Flight Simulator PC Hands-On: A Generational Leap In Graphical Realism

[Music] foreign [Music] after more than a decade-long hiatus microsoft flight simulator is back and is releasing on august 18th currently the game is entering a closed beta period before launch and i had the chance to play a preview version of this game for this video while the game is releasing on august 18th can be thought of like a release of an mmo game with this just being the beginning and the game will be seeing periodic updates over time long into the future it is long term project for microsoft and a sobo studio with expansions to content and play scheduled for the post launch period and a planned xbox release sometime down the line i'm not exactly sure how and when that may happen though as it has yet to be revealed if you've never played a game like this before gameplay and microsoft flight simulator is the same as it is in previous games in this series it is a plain flying simulator essentially at its heart with an intense level of detail and rigor and even more detail and simulation than before flying an airbus a320 is very complex in real life and can be just as complex in this game if you want but you can also scale down the simulation input and automation to a level of difficulty that you prefer you can play the game on the easiest setting for example like i did for a lot of shots in this video and it is just as simple as playing any other game with flying mechanics in it the game becomes easier to play when you do this but the simulation of the physics and the world around you stays just as complex it's just less manual input basically the planes in this game will never fly like they do in arcade games but it's still fun the core gameplay loop is flying from place to place and that simplicity is the game's strength for me at its best this game is incredibly relaxing and i spent more than 10 hours with the game learning how to pilot the planes exploring the earth wandering and just enjoying the sights i did this for hours on end without really thinking about the time it was more about the experience kind of like you would with real world hiking how you play exactly beyond the difficulty setting is incredibly customizable like the best pc games of all time you play how you want i played with a controller a mouse and keyboard hands on throttle and stick a flight yoke with pedals everything the game just automatically recognizes all your input peripherals and has default mappings for them that you can also customize the flight yoke with pedals and the throttle was probably the best and most enjoyable way to play the game due to how sturdy and precise such instruments are but even a basic xbox 360 controller was very good and very relaxing to play with on the easy difficulty settings the game maintains this high level of customization while also being intuitive to customize the ui is just great here you can edit every single thing you can really think of in the game view window itself while playing by turning on and off widgets and moving their location around like an rpg game of old or a military sim game you can play the game in third person first person in the cockpit watch your plane just fly around in free camera with no restrictions with this free camera you can even move multiple kilometers of way in any direction you want and turn on things like depth of field changing the camera rotation and anything that your heart desires being part of digital foundry though here i am interested in this game's technology while i will not go too far in depth in this preview video to the specifics or how things look or work i want to provide an overview of how this game engine works as it's very unique and if you're like me i think you'll be suitably impressed how it works with a high level overview the game's technology is built off of the simulation engine from the last flight simulator games but with extensive changes since then and a completely different rendering engine on top built by a sobo studio sobo studio is no stranger to rolling with their own rendering technology in custom engines and they've done amazing work in the past like the gorgeous a plaguetail innocence but here the studio's really gone overboard with the rendering features in microsoft flight simulator in this game you can fly all the way across the earth and visit any place on our lovely blue planet to generate the planet terrain and its details the game engine leverages satellite imagery or flyby image scans of the earth as the basis for height and terrain textured data offline procedural generation ai on their back end in servers reads these textures based upon their own set parameters and properly populates the earth's terrain with materials roads buildings water bushes trees and much more based upon brush set assets that the team has made after this step the game team can also go in and add in specific locations with even more detail like specific landmarks with photogrammetrically captured materials and textures and models so big cities like new york look particularly great or specific cultural heritage sites can also look really awesome when playing the game you're essentially looking at an extremely high resolution image of the entire globe in 3d it's like google earth but of a much higher quality this has a downside though as the entire texture data and height map data being used here from these scans would take up terabytes upon terabytes of real data multiple petabytes on a hard drive you would never have the hard drive space to store the entire earth on it at this quality with this technique but in game you never need to see the entire earth at this quality anyway since you and your plane can only go around it so quickly and you can only see so much unique information per frame based upon the horizon the game utilizes a base mesh and texture for earth that is lower quality and will use your internet connection to stream even more higher quality terrain data onto your pc as you play it over the azure cloud it's an incredibly novel way to boost the game's fidelity and diversity of its rendering that hasn't been used too often before in my play it ended up not using too much data for my standards but it is something to be mindful of if you're interested in this game in the 10 plus hours i spent with it the game used around 7 gigabytes of data as a part of this earth data more can be streamed in like the real-time world location of real planes flying around representing the air traffic you see around you it can also stream in the local weather radar and forecasts to populate clouds and the weather occurring at your location while flying the game basically represents the real world flight and weather conditions 24 7. in terms of rendering that weather is represented by the game's atmospheric simulation which provides near and distance fog light scattering in the air and volumetric cloud coverage to cover the wide variety of weather scenarios that the game can represent it goes from clear skies cloudy skies rainy storms snowstorms and massive lightning storms this game is all about being high up in the air and more than half your camera view invariably shows the sky so they spent a lot of their rendering budget here getting the sky right there are massive volumetric cloud formations that stretch as far as the eye can see with no visible detail transitions or popping in clouds cast shadows onto themselves as well as onto the clouds below them or even onto the ground below them as they form and dissipate based upon wind and weather conditions on the altar settings the volumetric clouds are so high res and detailed that they frankly look real at times and can take your breath away i exclaimed my awe multiple times rather audibly while playing this game the way atmospheric rendering clouds and light interact with one another is very special in this game terrain below the clouds is also given a great attention to detail with the bushes buildings roads and shadows stretching out very far into the distance on the ultra settings on a technical level some areas will hold up better than others depending upon the quality of the satellite data driving them or whether or not they're using those photogrammetric assets i mentioned earlier but on the whole most locations in this game looked excellent in the preview especially when you're 150 to 300 meters up in the air you can't even get closer actually outside of cities if you land on the ground there you can see highly detailed ground around your plane with individual grass stocks and more so the world below your plane is detailed and it's not necessarily static cities have their own day night cycles with rendered cars