This summer we published an extensive review of the new Microsoft Flight Simulator, which many people call Flight Simulator 2020 to distinguish it from the previous editions. At the time, we expressed our substantive judgment on the game, but we did not go into the technical side too deeply. In the past few weeks we have changed that by working with an extensive selection of processors and video cards. With the help of our community we have developed a reliably reproducible benchmark for this, more about this on the next page.

The technology behind Flight Sim We know Flight Simulator, of course, as a game from Microsoft, but strictly speaking, the latest iteration of the game is no longer from Redmond. The Microsoft game studio responsible for simulation games, including Flight Simulator 2004 and Flight Simulator X (from 2006), was launched in 2009 closed. The new Flight Simulator was developed by Asobo, an independent French studio that has previously made games for Microsoft, but has also worked for Ubisoft and THQ, for example.

Asobo has used an engine for Flight Simulator from the Microsoft ranks. This includes the Forza Tech engine from Turn 10 Studios, the Microsoft division responsible for the Forza Motorsport series. The biggest addition made specifically for this game is obviously the landscape simulation. Bing Maps data forms the basis for this, unfortunately including its inherent weaknesses, but in the Azure cloud, the 2d satellite data is combined with elevation data to generate a photo-realistic environment. In our review we concluded that this yielded an excellent result, with which Flight Simulator out of the box was at least as beautiful as competitors, including (paid) mods.

DirectX 12 A notable omission is support for DirectX 12; currently the game runs exclusively in DirectX 11 mode. That is not a limitation of the engine. In fact, Forza Motorsport 7 is one of the few games that requires DirectX 12 to run. An important advantage of DirectX 12 is that, if properly implemented, the workload is easier to distribute across different cores. Overall, DirectX 12 games are less likely to suffer from a CPU bottleneck than DX 11 games. In September, Asobo hinted that it was working on adding DirectX 12 support to Flight Simulator. At the same time, the developer warned to expect little performance gain from this; especially the addition of ray tracing would be a reason to make the game DX 12 – compatible.