Microsoft Flight Simulator

How This Combo Ranks

The AMD Ryzen 7 5700 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 combination sits at rank 413 out of 1,795 tested combos in Microsoft Flight Simulator. That places this pairing in the top 23% of all system configurations evaluated, a strong showing for a flight sim known for its punishing demands on both CPU and GPU. The rank reflects a balanced pairing: the 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 5700 provides solid single-threaded headroom, while the RTX 4070’s Ada Lovelace architecture handles the heavy rasterization load. The data places the CPU in the 84th percentile among all processors, with an average benchmark score of 27,220. Its nearest rival, the Intel Core i9-9900K, scores 27,043—just 0.7% behind—indicating the Ryzen 7 5700 is effectively trading blows with a previous-generation flagship. The Intel Core i7-12700H and Core i7-1370P trail by 0.8% each, while the AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 sits 1.2% back. This tight clustering means the CPU is not a bottleneck in most scenarios; it delivers performance squarely in the upper-midrange tier.

For the GPU, the RTX 4070 holds the 81st percentile among all graphics cards, with an average benchmark score of 37,283. Its nearest rivals are curious: the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 is 0.6% ahead, while the NVIDIA GeForce MX570 A and RTX 4080 Mobile are 1.9% and 2.2% ahead, respectively. The AMD Radeon RX 5300M trails by 2.5%. This suggests the RTX 4070’s desktop-class performance is closely matched by some mobile and older parts in synthetic tests, but the measured FPS data in Flight Simulator tells a more nuanced story—one where the 12 GB GDDR6X frame buffer and 504.2 GB/s memory bandwidth prove decisive at higher resolutions.

FAQ

Q: How does this combo perform at 1080p Ultra settings?

A: At 1920x1080 with Ultra settings, the system averages 92.1 FPS. This is the lowest 1080p result among the four settings, but still comfortably above 60 FPS, indicating the game is playable at maximum detail on Full HD.

Q: What is the biggest FPS jump between settings at a given resolution?

A: The largest delta appears at 4K: moving from High (54.2 FPS) to Low (99.1 FPS) yields a 44.9 FPS improvement. At 1440p, the same settings gap is 54 FPS (80.2 to 134.2), and at 1080p it is 62.9 FPS (99.1 to 162). The scaling is consistent across resolutions.

Q: Is the CPU or GPU the limiting factor in this game?

A: The data suggests the GPU becomes the primary constraint at higher resolutions. At 1080p Low, the system hits 162 FPS, which likely approaches CPU limits for the Ryzen 7 5700. At 4K Ultra, the average drops to 56 FPS, a 65.4% reduction from 1080p Low, indicating the RTX 4070’s rendering load dominates.

Q: How does the RTX 4070 compare to its closest GPU rivals in synthetic tests?

A: The RTX 4070’s average benchmark score is 37,283. The Radeon RX Vega 56 is 0.6% higher, the GeForce MX570 A is 1.9% higher, and the RTX 4080 Mobile is 2.2% higher. The RX 5300M is 2.5% lower. These are marginal differences in aggregate benchmarks.

Q: What is the CPU’s multi-threaded performance relative to its peers?

A: In Cinebench R23 multi-core, the Ryzen 7 5700 scores 20,655. Its nearest rival, the Core i9-9900K, averages 27,043 overall (including all benchmark types), but the CPU’s 84th percentile ranking confirms it sits above the median. The 0.7% delta to the i9-9900K is negligible in real-world gaming.

Q: Does the 12 GB VRAM capacity affect 4K performance?

A: At 3840x2160 with Ultra settings, the system averages 56 FPS. The 12 GB GDDR6X buffer (with 192-bit bus and 504.2 GB/s bandwidth) is sufficient for this game’s textures at 4K, as the FPS drop from High (54.2) to Ultra (56) is only 1.8 FPS—essentially flat, suggesting VRAM is not the bottleneck at this resolution.

GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 is the workhorse of this pairing, built on the 5 nm Ada Lovelace architecture with 5,888 shading units, 184 texture mapping units, and 64 ROPs. Its 12 GB of GDDR6X memory runs across a 192-bit bus, delivering 504.2 GB/s of bandwidth. The GPU’s base clock is 1920 MHz, boosting to 2475 MHz, with memory clocked at 1313 MHz (21 Gbps effective). These specs translate to a pixel rate of 158.4 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 455.4 GTexel/s, with FP32 performance at 29.15 TFLOPS. In Microsoft Flight Simulator, the GPU’s role is most evident at 4K resolution. The measured FPS shows a clear hierarchy: at 3840x2160, Low settings produce 99.1 FPS, Medium drops to 74.5, High to 54.2, and Ultra to 56. The non-linear scaling between High and Ultra (where FPS actually rises by 1.8) suggests that Ultra presets might be engaging different rendering paths or that the GPU is not the sole limiter at that extreme.

