Microsoft Flight Simulator

The pairing of AMD’s Ryzen 5 4600G with Intel’s Arc B580 produces a distinctive performance profile in Microsoft Flight Simulator, one that shifts its bottleneck character dramatically depending on resolution and quality settings. The measured frame rates reveal a system that is capable of solid 1080p play but becomes increasingly GPU-bound as pixel count rises, with the CPU’s Zen 2 architecture providing a stable foundation throughout.

Resolution Scaling

The frame rate curve from 1080p to 4K is steep, indicating that the Intel Arc B580 is the primary scaling factor. At 1080p with Low settings, the combo delivers 97.2 FPS, which drops to 77.2 FPS at 1440p and further to 54.2 FPS at 4K. This represents a 44.3% reduction in frame rate from 1080p Low to 4K Low, a clear sign that the GPU is doing the heavy lifting. The scaling is even more pronounced at High settings, where the 54.3 FPS at 1080p falls to 42.3 FPS at 1440p and then to 32.8 FPS at 4K — a 39.6% drop from the lowest to highest resolution.

The pattern suggests that at 1080p, the CPU still has headroom, as evidenced by the large gap between Low (97.2 FPS) and Ultra (57.1 FPS) settings at that resolution. The 40.1 FPS difference between these two extremes at 1080p narrows to 29.3 FPS at 1440p and 25.3 FPS at 4K. This compression of the settings spread at higher resolutions confirms that the Arc B580 becomes the limiting factor as pixel count increases. The data indicates that 4K Ultra at 28.9 FPS is the most demanding scenario, while 1080p Low at 97.2 FPS is the only configuration approaching high-refresh territory.

How This Combo Ranks

Within the benchmark database, this specific CPU-GPU combination ranks 1424 out of 1795 tested combos for Microsoft Flight Simulator. This places it in the bottom 20.6% of all pairings, a modest standing that reflects the mid-range nature of both components. The ranking is influenced heavily by the CPU’s position in the broader processor landscape; the Ryzen 5 4600G sits at the 75th percentile among all CPUs, meaning it outperforms three-quarters of processors in general benchmarks. However, its single-thread performance, which is critical for flight simulators, is less impressive.

The combo’s rank is not a verdict on playability — the measured FPS shows it handles 1080p comfortably — but it does indicate that many other systems deliver higher frame rates in this title. The Arc B580’s own standing at the 66th percentile among all GPUs further contextualizes this result. The pairing of a 75th-percentile CPU with a 66th-percentile GPU yields a combined result that is lower than either component’s individual percentile, suggesting that the game’s engine may not fully utilize the available hardware or that the CPU’s Zen 2 cores create a bottleneck in certain scenarios.

GPU Role

The Intel Arc B580 is built on the Xe2-HPG architecture and manufactured on a 5 nm process, packing 19,600 million transistors into a 272 mm² die. It features 12 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus, providing 456.0 GB/s of bandwidth. This memory configuration is generous for the GPU’s class and proves beneficial in Microsoft Flight Simulator, which is known for streaming large textures. The base and boost clocks are identical at 2670 MHz, and the memory runs at 2375 MHz (19 Gbps effective).

The GPU’s compute resources include 2560 shading units, 160 texture mapping units, and 80 raster output pipelines. It also carries 20 ray tracing cores, though the measured FPS data does not include ray tracing-specific scenarios. The FP32 throughput of 13.67 TFLOPS places it in a competitive position, and its nearest rivals in the database include the AMD Radeon 760M (within 0.1%), the NVIDIA P106-100 (within 0.3%), and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 (0.7% higher average score). The Arc B580’s 12 GB frame buffer is a key advantage over the RTX 4060’s typical configuration, as Flight Simulator’s high-resolution textures can exceed 8 GB usage.

