Microsoft Flight Simulator

Microsoft Flight Simulator is one of the most demanding titles in the database, and the pairing of an Intel Core i5-10400F with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER lands in a middle tier for this game: strong enough for comfortable flight at mainstream resolutions, but stretched at 4K. The recorded data covers four preset tiers at three resolutions, and the pattern is consistent. Frame rates fall off steeply as pixel count rises, while the i5-10400F's six-core, twelve-thread Comet Lake design holds up its end of the workload.

Best Settings per Resolution

The playable threshold in the database is 60 FPS, and the most demanding preset that clears it at each resolution is as follows.

• 1920x1080: Ultra at 64 FPS average. Every preset is playable at 1080p, from Low at 112.7 FPS up to Ultra at 64 FPS. Ultra is the correct choice here, since it still clears the threshold with headroom to spare relative to nothing, but with only a small margin over Medium's 85 FPS, pilots sensitive to dips may prefer Medium for stability.
• 2560x1440: Medium at 72 FPS average. High drops to 53 FPS and Ultra to 46.4 FPS, both below the line. Medium is the highest preset that stays at or above 60 FPS.
• 3840x2160: Low at 65 FPS average. Medium manages 50.4 FPS and High only 39.6 FPS. Low is the sole preset that reaches the threshold at 4K.

The gap between best-playable presets tells the story of the game's appetite for GPU power: at 1080p you can run everything maxed, at 1440p you sacrifice two tiers, and at 4K you sacrifice three.

CPU and GPU Roles

The scaling data points to a GPU-bound profile at every resolution tested. Moving from 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 at Ultra cuts the average from 64 FPS to 46.4 FPS, a drop of roughly a quarter to a third of the frame rate for a modest resolution increase. Going from 1440p Ultra to 4K Ultra drops it further to 38.5 FPS. If the CPU were the limiting factor, frame rates would stay comparatively flat as resolution rose, because the processor workload is largely resolution-independent. That is not what the measurements show.

Preset scaling reinforces this. At 1080p, dropping from Ultra to Low raises the average from 64 FPS to 112.7 FPS, a gain of over three quarters again on top of the Ultra result. Visual settings load the GPU far more than the CPU in this title, and the large swings indicate the RTX 2070 SUPER, with its 8 GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus and 448 GB/s of bandwidth, is the component being saturated.

The i5-10400F is no bottleneck in this configuration. Its twelve threads cover the simulator's parallelism, and its database standing (68th percentile against all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 14185) sits well above the level where CPU-limited behavior would appear at these frame rates. In short: at 1080p the pairing is roughly balanced, and at 1440p and 4K it is firmly GPU-limited.

How This Combo Ranks

Out of 3714 tested hardware combinations in this game, the i5-10400F plus RTX 2070 SUPER ranks 2127th. That places it below the median, which reflects how punishing Microsoft Flight Simulator is rather than any weakness specific to this pairing. The game rewards high-end GPUs disproportionately, and a Turing-generation card with a 20282 average benchmark score (65th percentile against all GPUs) cannot reach the top of such a leaderboard.

Context matters here. A below-median rank in this title still corresponds to a machine that runs the game at Ultra settings above 60 FPS at 1080p. Many of the combinations ranked above it are simply newer or faster graphics hardware paired with comparable processors.

FAQ

Q: Can this PC run Microsoft Flight Simulator at 4K?

A: Yes, but only at the Low preset, where the measured average is 65 FPS. Medium (50.4 FPS), High (39.6 FPS), and Ultra (38.5 FPS) all fall below the 60 FPS threshold at 3840x2160.

Q: What is the best-looking playable setting at 1440p?

A: Medium, averaging 72 FPS. Low is faster at 89.3 FPS, but High (53 FPS) and Ultra (46.4 FPS) do not maintain 60 FPS.

Q: Is the CPU or the GPU the limiting factor?

A: The GPU. Frame rates fall sharply as resolution and preset climb, from 112.7 FPS at 1080p Low to 38.5 FPS at 4K Ultra, which is the signature of graphics-limited scaling rather than a processor ceiling.

Q: Does 1080p Ultra stay above 60 FPS?

A: Yes, at 64 FPS average, with a small margin. Medium offers a larger buffer at 85 FPS if consistency matters more than maximum detail.

Q: How many CPU cores and threads does the i5-10400F have for this game?

A: Six cores and twelve threads, with a 2.90 GHz base clock, a 4.30 GHz boost clock, and 12 MB of shared L3 cache on the Comet Lake architecture.

Q: How much video memory does the RTX 2070 SUPER provide?

A: 8 GB of GDDR6 across a 256-bit memory bus, delivering 448 GB/s of bandwidth.

Measured FPS Breakdown

All figures below are measured averages from the database.

1920x1080

| Preset | Avg FPS |

|---|---|

| Low | 112.7 |

| Medium | 85 |

| High | 67.3 |

| Ultra | 64 |

2560x1440

| Preset | Avg FPS |

|---|---|

| Low | 89.3 |

| Medium | 72 |

| High | 53 |

| Ultra | 46.4 |

3840x2160

| Preset | Avg FPS |

|---|---|

| Low | 65 |

| Medium | 50.4 |

| High | 39.6 |

| Ultra | 38.5 |

Two patterns stand out. First, the Low preset scales almost linearly with pixel count: 112.7, 89.3, and 65 FPS across the three resolutions, consistent with a shader- and fill-rate-limited workload. Second, the High and Ultra presets compress at the top end, with only 39.6 versus 38.5 FPS at 4K and 53 versus 46.4 FPS at 1440p. Once the heaviest presets are engaged, the additional quality cost of Ultra over High is comparatively small in frame rate terms, but both are beyond what this GPU can sustain at higher resolutions.

The Verdict

Yes, this PC can run Microsoft Flight Simulator, with the qualification depending entirely on resolution:

• 1080p: fully playable at every preset, including Ultra at 64 FPS. This is the resolution where the pairing shines.
• 1440p: playable at Low and Medium, with Medium delivering 72 FPS as the best playable option. High and Ultra fall short of 60 FPS.
• 4K: playable only at Low, at 65 FPS. Medium and above do not reach the threshold.

For a flight simulator, where frame pacing matters for control smoothness but twitch reflexes matter less than in competitive shooters, the Medium tier at 1440p or Ultra at 1080p represent the sweet spots in this dataset. The RTX 2070 SUPER's Turing architecture with DirectX 12 Ultimate support also ensures the game's rendering features are available, though turning them up is exactly what costs the frame rate shown above.

Similar Performance Alternatives

Looking at hardware that behaves comparably, based on the database's rival scores:

For the GPU side, the RTX 2070 SUPER's average benchmark score of 20282 sits within a narrow band of several alternatives: the NVIDIA Quadro M4000M (20480, about 1 percent faster), the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Mobile (20534, about 1.2 percent faster), the Intel Arc B570 (20556, about 1.3 percent faster), and the Intel Arc A750 (20582, about 1.5 percent faster). A system built around any of these cards should produce Microsoft Flight Simulator frame rates within a few percent of the figures in this breakdown, meaning similar 1080p Ultra capability and similar struggles at 4K.

For the CPU side, the i5-10400F's average score of 14185 is nearly identical to the Intel Xeon 6756E (14163, within 0.2 percent), the Intel Core 7 160UL (14232, within 0.3 percent), the AMD EPYC 7552 (14115, within 0.5 percent), and the AMD Ryzen 3 7320C (14277, within 0.6 percent). Any of these processors would deliver effectively equivalent CPU-side performance in this game, and since the title is GPU-bound at these settings, swapping among them would change flight simulator results little if at all.

The practical takeaway: owners of this combo looking for more frames should upgrade the graphics card first. The CPU data shows ample headroom, and every resolution scaling measurement in this dataset points at the GPU as the gatekeeper.