Best Graphics Cards for Microsoft Flight Simulator
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is a graphics card destroyer. When it first came out even the NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti were struggling to keep up with most of the upper echelons of resolution. There are some new players on the market, and with Christmas coming up, it only makes sense to explore what’s your best bet for a GPU for Microsoft Flight Simulator.
NVIDIA vs AMD
Nvidia or AMD? This used to be a lot easier to answer. Traditionally you’d be better off with a NVIDIA graphics card for gaming over AMD, even though there was a premium price to pay. However with AMD’s 2020 GPU lineup, they’ve really gotten competitive. These models are the AMD 6800, and the 6800 XT. Ray-tracing is something that is still being done better by NVIDIA, however Microsoft Flight Simulator does not use rely on ray-tracing or use it to produce its spectacular visuals - so it’s more something you’d want to consider if you plan on spending a lot of time in something like Cyberpunk 2077.
Regardless of manufacturer something very important to bare in mind when looking at benchmarks is that Flight Sim Frames per Second are not comparable to a First Person Shooter’s frames per second. You’re only going to cry if you go down that route - and for no good reason. Realistically, you can have a smooth turbulence free flight at 40 FPS and even lower. But it’s always nice to have some headroom, especially if you plan on visiting large cities with detailed building layouts (such as New York), as environment drastically affects performance.
Top GPUs for Microsoft Flight Simulator (Best to Worst):
AMD 6800 XT - 22 GB of Video Memory
AMD 6800 - 16 GB of Video Memory
NVIDIA RTX 3090 - 24 GB of Video Memory:
NVIDIA RTX 3080 - 10 GB of Video Memory:
NVIDIA RTX 3070 - 8 GB of Video Memory:
Cheap GPUs for Microsoft Flight Simulator (Best to Worst, all can give above 40 FPS on Medium):
NVIDIA RTX 2080 (TI > Super)
GPUs Compared Microsoft Flight Simulator Performance
NB: There have been performance updates since this video’s release that will improve frame rates.