching a movie that anyone does at 24p, you prefer it over 60p right, as otherwise all just does not compute in your brain. Just have a look at the videos we included, and you'll soon realize that it's all good. So in your preferred resolution, your target can be 30 (at minimum); perhaps 25 FPS might even do it. As you have been able to see, something is bottlenecking at Full HD as the cards are just too close towards each other. This might be CPU related, but also can be a throttle based on retrieving satellite imagery from the cloud servers. We'll have to investigate a bit more to see what is going on there. Graphics performance-wise, we'd recommend a beefy setup, of course. I'd recommend an enthusiast-class graphics card for the highest resolutions, 32GB on the System memory and obviously and SSD. processor wise four cores work, but my recommendation sits at an eight-core configuration for best experience.
However, there's far more to say here, as reviewing and benchmarking this title is complicated. We use a once screen setup. Surely many flight-simmers will use multiple screens. Do you measure cockpit mode, or measure externally. Of you use multiple monitors, how much will be used for actual flight views, as opposed to a dashboard.
All these factors combined do make this a challenging title to measure. Overall though, I think it safe to state that we measure the more stringent conditions. Flight Simulator 2020 does exceptionally well on many vital points, high framerates at Ultra quality settings; however, not so much. As stated, running a flight-sim at 30 FPS is fine, please trust me on that. The planes look detailed and fly + function well. The Flight Sim universe looks very beautiful from high and above, but also in detail over cities and major airports. One point of criticism would be the choice of Bing Maps; Bing often has outdated maps. Hopefully, Microsoft will be able to improve this in the future. Another critique would be pricing; the standard edition is quite meager if you like to fly the larger airliners. The basis with this new Flight Simulator, however, is unique with an excellent weather system as well.
Graphically speaking, while not perfect graphics-wise and with a stutter here and there, this is among the best and realistic flight-sims to date. The landscape looks very good, though not everywhere. But especially the cities and airports that have been modified by hand are breathtaking. The one thing I am left baffled by is the fact that this title is DirectX 11 only, A Microsoft title, developer of DirectX, not using or even offering DirectX 12. Yeah, that's just fascinating when you think about it longer than 2 seconds.
Right, now where is the stewardess? I want to join the Mile High Club. Hey, this is supposed to be a realistic sim you know?
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 - UHD GeForce RTX 2080 Ultra Settings
Для просмотра ссылки Войдиили Зарегистрируйся[/SHOWTOGROUPS]
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020
Flying first class with Microsofts latest Simulator and 30 GPUs
Updated August 21st:
- added image quality screenshot comparison
- added core CPU scaling results
- added image quality settings performance comparison
- added Core i9 9900K vs Ryzen 3800XT
- added DRAM memory scaling, 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB.
- added VRAM scaling with Radeon VII (16GB VRAM) and observe VRAM utilization in normal and dense terrains.
Please note that the installation size of the game passed 100GB. And even on our 500 Mbit/s connection, we've noticed exorbitantly sluggish download rates. We started downloading the game early in the morning, hours later looking to my right side monitor, we're at 60% of the downloads as the sim keeps fetching .fspackages. A nauseating wait for such a AAA title fetching from the supposably fast Microsoft Azure cloud servers.
That stated this article is not provided or sponsored by Microsoft. We purchased the most premium edition to bring you an unbiased review as tho what you will need for graphics hardware. We assume that any flight-simmer already has a decent PC, so once again we check PC graphics performance over many graphics cards. We'll test the game on the PC platform relative towards graphics card performance with the latest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards. Many graphics cards are being tested and benchmarked.
Depending on your set-up, PC owners can expect a range of enhancements from this port, including supporting ultra wide monitors, the ability to run the game at 4K, might be a bit of thing though
Also, and this has to be stated. In the pasty we have tried reviewing flight sims; however, it takes tremendous amounts of time and effort to even test one graphics card as you need to set up the plane, takeoff, test and move onwards. The underlying problem is that each run needs to be the same way to objectively test performance. And the past experiences have proven that to be complicated. Regardless we'll do our best.Flight Simulator 2020 scores unusually well in the graphics area. The world scenery looks very good, the lots of cities and airports have been manually revised by hand. The ones that did not get ta premium treatment also look pretty good. The differential is the more personalized stuff, example if you fly over your own house, that's where you'll likely be dissatisfied. What is beautiful in-game is the weather system, real-time data is flowing into the engine, and as such, you get a physical simulation of the weather. That weather is not only beautiful to see, it will of course also have an effect on the flight characteristics of your simulation. The combination of beautiful modelled aircraft, gorgeous landscapes and the weather system that makes this Flight Simulator an excellent new edition.
