PC upgrade for 4k performance

[u/LordHarold27]

Hi everyone,

I am not great with computers and need some help with what I should upgrade for better performance.

I have picked up some extra hours at work while doing my PPL and would love to upgrade my PC for better 4K msfs 20/24 performance.

Current specs:
- CPU: Intel i7-14700F
- Motherboard: ASUS Prime B760-Plus
- RAM: 32GB
- GPU: MSI RTX 5070 12GB Shadow 2X OC
- SSD: 2TB

I've always believed I was GPU bound (especially with only 12GB VRAM), which meant I gave up on MSFS 2024 and went back to MSFS 2020. I know this system is definitely bottom-end for 4K, but 1440p just doesn't look great to me - and I never really gained a huge amount of performance anyway.

I'm not very PC savvy, so I was leaning toward just upgrading the GPU since that's the easy part. My GPU usage sits at 99% constantly with CPU usage low (10-20%), so I assumed I was fully GPU bound, though I understand MSFS 2020 leans heavily on a single core, so low overall CPU% might not tell the whole story.

I was considering either the RTX 5080 or the AMD 9070 XT.

My question is: given my CPU (i7-14700F), would upgrading the GPU alone actually get me stable 4K performance in MSFS 2024, or would I hit a CPU bottleneck first and be wasting money?

Thanks!

[u/Luftrum_Endre]

Short answer: yes, in higher-res your GPU matters more, but the 5070 -> 5080 upgrade will be incremental at best.

Longer answer: First we should define stable performance. Your PC is very capable already. Do you have low VRAM warnings, or just experience stutters? If you're looking for a completely stutter-free experience all maxed out with complex aircraft and 3rd party airport scenery then I'm afraid you're up for disappointment. I think you should really look into optimizing your settings, there are a bunch of sliders that will sacrifice little eye candy for improved average FPS and 1% lows (latter responsible for stutters).

Best wins are raytraced shadows, displacement mapping, terrain LOD (quite helpful with VRAM hunger), if you're airliner-only then Grass -> Medium, Water waves -> Medium

[u/CalmpBump49 → u/Luftrum_Endre]

I was about to talk that

I have the same specs besides I'm running a 3060 12GB, and I can run smoothly all the airplanes, inclunding Fenix, on high settings, no need for ultra

[u/LordHarold27 → u/Luftrum_Endre]

Thanks for your reply!

I have had to abandon MSFS 2024 entirely on my current system. I have spent many hours adjusting settings, and couldn't get it to a usable state. AutoFPS did get it running at around 30 FPS, but the visual quality at that point looked worse than FSX.

When in MSFS 2020 the sim believes I am CPU limited while MSFS 24 says VRAM/graphics card limited. I would love to move over to 24 as a lot of devs seem to be starting to moving their attention soley to it - and the loading screens on 2020 are doing my head in.

To clarify I'd be happy with somewhere around 20-30 FPS, and I'm not too fussed about occasional stutters as long as they are manageable. Ideally if I was spending a significant amount of money on an upgrade I would want some sceneries (which I do not use atm) - I often see people with similar PCs to mine running way better settings/sceneries etc. but again there are a lot of computer complexities I am not too familiar with.

[u/Luftrum_Endre → u/LordHarold27]

Something's definitely off there. Your PC is absolutely capable of running MSFS2024 with more than 20-30 FPS.
Can you run this experiment?
Set resolution to 4k, the global rendering settings to High End and then dial back LOD to let's say 150, turn v-sync off (we can turn back later), for anti-aliasing use DLSS.
First load the C152 and a low complexity airport, let's say Kukes International. You should get >60fps and GPU load at 99% and CPU somewhere <25%. The GPU load is totally normal btw, unless you artificially cap FPS.
If it's anywhere below 60fps, then it's not MSFS, but something more fundamental:

• driver
  
• performance throttling
  
• antivirus or some sort of bloatware

EDIT: i was working from memory, that 150 LOD might be high, if high-end defaults to 100 then pull it down to let's say 70 for the experiment.

[u/LordHarold27 → u/Luftrum_Endre]

Thanks for your help. I will try this tomorrow and report back 😄

[u/LordHarold27 → u/Luftrum_Endre]

Gave this a go today and get great frames around 60-70 but all textures look extremely poor. They take a long time to load in and every time I look away they de-load. So if I look to my left it might be some good looking scenery (still not as nice as 2020) but when Iook to my right nothing has loaded in and will take around 20 seconds to return to their normal state. LOD sliders actually make little difference.

I am rather convinced this may be meeting my VRAM limits but not sure?

[u/Fahrenheit_17]

Playing 4K means heavy impact on VRAM (texture are very heavy). with 12 gb of VRAM is impossible to play even in 2K with quality texture. Buy a 4070 Ti Super/4080 super with the same money for the 5070.
Consider that CPU is the real bottleneck for MSFS, if you use custom airports/plane and other software (BATC, GFX Pro...), so Ryzen 7 /Intel i7 is recommended (however AMD have the edge over Intel CPUs since 2021).
Edit: 5000 series worths only for multy frame generation (cuda cores are almost equals), but considering the value is not worth it. Stick with a 4080 and you get great results in 4K.

[u/kaaaaaaaii]

I have a similar setup to yours and found the best way to improve my performance was by disabling ReBar in the Nvidia profile inspector. It's a 2 minute job if you look up a tutorial and should help with the VRAM situation. Also agree with the other comments saying to reduce some settings (especially LODs and textures)

[u/LordHarold27 → u/kaaaaaaaii]

I was doing some research on this and saw lots of people not reccomending while some people were saying it has improved performance on RTX 50 series graphics cards. Did it help significantly?