Microsoft Flight Simulator is getting a major update that will bring huge optimizations to the game massively boosting pc performance, according to the developer Asobo. The developer says that the next update will make the game a lot less demanding, which is great news for players who were previously facing performance issues.
During its latest developer livestream, Asobo revealed the massive performance improvements coming to Microsoft Flight Simulator on PC in the next update, with CEO Sebastian Wloch explaining that the team has rewritten “a lot of the parts of the engine to get the maximum performance out of the sim as part of its work on the upcoming console version.
The new update is planned to release with the game’s launch on Xbox Series X/S on July 27th. CEO Wloch demonstrated before-and-after gameplay footage of a flyover over Manhattan recorded on a PC with an i7-9700K CPU and Nvidia 2060 Super graphics card – and running Flight Simulator at Ultra settings in 4K with a 40% render scale.
In the livestream, he showcased the game running on its current version, with the CPU operating at 100% with the RTX 2060 being utilized around 50-75%. However, CPU usage falls to 75% with the GPU getting fully utilized at 100% with the new update. In the demonstration, system memory usage falls from 27GB to 14GB.
These are actually huge improvements considering how much the current version of the game hogs the CPU and RAM, while the GPU doesn’t even get utilized fully. It’s an amazing presentation, but Asobo’s work on Flight Simulator for Xbox Series X/S will provide more than just performance gains to PC gamers.
When the new PC version is released, the developer has already stated that it would have new and improved lessons, more Discovery Flying choices, and a slew of new flight help capabilities. We will have to wait till July 27th to see how much difference it makes for the players. Previous updates added Fort Lauderdale and Hong Kong airports to the game along with the earlier update which reduced the overall game size by a considerable amount.