Flight Simulator makes use of Asobo's in-house developed game engine and uses Bing Maps data, accessing over two petabytes of data from the cloud on-demand. Azure AI analyzes map data and photogrammetry to generate photorealistic 3D models of buildings, trees, terrain, and so on. This allows the simulator to depict most parts of the world in 3D photo-realism and other elements in high definition. The game's engine utilizes satellite imagery or fly-by image scans as the basis for height and terrain texture data. Offline procedural generation AI then reads these textures based on their own parameters and correctly populates terrain with materials, roads, buildings, bushes, trees and more based on brush set assets the developers have made.
For this article, multiple graphics cards are being tested and benchmarked. You are going to need a reasonably modern PC with at least a mainstream graphics card to run the game nicely. This article will cover benchmarks in the sense of average framerates; we'll look at all popular resolutions scaling from Full HD (1920x1080), WQHD (2560x1440) and of course Ultra HD. UHDTV (3840x2160) pixels which are four times as many pixels as 1920x1080. We test with the game based on the optimized and available AMD Radeon driver (Для просмотра ссылки Войди
Welcome aboard Guru3D airlines, your pilot on this flight is captain Hilbert, this flight will go from Amsterdam Schipol Airport where we'll take-off, and gently Brexit into Heathrow Airport *coughs*
Concluding
I wanted to perform a review for our flight-sim fans on this title. But man-oh-man, how difficult and time-consuming this is
To those that have requested a flight-sim benchmark for years now, yes we'll keep this one in the test suite as we can reasonably objectively script what we are doing/flying and thus somewhat objectively measure performance. We'll keep updating and expanding on this review throughout the week. It has been a long wait on a new revised Flight Simulator, and Microsoft simply put did a fantastic job from a graphics point of view. Applying a recommendation as to how precise the sim is, I'll leave the other experts. The graphics can be both normal and sometimes exceptional. The focus on more detailed cities and airports is a crucial factor here, which also influences performance.There is room to tweak performance but at the cost of image quality. We could recommend High-end quality mode as the second-best option.
A cardinal rule with flight sims is that 30 fps (as repulsive as that sounds) is enough as a simulated experience. We're not stating that 30 FPS is a good thing, but the scenery in flight is slow-pacing and slow-moving; it really does not need 100+ FPS, at 30 to 60 FPS you'll feel very comfortable; it's your simulation FPS / refresh domain to look out for. This is not different from watching a movie that anyone does at 24p, you prefer it over 60p right, as otherwise all just does not compute in your brain. Just have a look at the videos we included, and you'll soon realize that it's all good. So in your preferred resolution, your target can be 30 (at minimum); perhaps 25 FPS might even do it. As you have been able to see, something is bottlenecking at Full HD as the cards are just too close towards each other. This might be CPU related, but also can be a throttle based on retrieving satellite imagery from the cloud servers. We'll have to investigate a bit more to see what is going on there. Graphics performance-wise, we'd recommend a beefy setup, of course. I'd recommend an enthusiast-class graphics card for the highest resolutions, 32GB on the System memory and obviously and SSD. processor wise four cores work, but my recommendation sits at an eight-core configuration for best experience.
However, there's far more to say here, as reviewing and benchmarking this title is complicated. We use a once screen setup. Surely many flight-simmers will use multiple screens. Do you measure cockpit mode, or measure externally. Of you use multiple monitors, how much will be used for actual flight views, as opposed to a dashboard.
All these factors combined do make this a challenging title to measure. Overall though, I think it safe to state that we measure the more stringent conditions. Flight Simulator 2020 does exceptionally well on many vital points, high framerates at Ultra quality settings; however, not so much. As stated, running a flight-sim at 30 FPS is fine, please trust me on that. The planes look detailed and fly + function well. The Flight Sim universe looks very beautiful from high and above, but also in detail over cities and major airports. One point of criticism would be the choice of Bing Maps; Bing often has outdated maps. Hopefully, Microsoft will be able to improve this in the future. Another critique would be pricing; the standard edition is quite meager if you like to fly the larger airliners. The basis with this new Flight Simulator, however, is unique with an excellent weather system as well.
Graphically speaking, while not perfect graphics-wise and with a stutter here and there, this is among the best and realistic flight-sims to date. The landscape looks very good, though not everywhere. But especially the cities and airports that have been modified by hand are breathtaking. The one thing I am left baffled by is the fact that this title is DirectX 11 only, A Microsoft title, developer of DirectX, not using or even offering DirectX 12. Yeah, that's just fascinating when you think about it longer than 2 seconds.
Right, now where is the stewardess? I want to join the Mile High Club. Hey, this is supposed to be a realistic sim you know?
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 - UHD GeForce RTX 2080 Ultra Settings
Для просмотра ссылки Войди