and buses flowing through their streets and thousands upon thousands of light sources and other dynamic elements that all affect the volumetric light rendering and atmospheric scattering in the game if you fly over a city at night it looks amazing and you can even see the bottom side of your jet or plane being ambiently lit up from the city below you looking at the outside of the flying machines you pilot they are lavishly detailed like the terrain and sky the outside fuselage of these trains are crafted to the point where you can see individual bolts and rivets modeled on them and high quality physically based materials inside the cockpits of these planes are where you will see the most attention to detail as this is where the game utilizes specific rendering load to the fullest since this game has one viewpoint for the most part of you in the cockpit or behind the plane they really crank up the poly count and geometry and artist time spent inside these cockpits every single dashboard instrument bolt screen dial cup holder is modeled to an insane level of geometric detail where they do not break down even when you zoom in all the instruments and screens update in real time as well showing off your flight speed pitch yaw and much more and can be configured if you wish there are a lot of good graphical features selling the realism of these cockpits like the high resolution shadow maps in the interiors high quality ssao and screen space reflections which are glossy contact hardening and even render onto the windows of your plane and it is very rare to see ssr on glass and games so at night or at the right angle you can see your cockpit reflected back at you in the window it's screen space only of course but it's a neat effect there's definitely a lot more to talk about here that i can hopefully cover after the game releases but to say the least it is an incredible looking game right now before release and according to the developers the game will only get better looking over time as they're going to keep adding to it visually with higher quality settings and even ray tracing support in the future although they have yet to say what type of ray tracing that might be being quite good looking means the game can also be very heavy on a ryzen 3900x with an rtx 2080 ti putting the game to the highest settings at ultra and at 4k saw the game running in the 40s or 30s most of the time there's a variability of load though depending upon how close to the ground you get or how close you are to the clouds or how many clouds there are basically the closer you are to clouds or the ground the more expensive the game becomes on the gpu and it can be quite a lot this game makes my gpu incredibly hot much hotter than it gets in other games so the highest settings at 4k are out of the question for 60 fps but 30 fps is very possible on this extremely high end gpu at 4k but you cannot lock the game to 30fps in the game in the current game menu and it being a windows store game for this preview version that i had access to also meant that nvidia inspector or the control panel was not working with its exe to force half raid v-sync so i settled for 70 of 4k utilizing the game's in-game resolution slider for this footage which brought me much closer to 60 fps as a note if you choose your resolution in this game below your native desktop resolution it always utilizes integer scaling which is perfectly good for divisible resolutions like 1080p on a 4k display but it looks bad on anything else i think so i definitely recommend utilizing the in-game resolution slider here especially since i also think it is doing a bit of image reconstruction below 100 percent if you set taa to on but even at that 70 percent of 4k the rtx 2080 ti and ryzen 3900x cannot always maintain a perfect 60 fps on those ultra settings based upon the gpu and cpu load the highest settings in this game are rather cpu limited on ultra settings at 4k it scales like i mentioned but at 1440p i saw a healthy uptick in performance that put the frame rate above 60fps but when going down to 1080p or 540p at ultra the expected frame rate increase did not happen the game is very cpu bound on ultra settings and it is so very quickly if you're not gpu bound even on this mammoth 3900x 540p and 1080p in this game at ultra settings on the 3900x essentially have the exact same frame rate and it'll equalize more the closer you get to the game's ground with the towns and bushes and trees and cars and all that but fear not the game does scale very well both on the gpu and cpu based upon various graphical options they offer i would like to go into these more detail after the game releases but you can gather a lot of performance back if you want for example in a completely cpu limited scenario i could increase the game's frame rate by 100 by going down to the lowest settings from the highest so there's definitely going to be some granularity there for cpu scaling in the visual options at a fully gpu limited 4k going down from ultra settings to high settings increased performance by 32 on average from ultra to medium increased performance by 61 percent and going from ultra to low increased performance by a whopping 144 percent i won't go so far into it here of course for this preview version of the game but to my eye the high settings offered the best visual bang for the buck they looked minimalistically worse than ultra while performing much better and retaining much of the game's visuals medium still looked great i must say but the compromises to terrain generation or cloud resolution take away that flawless look that the game has and brings it more into video game looking territory but even then this game's rendering features on medium are still a step above many other games out there keeping that in mind if we go over to the mid range here we can see just exactly how next generation the graphics and clouds and sky in this game really are sticking to 1080p and using those nearly flawless high settings we can see that the amd rx 580 and nvidia gtx 1060 are getting hammered here with the gtx 1060 spending its time in the 40 fps range dipping into the 30s while the amd rx 580 is underperforming sticking around the 30fps line the entire time through this benchmark this same spread of around a 25 performance lead over the rx 580 from the gtx 1060 continues when you drop to medium settings here the gtx 1060 gets much closer to 60 fps at medium settings being around 50 fps at its worst in this benchmark i made while the amd rx 580 here is around 40 fps this game is heavy and particularly heavy on amd hardware in the current version with the current drivers but here we have it one of the first games with next-gen graphics released and it scales like this on older mid-range hardware like red dead redemption 2 before this the medium settings here in this game are honestly better than many games out there in many ways so you have to scale your perception in this game more than you have to scale the graphic options and i just love that in my short time with this preview version of microsoft flight simulator i've seen a level of ambition and craft which is monstrously high graphically no other game does clouds and skies better based upon what i see here and it looks like you can scale performance very well with the in-game settings though you have to be mindful here as we're looking at a game with next-gen graphical quality it is also very heavy on the cpu at the highest settings though this is something that may change in the future when they move over to directx 12 from the directx 11 version that i previewed here this video is just scratching the surface though i would like to do an updated video covering some of the more optimized settings after the game releases also perhaps revisiting this game further in the future as they add more to it like virtual reality support which the developer announced to us as a part of the presentation attached with this preview in the meantime though i hope you enjoyed this video covering my experience with the preview version of microsoft flight simulator which is releasing very soon on august 18th if you did enjoy it hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you are already a subscriber then please consider hitting that little bell in the corner to be informed as soon as digital foundry posts a video if you want to see more content like this and help us out consider supporting us on patreon to get years worth of digital foundry content available in high quality for download if you want to talk to me about this game and glorious volumetric clouds write a comment below or follow me and digitalfoundry on twitter and as always this is alex bringyoufube you

