Microsoft Flight Simulator game engine gets reworked to optimize performance

[Shawn Knight]

In brief: Asobo Studio, the developer behind the latest iteration of Microsoft Flight Simulator, has been working to iron out some of the wrinkles in the 2020 release. Based on what was shown in a recent demonstration of the game’s pending update, they’ve hit a home run in terms of overall performance improvements.

In a video recently shared on YouTube, Asobo Studio co-founder Sébastien Wloch said they have rewritten parts of the game engine to squeeze out even more performance and used his own personal computer to highlight the gains.

His rig, powered by an Intel Core i7-9700K and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super, averaged around 32-40 frames per second with the latest public update while running with ultra graphics settings and flying over New York City.

With sim update five (the one that is currently in development), the average climbed to around 55-60 frames per second. Digging in deeper, Wloch revealed that CPU utilization dropped around 25 percent and system memory usage was nearly cut in half. The GPU, meanwhile, was being better utilized as load on it went from around 75 percent to 100 percent.

With CPU utilization significantly lower, gamers have more headroom to run additional apps in the background should they choose to do so.

Sim update five will be released on July 27 alongside a version of the game for Xbox Series X/S.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/90271-microsoft-flight-simulator-game-engine-gets-reworked-optimize.html

 

[NicktheWVAHick]

MSFS2020…the ONLY reason I own a high-end computer. Now if they can just release a DX-12 version sometime this year I will be in pig-heaven.

 

[amghwk]

A realistic game with terrible optimizations. The way it makes even the highest-end graphic cards crawl, is a joke.

 

[DrSuess]

MSFS2020…the ONLY reason I own a high-end computer. Now if they can just release a DX-12 version sometime this year I will be in pig-heaven.

What do you think update 5 is? Its a release of the DX12 rendering engine for flight simulator. The DX12 port was always going to coincide with the Xbox release of the sim. DX12 was the only way they could run @4K 30FPS on a console.

 

[captaincranky]

So they're not going to make it compatible with Windows 7, and that's final?

 

[DrSuess]

A realistic game with terrible optimizations. The way it makes even the highest-end graphic cards crawl, is a joke.

It wasn't terribly optimized for a DX11 game, it suffered from the limitations of DX11. Which is different from being terribly optimized. Now that they are using a modern DX12 engine they can finally issue draw calls in parallel across several threads thus completing frames quicker. With DX11 all draw calls were issued serially from a single thread, this is why FS DX11 was so heavily dependent on the processors single core performance while the GPU was generally under utilized.

 

[Bobbydpue]

So they're not going to make it compatible with Windows 7, and that's final?

Windows 7 reached End of Life 14 Jan 2020. Why are you mad the upgrade to 10 is free? It's a choice you made.

 

[captaincranky]

Windows 7 reached End of Life 14 Jan 2020. Why are you mad the upgrade to 10 is free? It's a choice you made.

I was being facetious.

 

[Irata]

Did they improve multithreading ? Afair, not being able to run other apps in the background was not a problem since the game did not use many threads, but I may be wrong here.

 

[Danny101]

It wasn't terribly optimized for a DX11 game, it suffered from the limitations of DX11. Which is different from being terribly optimized. Now that they are using a modern DX12 engine they can finally issue draw calls in parallel across several threads thus completing frames quicker. With DX11 all draw calls were issued serially from a single thread, this is why FS DX11 was so heavily dependent on the processors single core performance while the GPU was generally under utilized.

So with DX12, we can finally get past the emphasis on single core performance and where it matters less?

 

[DrSuess]

So with DX12, we can finally get past the emphasis on single core performance and where it matters less?

Yes, if a game is coded optimally you could. If you read the article above CPU utilization is decreased by 25% and GPU utilization increased from 75% to 100% and the FPS has increased. Because of their new engine the CPU no longer bottlenecks. You should no longer need a high end CPU, you could just use a mainstream CPU, but will still likely want a high end GPU.

It still is possible to write a bad DX12 game if the developer does not take advantage of DX12's multithread capabilities or does so poorly.

 

[Avro Arrow]

This is why, even though I AM a pilot, I refused to be an early adopter of FS2020. I expected it to be as buggy as FSX and pretty much everything else that Microsoft releases in its early stages. I remember seeing numbers from Steve which indicated that the lowly RX 470 had better performance than the R9 Fury despite the Fury being a MUCH faster card using much faster HBM1 VRAM. It was an absolute joke.