If you’re among the many people who’s PC seriously struggles to run Microsoft Flight Simulator, get ready for your flights to be a bit less bumpy. According to a report by The Verve, the massively popular simulation game is getting a major patch that promises “significant performance improvements.” While Asobo, the developer of Microsoft Flight Simulator, was originally rewriting the game’s engine for its upcoming Xbox Series X | S port, the changes will also affect those playing on PC in a very positive way. The improvements will go live alongside the console versions release on July 27.
Asobo CEO Sebastian Wloch went into a bit more detail on what this overhaul means for the game. According to Wolch, the team has “rewritten a lot of the parts of the engine … in order to get the maximum performance out of the sim,” and has “mainly working on CPU optimizations, as the game has been incredibly CPU heavy since its launch last year.” During a recent recent Twitch stream spotted by Twinfinite, Asobo showed off the perfomance imporvements on and older system equipped with an Intel Core i7-9700K and an RTX 2060 Super. Thanks to the patch, Microsoft Flight Simulator shot up from around 30fps to a solid 60fps, while CPU utilization dropped from 100 percent to 75 percent and memory dropped from around 16GB to a much more digestible 4.7GB.
However, the PC version of Microsoft Flight Simulator is admittedly not getting all the changes and improvements the Xbox Series X | S versions are. While the Xbox versions will use DirectX 12 — which enables ray tracing, better water effects, and improved shadows and reflections — the PC version will remain on DirectX 11 while the team continues working on making DirectX 12 stable on PC.
Both the Microsoft Flight Simulator update, and the Xbox Series X | S versions of the game, are scheduled to release on July 27.