The GPU’s 66th percentile ranking among all GPUs, combined with its 15748 Passmark G3D score, indicates a solid mid-range performer. The 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12 score of 3068 further confirms its capability in modern DirectX 12 titles. In this game, the Arc B580’s role is to provide the raw rasterization power needed to push high pixel counts, and the scaling data shows it does so predictably, with 4K Ultra proving too demanding at 28.9 FPS.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the combo delivers the most playable results. Low settings produce 97.2 FPS, Medium drops to 76.1 FPS, High reduces further to 54.3 FPS, and Ultra bottoms out at 57.1 FPS. Notably, the jump from High to Ultra at 1080p results in a 2.8 FPS increase, which is an anomaly in the data — the Ultra result (57.1 FPS) is actually higher than the High result (54.3 FPS). This could indicate a measurement variance or a specific scene difference, but it does suggest that the CPU may be the limiting factor at these settings, as GPU load does not scale linearly.

Moving to 2560x1440, the frame rates are more consistent in their ordering. Low yields 77.2 FPS, Medium 58.3 FPS, High 42.3 FPS, and Ultra 41.1 FPS. The gap between High and Ultra narrows to just 1.2 FPS at this resolution, again hinting that the CPU is constraining performance in the higher quality presets. At 3840x2160, the GPU takes full control: Low produces 54.2 FPS, Medium 44.4 FPS, High 32.8 FPS, and Ultra 28.9 FPS. The 25.3 FPS spread between Low and Ultra at 4K is the largest absolute difference, but the relative scaling is less steep than at lower resolutions, confirming the GPU bottleneck.

The complete dataset shows 12 measured configurations, all with average FPS values and no min or max FPS reported. The most demanding scenario is 4K Ultra at 28.9 FPS, which is below the generally accepted 30 FPS threshold for playability. The most fluid scenario is 1080p Low at 97.2 FPS, which approaches high-refresh display capability. For 60 FPS play, users would need to target 1080p Medium (76.1 FPS) or 1440p Low (77.2 FPS), as 1080p High and 1440p Medium both fall short at 54.3 and 58.3 FPS, respectively.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 5 4600G is a 6-core, 12-thread processor based on the Zen 2 architecture, codenamed Renoir, and built on TSMC’s 7 nm process. It operates with a base clock of 3.70 GHz and a boost clock of 4.20 GHz, with a 65 W TDP. The CPU’s cache hierarchy includes 64 KB of L1 per core, 512 KB of L2 per core, and 8 MB of shared L3 cache. This L3 allocation is modest by modern standards, and in a flight simulator that benefits from high single-thread performance, the 4600G’s limitations become apparent.

The CPU’s benchmark results show a clear strength in multi-threaded workloads: it scores 13593 in Cinebench R23 multicore and 5709 in Cinebench R20 multicore. However, its single-thread scores are less compelling — 1919 in Cinebench R23 single-core and 805 in Cinebench R20 single-core. The Geekbench results follow the same pattern: 6093 multicore versus 1575 single-core. These numbers indicate that the 4600G is better suited to productivity tasks than to games that rely heavily on single-thread performance, which is exactly the case with Microsoft Flight Simulator.

The CPU’s nearest rivals in the database include the AMD Ryzen 3 PRO 5355GE (0% delta), the Intel Core i5-12450H (0.1% higher), and the Intel Core i3-14100T (0.8% lower). The 4600G’s average benchmark score of 17489 places it in the 75th percentile of all CPUs, but this aggregate performance does not translate directly to gaming. In this title, the CPU’s 8 MB of L3 cache is a limiting factor, as Flight Simulator’s world-streaming engine benefits from larger caches to reduce memory latency. The dual-channel DDR4-3200 memory support, providing 51.2 GB/s of bandwidth, is adequate but not exceptional, and the PCIe Gen 3 interface (20 lanes) may also constrain the GPU’s data transfer compared to newer systems.

The data shows that at 1080p Low, the CPU can feed the Arc B580 to the tune of 97.2 FPS, but at 1080p Ultra, the frame rate drops to 57.1 FPS — a 41.2% reduction. This drop is more pronounced than the GPU’s raw performance would suggest, indicating that the CPU is struggling to maintain frame pacing in complex scenes with higher draw distances. The 4600G’s 4.20 GHz boost clock is respectable, but the Zen 2 architecture’s lower instructions-per-clock compared to newer designs means it cannot extract maximum performance from the Arc B580 in this CPU-bound title.