Am I pleased with my MS Flight Simulator 2020 new PC build so far?

I couple of weeks back I did something I hadn’t done since around 2000. I built my own custom build PC specifically for playing the new MS Flight Simulator 2020. You can read about my musing on selecting my components here.

The final specs I went with are:

  • Fractal Meshify C case
  • ASUS AM4 TUF Gaming X570-Plus (Wi-Fi) ATX Motherboard with PCIe 4.0, Dual M.2)
  • EVGA 650 B5, 80 Plus BRONZE 650W
  • AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT
  • Corsair Force MP600 M.2 2280 500GB PCI-Express Gen 4.0 x4 NVMe
  • CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 32GB (2 x 16GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3600

The last component I couldn’t decide on was the graphics card, but I eventually went with an EVGA RTX 2060 KO.

So what have been my results so far? Has it worked out as I expected?

Yes. I’m pleased. I’m only running at 1080 resolution as I don’t have a 4k monitor. On high settings I’m getting around 50 to 60 fps in most areas, including most cities. If I dial it up to Ultra I’m still getting around 50fps, but over cities like Seattle it does drop to around 20 to 30fps, and that seems to vary a lot.

I’ve played most of the prior MS Flight Simulator versions over the years, and from prior experience I’m happy with getting 30fps. To get 50 to 60 fps over most areas at high I am very happy with. I had those moments of doubt that maybe it would turn out you really did need a monster of a PC, but even going with slightly better that recommended specs, I’m more than happy with the results so far.

Have there been other issues? Sure, there’s lots of weird and unusual glitches and bugs, I’ll write about those in a following post later.

MS Flight Simulator 2020: Release day 1 (8/17/2020) download issues

Seems like there’s been plenty of issues on release day 1 getting the new Flight Simulator 2020 downloaded and installed. For me, here’s a summary of some of the issues I ran into:

  • Installer crashing when using KVM to switch keyboard and mouse to second PC. It took me a while to realize the cause of this as it happens a short while after I made the switch. It seems the installer doesn’t like if you disconnect a wireless mouse or keyboard and the installer would crash without any error to the desktop. Restarting it would pick up from where it left off
  • App starting even though download had failed part way through. This happened a couple of times for me related to the above. I could get to the globe and select a start airport and destination airport, but the ‘Fly’ button wouldn’t do anything
  • Downloader/installer showing incorrect total file size download, total download size, and or percentage. This happened related to the above crashes. If the progress bar is not adding up, look in the download dir below and see where you are with the 001 to 031 files to give a rough idea how far along you are
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  • Depending on whether you purchased on Steam or the Windows Store, and where you selected to install to, your location may vary but for me the location was C:\Users\my-userid\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator\Packages\Official\Steam . To get an idea how far along you are with the download if the progress bar is not making sense, look for files named fs-base-cgl-0.1.21.fspackage.nnn where nnn ranges from 001 through 031 and each of these files is approx 2GB each. Once you get to 031 there’s a handful of much smaller patch files, then the installer starts decompressing each of the 001 through 031 files (which will vary depending on the speed of your CPU and disk – on my Ryzen 5 3600 with Gen 4 m.2 SSD it was taking about 10secs per file)
  • If you get stuck on one of the numbered files and it seems like the download is not progressing at all, posts online suggest to quit the app, delete the last/most recent file in the above dir on which it’s stuck then start the installer again and it will restart with the last file again

Comparing screenshots of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002, 2004 and FSX

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is almost here and I thought it would be interesting to look back at how the scenery has evolved since early versions. I have FS 5.1 (DOS), FS 2002, 2004, and FSX as well as numerous scenery add ons.

Here’s a side by side comparison over Southend, England:

FS 2002 Over Southend
FS 2002 Over Southend with Just Flight South East England VFR Scenery
FS 2004 Over Southend
FSX Over Southend

The Just Flight VFR scenery is pretty good in comparison to the stock scenery. The water textures definitely improved in FSX, but what is it with the colors? Pretty sure the sea at Southend does not look like the Caribbean.

