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[Digital Foundry] Flight Simulator Hands-On



  • Map streamed by the Azure cloud service is several petabytes worth of data
  • Terrain generation, skies and clouds of unprecedented quality
  • Real-time weather conditions based on the Earth
  • Very heavy on hardware. 2080 Ti/4K/Ultra settings nets around 30-40fps
  • Scales very well with lower settings
  • CPU-bound at around 70-80fps on Ultra
  • Currently, AMD GPU's performs much worse
  • 10+ hours of play-time used around 7GB of data
 
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It looks orgasmic. I'm cooming all over that beautiful sky and volumetric clouds.

It's crazy tho that a (my future) 3080ti won't even hit 60fps on 4k ultra settings.
 
Basically the next step, just a shame its a flight sim, if I coukd fly a helicopter with bf controls id play it

It got a VR mode?
 
Clean your keyboard and flight stick/throttle combo please.

gross.png
 
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Can't wait to try this. An i5 8400 and a GTX 1060 gets near 60 FPS on medium at 1080p, which is exactly what I have. I'll probably take the FPS hit and crank up those clouds.
 


  • Map streamed by the Azure cloud service is several petabytes worth of data
  • Terrain generation skies and clouds of unprecedented quality
  • Very heavy on hardware. 2080 Ti/4K/Ultra settings nets around 30-40fps
  • Scales very well with lower settings
  • CPU-bound at around 70-80fps on Ultra
  • Currently, AMD GPU's performs much worse
  • 10+ hours of play-time used around 7GB of data

Can't wait to see how this will perform on the "amazingly powerful" series X is this is true.
 
im expecting alot of sales of people who never even played a flight simulator before just because they are so impressed by its visuals and what the game is achieving.

I know this for a fact since im one aswell lol. Steam release gonna be interesting
 
Needs a Lite option that utilizes high resolution tiled textures instead of these real world streamed megatextures. I'd rather have my internet connection available/used on other things while playing even if that means I get lesser visuals (in texture variety rather than quality/models/effects).

Doom Eternal had the right idea to swap the megatextures for standard techniques, it didn't really seem to lack in texture variety because of it and their quality was way better than megatextures could achieve (yes I know it's not the same engine/technology here).

Won't that kill console SSDs faster (compared to more reliability/longevity based PC SSD models), swapping in and out that much data? Or is that done just on reserved ram or something (I assumed it would save parts of them temporarily on SSD for reuse)?

If the latter then I guess SSD speed isn't the be all anyway. Plus it seems like your internet connection quality is more important in this case regardless, few (none?) have a connection that can match that kind of data rate.
 
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This should've been at the July showcase tbh. C'mon, Microsoft!

...that said, hearing it's running worst on AMD GPUs, I hope that's just because the desktop RDNA2 cards aren't out yet.
It was shown at E3 2019 and has been in a semi-closed beta for nearly a year, why even bother showing it again when its basically already out? They had already shown "next-gen" a year before and no one bothered to notice or care then.
 
Holy shit! Texture Synthesis in realtime!!!

This is the first game to EVER do this! I remember back in my days that we wanted to use procedural texturing (which gives unlimited texture resolution) but also needed to filter the texturing. Computing the texture synthesis of the procedural textures is an incredible technique to convert from procedural to regular textures.

Cloud rendering is completely next-gen. The technique they used is amazing.
 
This game is not coming to Xbox. Why do people keep acting like it will?


The marketing says "Xbox games pass for PC". The platform is only Windows 10.

NVM, I stand corrected:

 
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Why wasn't the same passion and care taken with Halo Infinite visuals? Every other MS team and project seem to know what they're doing except Bonnie Ross and her Island of Misfit Diversity Hires.
 
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