Images in this article provided by: Microsoft

Initially departing nearly a year ago on PC, the ridiculously ambitious Microsoft Flight Simulator is finally landing on the next-generation Xbox Series S/X consoles.

It’s a substantial undertaking porting such an all-encompassing simulator to a fixed-specification console. Presenting a one-to-one digital recreation of Earth, it’s overwhelmingly demanding even for top-of-the-line gaming PCs.

Getting the game performant required thorough optimisations, uprooting the underlying simulation and re-engineering fundamental aspects from the ground up. The results are truly confounding… We never expected such an immensely intricate simulation on a console.

Thankfully, the optimisations have graciously trickled down to the PC version. Performance has doubled in previously demanding parts of the world.

Greatly improved performance

Previous iterations of Microsoft Flight Simulator were notoriously demanding. It usurped the reigning champion Crysis, with “…but can it run Microsoft Flight Simulator?” becoming the go-to gaming benchmark.

However, simulators are different beasts compared to ‘normal’ games. Typically, games are bottlenecked by the GPU well before other components. Microsoft Flight Simulator has cutting-edge graphical techniques, like atmospheric scattering through volumetric clouds, but it flipped the script.

Simulating physics interactions, real-time weather and constantly streaming in-and-out map data were heavily reliant on the CPU and RAM.

Thanks to the update, it’s switched from being CPU-dependent to equally balanced across the board. The simulator is unprecedented in scope, so performance varies wildly from location to location.

Flying sky-high in an aeroplane over the sea is less demanding than barely skimming a sprawling city, but early reports indicate an outstanding fifty percent uplift in performance. This offers the end-user a lot more freedom to fine-tune their settings.

At present, it doesn’t support image reconstruction and upscaling techniques like NVIDIA’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR. Hopefully their implementations are considered for a future update. In the meantime, the game’s internal resolution slider uses temporal upsampling to produce convincingly sharp results.

Virtual reality and future updates

This update has exciting implications for excruciatingly taxing virtual reality headsets. With VR, you’re rendering the scene twice, once per eye. This alone causes a severe headache for performance, but VR also requires above-average framerates to avoid motion sickness.

Before this update, only the highest-end gaming PCs could brute-force acceptable levels of performance. Now, it’s looking like comparatively lowly GPUs may be able to power VR.

This isn’t the end for PC performance optimisations, either. While the Xbox version gets DirectX 12 first, it’ll come a little later down the line for PC users. DirectX 12 interfaces closer on a hardware-level for increased CPU utilisation, but more notably opens up the potential for ray-tracing.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is a very forward-thinking game, inherently designed to be future-proof. Ray-tracing support is the next logical progression.

It’s on Xbox Game Pass!

It’s a realistic simulator through and through. Don’t expect dizzying barrel rolls without your wings snapping off. If you’re admittedly cautious about a full-on simulator, try it out on Xbox Game Pass!

If you haven’t played since launch, Microsoft Flight Simulator has received numerous content updates, enhancing the accuracy of the map by placing hand-crafted, recognisable structures like the Las Vegas Strip and updating the photogrammetry model on a country-by-country basis.

This update also introduces accessibility features to facilitate first-time pilots. More forgiving landing gears, informative tooltips, anti-stall and auto-trim assists – these helpful features gradually introduce you to the simulation’s more in-depth systems.

Brand-new discovery flights place you directly in the most awe-inspiring locations, from the Great Pyramids to Mount Everest. These flights come perfectly pre-configured by the developers for sightseeing leisure.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is available now on Xbox Series X/S consoles and PC.