Flight Sim 2020 – Horizon Zero Dawn
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020
First, we will utilize Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 to test performance, then scroll down for Horizon Zero Dawn. Testing Microsoft Flight Sim 2020 is an interesting process and one we are still honing in. Please check out our Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 Performance at 4K for information that we found out during our testing prior to this review. It also details how we test the game.
You should know this, the game is DX11 only, and we go into this game knowing it is CPU dependent/limited. That’s just the kind of game it is. Now, what we can do is to try and mitigate that in our testing and game settings, and we are still tinkering with that. We have some information from NVIDIA on how to perhaps try and make it less CPU limited which we will have to check out and test.
For right now, our testing method involves taking off from Atlanta airport on a “Few Clouds” weather at 9 AM and landing at DeKalb-Peachtree Airport while letting a propeller plane fly low enough over Atlanta. The two points where performance is lowest is when taking off, and when landing. We also have the game set to the highest online experience, downloading all online materials for the highest quality.
It’s a long run-through, and our results are very consistent run-to-run. It’s just that, as you will see, we are hitting CPU limitations at these game settings. It is something we will investigate more, however. The game supports a resolution scaling feature, and we will also play around with that in the future which could help. Also, if the game ever did adopt DX12 API support we think it could help utilize the CPU better. We are going to test the game at the highest in-game setting which is “Ultra.”
1440p
Note that we are running the game at 1440p at the highest in-game Global Rendering Quality Preset of “Ultra.” As you can see, there is hardly any deviation in performance from the GeForce RTX 2080 FE to the GeForce RTX 3080 FE. We see a slight climb and progression in framerate, and the order of the cards in terms of “what’s fastest” is inline. The difference is only 10% between the GeForce RTX 3080 FE and GeForce RTX 2080 FE. This is of course not representative of all other games, this shows severe bottlenecking somewhere in the system. Let’s see what happens at 4K though below.
4K
Ok, at 4K we actually see a bigger difference, rightly so. It’s still not as far apart as we’d assume it should be, so there is still a major bottleneck even at 4K. The GeForce RTX 3080 FE is 62% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 FE however, and 2% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Obviously the RTX 3080 FE is not hitting its full potential in this game, by a long shot. It’s too bad this game does not support DX12 or a feature like DLSS which would be very beneficial to this type of game.
High-End Quality Setting
Due to the bottlenecking in this game, we wanted to try one more thing with the extra review time we got. We lowered the in-game setting down one notch from “Ultra” to the setting called “High-End.” This is just one preset notch down. Doing this greatly changed the performance in the game on the GeForce RTX 3080 FE. Here you can see the GeForce RTX 3080 FE at 1440p now hitting an average of 46 FPS in our test, and at 4K 42.6 FPS. This is a much better performance than with the “Ultra” settings above.
I suppose this means you are much better off running this game on the “High-End” settings versus “Ultra” on the GeForce RTX 3080 FE for now. Hopefully, we see some more optimization over time in this game, or more feature support added.
Horizon Zero Dawn
We are now testing the newly released on the PC Horizon Zero Dawn. It may be filled with issues, but it is relevant moving forward and we hope to see these issues squashed with patches. Right now the patch version we have tested on is patch 1.04. The game runs in DX12 and we are using the “Ultimate Quality” preset on the PC. We are also using the in-game benchmark for results.
This game performs very well at 1440p, even the GeForce RTX 2080 FE pulls in 80 FPS, so performance isn’t a huge issue. The new GeForce RTX 3080 FE does a lot better at 125 FPS. That is 56% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 FE and 24% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE.
At 4K the game does become performance challenged on the GeForce RTX 2080 FE and RTX 2080 SUPER FE. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE was the only card until now that could handle it well at 4K. However, the new GeForce RTX 3080 FE really supplants the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE. It is 69% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 FE and 29% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE.