Microsoft Flight Simulator

The pairing of an Intel Core i7-12700K with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 lands comfortably in the upper tier for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Measured benchmark data shows this combination clearing the 60 FPS playable threshold at every tested preset across all three standard resolutions, including Ultra at 4K. It ranks 108th out of 3714 tested hardware combos in this game, placing it in the top few percent of configurations on record. The RTX 4090 sits in the 88th percentile versus all GPUs in the database, and the i7-12700K sits in the 84th percentile versus all CPUs — a balanced high-end pairing for a simulator that demands both strong single-thread throughput and serious rasterization horsepower.

Measured FPS Breakdown

All figures below are measured average frame rates for this exact CPU/GPU pairing in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Where minimum and maximum data was captured, it is reported; otherwise averages only.

At 1920x1080, the combo scales from 212 FPS on Low up to 130 FPS on Ultra. Medium sits at 181 FPS with a measured range of 154 to 208, meaning even the slowest frames recorded at Medium stay above the 60 FPS threshold by a wide margin — a 94 FPS cushion at the floor. High averages 136 FPS, and Ultra holds 130 FPS.

At 2560x1440, Low delivers 188 FPS, Medium 146 FPS (124 minimum, 168 maximum), High 110 FPS, and Ultra 105 FPS. The Medium floor of 124 FPS remains well above 60, indicating the experience is smooth even in the worst sampled moments. The drop from Low to Ultra is 83 FPS — a meaningful but not dramatic cost for the extra visual fidelity.

At 3840x2160, the frame rates compress but stay playable throughout: 138 FPS on Low, 108 FPS on Medium (92 minimum, 124 maximum), 81 FPS on High, and 77 FPS on Ultra. Notably, the gap between High and Ultra at 4K is only 4 FPS, one of the smallest High-to-Ultra deltas in the dataset. The Medium minimum of 92 FPS demonstrates that even at native 4K, the slowest measured frames clear the 60 FPS threshold with over 30 frames to spare.

Across all resolutions, the Medium preset is the only one with min/max telemetry recorded, and in each case the minimum stays above 60 FPS — 154 at 1080p, 124 at 1440p, and 92 at 2160p.

FAQ

Q: Can the i7-12700K + RTX 4090 run Microsoft Flight Simulator at 4K Ultra?

A: Yes. The measured average at 3840x2160 on Ultra is 77 FPS, comfortably above the 60 FPS playable threshold.

Q: Which preset should be used at 1440p?

A: Ultra is playable at 2560x1440 with an average of 105 FPS. Since High averages 110 FPS, only 5 FPS separate the two presets, making Ultra the sensible choice at this resolution.

Q: What is the highest frame rate this combo achieves in the game?

A: 212 FPS, measured at 1920x1080 on the Low preset.

Q: Does the frame rate ever dip below 60 FPS?

A: No. All recorded averages are above 60 FPS, and the lowest recorded minimum — 92 FPS at 4K Medium — also clears the threshold.

Q: How does this hardware pairing rank against other tested combos in this game?

A: It ranks 108 out of 3714 tested combinations, placing it among the top performers in the database for Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Q: Is the CPU or GPU the stronger component in this pairing?

A: Both are high-percentile parts — the i7-12700K at the 84th percentile versus all CPUs and the RTX 4090 at the 88th percentile versus all GPUs — making this a balanced flagship-era combination.

CPU and GPU Roles

Microsoft Flight Simulator is a simulator, and its performance profile in this dataset reflects that genre's typical characteristics. The scaling between resolutions reveals which component is under load. Moving from 1920x1080 Ultra (130 FPS) to 3840x2160 Ultra (77 FPS) costs 53 FPS — a substantial drop that shows the GPU becomes the dominant bottleneck as pixel count quadruples. That is expected behavior for a GPU-bound progression.

At 1080p, however, the picture changes. Ultra at 1080p averages 130 FPS while Low averages 212 FPS — a gap of 82 FPS that persists even though the RTX 4090 is barely challenged at Low settings at this resolution. This pattern, where frame rates plateau well below what the GPU could theoretically deliver, is the classic signature of a CPU or engine-thread limit. The i7-12700K's strong single-thread credentials support this reading: a Cinebench R23 single-core score of 1850.5, a Geekbench single-core score of 2308, and a PassMark single-thread score of 4013 indicate a chip capable of feeding the simulation logic at high rates, but the 3DMark single-thread score of 1043 and 2-thread score of 2065 show that the lightly-threaded throughput that flight simulators lean on is finite regardless of GPU power.

The practical takeaway: at 1080p the CPU and engine are the limiting factor, and upgrading the GPU further would buy little. At 1440p and especially 4K, the RTX 4090's rasterization muscle — 82.58 TFLOPS of FP32 throughput, 16384 shading units, and 1.01 TB/s of memory bandwidth — becomes the deciding factor, and the frame rate scales accordingly.

Similar Performance Alternatives

For the CPU, the nearest rivals by aggregate benchmark score are remarkably close. The Intel Core i7-12700KF averages 35365 against the i7-12700K's 35287 — a difference of -0.2 percent — making it an essentially identical substitute for this workload. The Intel Core i5-13600T (-0.1 percent) and Intel Core i7-13700T (-0.3 percent) also land within a fraction of a percent, as does the Intel Core 5 213PE at -0.4 percent. Any of these chips would produce frame rates in Microsoft Flight Simulator within a hair of the measured results, with the caveat that the thermal-limited T-series parts achieve that parity on aggregate scores rather than guaranteed parity in a simulator's lightly-threaded critical path.

On the GPU side, the rival list is more eclectic. The Intel Arc Pro A60 scores 60326 versus the RTX 4090's 60347 — a 0 percent delta in aggregate terms — while the AMD Radeon Pro Vega 48 sits at 0.3 percent behind and the AMD Radeon Pro W6600M actually posts a -2.5 percent delta (a higher score). The AMD Radeon PRO V710 trails by 2.9 percent. In raw database scoring these professional cards cluster around the RTX 4090, but Microsoft Flight Simulator leans heavily on DirectX 12 Ultimate feature support, where the RTX 4090's 128 RT cores and full DX12 Ultimate (12_2) compliance matter for its highest presets. The measured combo rank of 108 out of 3714 is the most reliable indicator of what to expect from genuinely comparable gaming hardware.

Best Settings per Resolution

• 1920x1080 — Ultra, 130 FPS average. The most demanding preset clears 60 FPS by more than double. High is nearly identical at 136 FPS, so Ultra is the correct choice.
• 2560x1440 — Ultra, 105 FPS average. With High at 110 FPS, the 5 FPS cost of Ultra is trivial. Play Ultra.
• 3840x2160 — Ultra, 77 FPS average. Even at native 4K, the top preset stays 17 FPS above the threshold, and High at 81 FPS offers only a 4 FPS margin over it. Ultra remains playable throughout.

At no resolution does the best playable preset fall below Ultra. The verdict data confirms that all four presets — Low, Medium, High, and Ultra — are playable at all three resolutions for this combo.

The Verdict

Yes — decisively. The Core i7-12700K and RTX 4090 combination runs Microsoft Flight Simulator above 60 FPS at every tested resolution and every tested preset. The weakest single data point in the entire dataset is 77 FPS average at 4K Ultra, which is still 17 FPS clear of the playable threshold. Frame consistency is equally strong: the lowest recorded minimum anywhere is 92 FPS at 4K Medium. For a flight simulator, where consistent frame pacing matters for control smoothness and instrument readability, the margins here are generous. This pairing ranks 108 out of 3714 tested combos in the game — a result consistent with the hardware's percentile standings (84th for the CPU, 88th for the GPU) and with the RTX 4090's raw specifications, including 24 GB of GDDR6X on a 384-bit bus.

How This Combo Ranks

Rank 108 out of 3714 puts this pairing in the top three percent of all tested hardware combinations for Microsoft Flight Simulator. That placement is the product of two components that are each strong in the dimension this game stresses most: the i7-12700K's single-thread performance for simulation logic and the RTX 4090's rasterization and memory bandwidth for the visual load. The aggregate benchmark scores — 35287 for the CPU and 60347 for the GPU — sit above the vast majority of the database, and the measured frame rates confirm that neither component meaningfully holds the other back. For a 2020-release title being run on a 2022-flagship GPU and a 12-core Alder Lake CPU, the data shows a pairing that extracts essentially all of the game's available performance at mainstream resolutions, with headroom remaining even at 4K Ultra.