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In another iteration of its game, well, simulator, Microsft’s Flight Simulator 2024 is now out. It upgrades the well-renowned application that lets you become a pilot without needing hundreds of hours in training first. Just grab a controller or yoke and get into the skies, but if your performance is not quite good enough, you can adjust a few things to improve it.
Unsurprisingly, being a simulator, there are incredible graphics and plenty of data to stream from physics to the world. So, it can be quite a demanding game for your gaming PC. But there are a few ways you can help with the variety of settings onboard, so we’ve found a suitable variety to combine framerate and quality to improve your experience.
How we chose the best settings
Getting into the game took many hours. Even though it initially only took 30 minutes to update the launcher, the loading screen took until the next day before I entered the game. But once I did, I tested our testing rig with the game, seeing how well it performed and checking how the settings affected performance. So, even without thebest GPU for Flight Sim 2024,you can make the most of what you have with these options.
✓ What we used to test
Our in-house testing bench
- CPU: Ryzen 9 7950X
- GPU: RTX 3090
- RAM: 32GB DDR5 @ 6000MT/s
- SSD: Corsair MP600 Pro XT
- PSU: Phanteks Revolt X 1000W
Best settings for Flight Sim 2024
Here are the settings I found to be a good mix of performance and quality. Some will still be a personal preference, like motion blur and v-sync, as they can be down to your perception and experience. The resolution will depend on your gaming monitor’s native, as that’s the best solution. Some Nvidia features, like DLSS, are also locked to Nvidia GPUs.
| Setting | Our best pick |
|---|---|
| Display mode | Fullscreen |
| HDR10 | Off |
| Fullscreen resolution | Monitor’s native (2560x1440p for me) |
| Anti-aliasing | DLSS/FSR (depends on hardware) |
| DLSS/FSR | Auto/Balanced |
| AMD FidelityFX sharpening | 100 |
| V-sync | Off |
| Nvidia reflex low latency | On |
| Dynamic settings | Off |
| Global quality | Medium |
| Terrain LOD | 50 |
| Off-screen terrain pre-caching | Low |
| Displacement mapping | Off |
| Buildings | Medium |
| Trees | Medium |
| Plants | Medium |
| Rocks | Medium |
| Grass | Medium |
| Objects LOD | 50 |
| Volumetric clouds | Medium |
| Texture resolution | Medium |
| Anisotropic filtering | 4x |
| Texture supersampling | 2×2 |
| Water waves | Medium |
| Raytraced shadows | Off |
| Shadow maps | 1024 |
| Terrain shadows | 256 |
| Contact shadows | Medium |
| Windshield effects | High |
| Ambient occlusion | Medium |
| Cubemap reflections | 192 |
| Raymarched reflections | Medium |
| Light shafts | Medium |
| Depth of field | Medium |
| Motion blur | Medium |
| Glass cockpit refresh rate | Low |
| Characters quality | Medium |
| Traffic airport quality | Medium |
| Air traffic | Medium |
| Road traffic | Medium |
| Sea traffic | Medium |
| Fauna | Fullscreen |
Performance
I benchmarked the game while starting the landing activity into Stansted, setting the autopilot and auto-throttle on to try and get the same situation for the gameplay. Although the autopilot was hit or miss, I did adjust if needed, but the terrain and cockpit were the same to load in. So, I tried a variety of quality presets and upscaling options to see their effectiveness in the performance.
I found that applying any upscaling doesn’t significantly influence performance. On the ultra preset, changing the anti-aliasing modes varies the average framerate over a minute by only a couple of. Instead, the most significant difference is dropping the settings, so switching to medium improved the average by about 10FPS. That’s why I decided a medium preset with DLSS/FSR to boost those lows was the best solution (the penultimate option on the graph).
Here is a quick comparison between these settings and how they look.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 low preset, Image by PC Guide
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Ultra preset, Image by PC Guide
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Medium preset with DLSS auto, Image by PC Guide
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Ultra preset with DLSS auto, Image by PC Guide
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 medium preset, Image by PC Guide
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 ultra preset with anti aliasing off, Image by PC Guide
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Ultra preset with DLSS Balanced, Image by PC Guide
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Ultra preset with FSR balanced, Image by PC Guide
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Additional factors for performance
You can also try to improve its performance by changing other factors on your PC. These can help the game with resources or ensure you have everything up to date and ready for it.
- Update your graphics drivers: Ensuring your graphics drivers are up to date ensures no problems with your games when playing them. If it is Nvidia, AMD, or Intel, they may specifically have day-one drivers for these games and allow the GPUs to work best in them. Nvidia is well known for these, and version 566.14 supports Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.
- Close other processes:Sometimes, you might have something running in the background, taking up the resources. Something like Steam or Windows updating or even Chrome hogging all your RAM, you want to close it and make sure MSFS 24 has everything available to it, more important, the lower spec machine you have.
- Game and hardware updates:You may also have to wait for the game to update; on its release,MSFS 2024 had issuesthat can take time to resolve with updates. You may also want to ensure you have the hardware for the job and check how it compares to the Microsoft Flight Sim 2024 system requirements.