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 636,444

Keywords: Flight Simulator, Flight Simulator 2020, Flight Simulator 2020 graphics, Flight Simulator graphics, Flight simulator benchmarks, Flight Simulator performance, flight simulator 2020 benchmarks, flight simulator 2020 performance, flight simulator, microsoft flight simulator, flight simulator 4k, flight simulator 2020 gameplay, digital foundry

Id: AEkNQVWkgpc

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Samura1_I3]

Microsoft has said that this simulator is the most technically advanced game or sim they've ever attempted to make. It really shows.

[u/basedgrid]

Bruh some of the scenes I had to double check..looked insanely real. Now this is next gen.

[u/[deleted]]

And this shit is on gamepass (the base game anyways) day one and you can get access for a dollar. Microsoft is REALLY trying to pull out all the stops this gen.

[u/peenoid]

I'm guessing you don't start in a Cessna on Meigs Field, as was tradition. Chicago's mayor apparently had it illegally bulldozed in 2003.

sadface.

[u/[deleted]]

The cloud rendering in this game looks absolutely phenomenal, you could easily fool me by posing some of the in-game shots as real life.

On the opposite end of the spectrum I would NMS has the worst cloud rendering I've ever had the misfortune of laying my eyes upon. It hurts.

[u/hydramarine]

Now this is the generational leap I can get behind.

Asobo doing some impressive work lately. First Plague Tale then this (apparently they worked only on the graphics) ? Wow.

[u/Lev22_]

I wonder why Microsoft/Xbox didn't make this game as a Flagship to next-gen titles

[u/Darkseid_One]

PS5 has left the chat.

[u/djsnoopmike]

Why did they have to attack my nostalgia with that Flight Simulator X music?