The RTX 4070’s 46 ray tracing cores and 184 tensor cores are present but not heavily utilized in this flight simulator, which leans on traditional rasterization. The GPU’s 81st percentile ranking (average score 37,283) places it above most discrete cards, but its nearest rivals in the database—the RX Vega 56, MX570 A, and RTX 4080 Mobile—are all within 2.2% in synthetic tests. In practice, the 12 GB frame buffer is a key asset: at 4K Ultra, the system maintains 56 FPS, which is only 1.8 FPS below the High preset’s 54.2. This indicates the VRAM capacity is not being stressed to the point of performance collapse, even at the highest settings.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the system delivers its best results. Low settings produce an average of 162 FPS, which is the highest number in the entire dataset. Medium settings drop to 127.2 FPS, High to 99.1 FPS, and Ultra to 92.1 FPS. The gap between Low and Ultra is 69.9 FPS, representing a 43.1% reduction. This scaling is smooth and predictable, suggesting the CPU can feed the GPU adequately at this resolution, with the RTX 4070 having ample headroom.

Moving to 2560x1440, the averages fall: Low settings yield 134.2 FPS, Medium 102 FPS, High 80.2 FPS, and Ultra 76.2 FPS. The delta from Low to Ultra is 58 FPS (43.2% reduction), which is nearly identical to the 1080p scaling in percentage terms. This consistency indicates that the GPU is still the primary driver of performance at 1440p, with the CPU not yet becoming a wall. The High-to-Ultra gap narrows to just 4 FPS (80.2 to 76.2), hinting that Ultra presets add diminishing returns beyond High.

At 3840x2160, the most demanding resolution, the numbers compress significantly. Low settings average 99.1 FPS, Medium 74.5 FPS, High 54.2 FPS, and Ultra 56 FPS. The Low-to-Ultra reduction is 43.1 FPS (43.5%), again matching the percentage seen at lower resolutions. However, the High-to-Ultra transition shows a 1.8 FPS increase, which is anomalous. This could be due to driver-level optimizations or game-specific settings that reduce certain GPU loads at Ultra while increasing others. The 4K Low result of 99.1 FPS is identical to the 1080p High result, showing that the RTX 4070 can maintain similar frame rates when resolution is traded against detail level.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS drop from 1080p to 4K is a clear indicator of the system’s balance. At Low settings, the average FPS falls from 162 at 1080p to 134.2 at 1440p (a 17.1% decrease), then to 99.1 at 4K (a 38.8% decrease from 1440p). The total reduction from 1080p to 4K is 62.9 FPS, or 38.8%. At Medium settings, the progression is 127.2 to 102 to 74.5—a 41.4% total drop. High settings go from 99.1 to 80.2 to 54.2, a 45.3% drop. Ultra settings go from 92.1 to 76.2 to 56, a 39.2% drop.

These percentages are remarkably consistent, hovering between 38% and 45% regardless of settings. This uniformity suggests that the system is not hitting a hard CPU bottleneck at any resolution, nor is the GPU running out of memory. Instead, the scaling reflects the raw pixel throughput demands of 4K (which has 4 times the pixels of 1080p) being partially offset by the RTX 4070’s 504.2 GB/s bandwidth and 29.15 TFLOPS of compute. The fact that 1080p Low (162 FPS) and 4K Low (99.1 FPS) are only 38.8% apart, rather than the theoretical 75% reduction from pixel count alone, indicates that the CPU (with its 16 threads and 3.70 GHz base clock) is limiting the 1080p result. At 4K, the GPU becomes the dominant constraint, as evidenced by the Ultra setting’s 56 FPS relative to the 54.2 FPS at High—the smallest settings-based delta in the entire dataset.

The limiting component shifts based on resolution. At 1080p and 1440p, the CPU’s single-thread performance (3dmark_single_thread score of 901, Cinebench R23 single-core of 2,916) is sufficient to push the GPU to high frame rates. At 4K, the GPU’s rendering load takes over, and the system’s FPS becomes more sensitive to graphical settings than to CPU speed. This is a well-balanced pairing for a flight simulator that demands both strong single-threaded IPC (for physics and AI) and high GPU throughput (for terrain rendering). The 12 GB VRAM ensures that 4K texture packs do not cause swapping, as evidenced by the stable FPS across High and Ultra at 4K.