Ok, one more comparison, let’s take a look flying out of Napa in FS 2004:

FS 2004 flying West from Napa
FS 2004 flying West from Napa

And now in FSX:

FSX flying West from Napa

And now with Blue Sky Scenery:

FSX with Blue Sky Scenery, flying West from Napa

It’s about 2 weeks to go before FS 2020 is released. Will be interesting to compare how good the Bing satellite image based scenery is compared to previous FS versions.

Planning a mid to high end new Gaming PC build for MS Flight Simulator 2020

I’m excited about Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 that’s launching next month.

I’ve been and on and off flight simmer since first playing my first flight sims on a ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, and almost all recent versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator.

FS 5.1, 2002, 2004, FSX and various add on scenery

While Flight Simulator X has been updated to easily install via Steam, it’s been 14 years since FSX was released… that’s a long time between releases, but that’s not my focus of this post. If I’m gonna play FS 2020 I’m going to need some new hardware.

I’ve been mainly a Playstation console gamer for the past few years, but for playing Elite Dangerous and a few other casual games, a 2008 Mac Pro with a GTX 750ti has been more than enough for casual gaming, but it’s far from the minimum requirements for the new FS 2020 release.

From: Microsoft (link)

So, the first question, the age old PC builder question: Intel or AMD? AMD Ryzen have a slight cost advantage for comparable performance right now. I’m not looking for i9, or i7 performance, so even a comparable Ryzen 7 seem more than I need, so I’m going for a (current) top end Ryzen 5, the 3600XT at approx $250.

Ok, going AMD, so what chipset? M450, M550, X570? The best comparison of these chipsets I’ve seen is here.

  • X570 has support for the newer/faster M.2 PCIe x4 SSDs and is the latest chipset for AMD CPUs, so for the sake or $50 difference of so between slightly older M550 chipsets and X570, I’m going with X570

For RAM, X570 mobos support upto 4000MHz DDR4 RAM and faster with Gen3 Ryzen CPUs. What’s interesting is the prices (understandably) increase with speed, so doing some quick lookups: for 2 x 8Gb

  • 3200: $69
  • 3333: $99
  • 3400: $104
  • 4133: $229
  • 4266: $239
  • 4333: $264
  • 4400: $348
  • 4500: $499

I was initially thinking fastest RAM as possible, but there’s some lofty premium for those fastest (overclocked?) speeds, so rather go for the fastest 16GB I think I’m either going to go with some 3200 or 3400 and jump to 32GB instead (which is the ideal spec).

For motherboards I’m considering:

ASUS AM4 TUF GAMING X570-Plus ATX Motherboard with PCIe 4.0, Dual M.2, 12+2 with Dr. MOS Power Stage, HDMI, DP, SATA 6Gb/s, USB 3.2 Gen 2 and Aura Sync RGB Lighting

  • dual M.2 PCIe v4 slots
  • DDR4 upto 4400 (DDR4 4400(O.C.)/ 3466(O.C.)/ 3400(O.C.)/ 3200(O.C.)/ 3000(O.C.)/ 2933(O.C.)/ 2800(O.C.)/ 2666/ 2400/ 2133 MHz )

I ruled out this alternative:

MSI X570-A PRO Motherboard AMD AM4 SATA 6Gb/s M.2 USB 3.2 Gen 2 HDMI ATX

  • has 2 M.2 slots but only one 1 PCIe v4, but the other is PCIe v3
  • DDR4 upto 4400

For storage, I’ve already committed to a motherboard with PCIe v4 support, so I’m going with Corsair Force MP600 M.2 2280 500GB PCI-Express Gen 4.0 x4 NVMe initially, then I could always add more later.

For PSU, I’m going with a 650w modular from EVGA which should be more than enough power with some to spare.

Ok, that’s it for now. Parts are ordered from Newegg to arrive sometime next week, more updates to come later.