Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 on PC is a tough title to run smoothly, even with the powerful hardware that’s available today. If you’re going for a 4K experience at above 60 FPS, then you’re going to need top-of-the-line hardware. If you aren’t rocking a next-gen GPU from the future, then you’ll be in need of our Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 best settings guide to help you find the balance between fantastic visuals and smooth gameplay. Read on for the best PC settings.
What are the best settings for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 on PC?
- Display Mode – Full Screen
- Full Screen Resolution – (Your monitor resolution)
- HDR10 – (On if supported)
- Global Rendering Quality – High-end (Changing settings will make it “Custom”)
- V-Sync – Off (On if preferred)
- Frame Rate Limit – Ignore (60 FPS or 30 FPS if V-Sync is enabled)
- Render Scaling – 100
- Anti-Aliasing – TAA
- Terrain Level of Detail – 90
- Terrain Vector Data – High
- Buildings – High
- Trees – High
- Grass and Bushes – High
- Objects Level of Detail – 90
- Volumetric Clouds – High
- Texture Resolution – High
- Anisotropic Filtering – 8X
- Texture Supersampling – 2X2
- Texture Synthesis – High
- Water Waves – High
- Shadow Maps – 1024
- Terrain Shadows – 256
- Contact Shadows – High
- Windshield Effects – High
- Ambient Occlusion – Medium
- Reflections – Medium
- Light Shafts – High
- Bloom – On
- Depth of Field – High
- Lens Correction – Off
- Lens Flare – On
- Use Generic Plane Models (AI Traffic) – On
- Use Generic Plane Models (Multiplayer) – Off
Above you’ll find our recommended settings for balancing great-looking visuals with smooth gameplay. We found these settings worked well with our Ryzen 7 3700X, RTX 2070, and 32 GB RAM setup.
If you’re running less-powerful hardware, a quick fix to help put you over the sweet 60 FPS target (or 30 FPS, if you’re desperate) is to use the Render Scaling option. It starts on 100, but lowering it down to 90 or less can help you gain those valuable extra few frames with minimal impact to visuals.
It’s also worth noting that you should have installed the latest driver for the game, as these specifically target performance. I noticed a solid improvement when installing the latest Nvidia driver, which is available here.
