Microsoft Flight Simulator

Microsoft Flight Simulator presents one of the most demanding rendering workloads in the benchmark database, and the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G paired with the AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT produces a distinctive scaling curve across resolutions. The measured data shows a clear transition from a CPU-limited scenario at 1080p to a GPU-bound scenario at 4K, with the intermediate 1440p resolution representing the balance point. At 1080p with Low settings, the combo achieves 104.3 FPS, but this drops to 61.5 FPS at High settings, indicating that the flight simulator’s draw-call overhead and physics simulation are consuming processor headroom before the graphics card becomes the bottleneck. Moving to 2560x1440, the Low preset yields 86.1 FPS, while High drops to 49.8 FPS, a relative reduction that suggests the GPU is now the primary constraint. At 3840x2160, the scaling becomes more severe: High produces 33.3 FPS, and even Low falls to 60 FPS, demonstrating that the RX 6650 XT’s 8 GB frame buffer and 128-bit memory interface are struggling with the pixel throughput required at 4K. The delta between Low and High at 4K is 26.7 FPS, whereas at 1080p the same preset difference is 42.8 FPS, which confirms that resolution scaling amplifies the GPU’s workload faster than the CPU can compensate.

The resolution scaling behavior reveals that Microsoft Flight Simulator is exceptionally sensitive to pixel count due to its heavy use of procedural geometry and real-time terrain tessellation. From 1080p Low to 4K Low, the frame rate drops from 104.3 FPS to 60 FPS, a 42.5% reduction, while from 1080p High to 4K High, the drop is from 61.5 FPS to 33.3 FPS, a 45.9% reduction. This near-linear scaling pattern indicates that the rendering pipeline is consistently bound by the rasterization and memory bandwidth limits of the GPU at higher resolutions, rather than by any single fixed-cost CPU stage. The 1440p results sit between the two extremes, with Low at 86.1 FPS and High at 49.8 FPS, showing that this resolution is where the CPU can still feed the GPU enough data to maintain playable frame rates, but the GPU is already starting to lag behind. The fact that Ultra at 1440p (48.2 FPS) is only slightly lower than High (49.8 FPS) suggests that the additional effects in Ultra are not the primary cost; instead, the base scene complexity and shadow rendering dominate the GPU’s time budget.

Settings Recommendations

The measured data indicates that the Medium preset offers the most balanced experience across all three resolutions, providing a substantial improvement over Low without the steep performance penalty of High or Ultra. At 1080p, Medium delivers 82.5 FPS, which is 21.8 FPS higher than High (61.5 FPS) and only 21.8 FPS lower than Low (104.3 FPS), making it the sweet spot for maintaining smooth frame pacing in a flight simulator where sudden camera movements and dense scenery can cause stutters. At 1440p, Medium produces 62.9 FPS, which is comfortably above the 60 FPS threshold for most displays, while High drops to 49.8 FPS and Ultra to 48.2 FPS, both of which risk noticeable judder during flyovers of complex urban areas. The 4K results reinforce this recommendation: Medium achieves 45.9 FPS, which is playable but not ideal, while High (33.3 FPS) and Ultra (33.8 FPS) are both below the 35 FPS mark where many users perceive the simulation as laggy. For users prioritizing visual fidelity over raw frame rate, High at 1080p (61.5 FPS) is the highest preset that still maintains a consistent 60 FPS baseline, but Medium provides the best headroom for the inevitable dips when flying through cloud layers or over photogrammetry cities.

The data suggests that Low is only advisable for competitive or diagnostic purposes, as it sacrifices the volumetric cloud rendering and detailed terrain textures that define the flight simulator experience. At 1080p Low, the 104.3 FPS result shows that the CPU is capable of driving the simulation at high frame rates, but the visual quality loss is disproportionate to the performance gain when compared to Medium. The gap between Medium and High is consistent across resolutions (20.6 FPS at 1080p, 13.1 FPS at 1440p, and 12.6 FPS at 4K), which means that High’s extra effects—likely including enhanced reflections and higher shadow resolution—scale with resolution but do not fundamentally change the bottleneck. Therefore, the recommended configuration for this combo is Medium at 1440p or 1080p, depending on the display’s native resolution, with High reserved for users who own a 1080p monitor and can tolerate occasional frame rate variations below 60 FPS.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT is the dominant component in this combo for Microsoft Flight Simulator, particularly at resolutions above 1080p. The GPU’s 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus provides 280.3 GB/s of bandwidth, which is sufficient for the game’s texture streaming at 1080p and 1440p but becomes a limiting factor at 4K where the frame buffer must hold larger mipmaps and higher-resolution terrain data. The GPU’s boost clock of 2635 MHz and base clock of 2055 MHz are relatively high for the Radeon RX 6000 series, and the 2048 shading units operating at these clocks deliver a peak FP32 throughput of 10.79 TFLOPS. In the measured results, the GPU’s role is most evident in the 4K scaling: the difference between Low (60 FPS) and Medium (45.9 FPS) is 14.1 FPS, while the difference between Medium and High (33.3 FPS) is 12.6 FPS, showing a steep performance cliff as the renderer engages more complex shaders and higher texture detail. The GPU’s 64 ROPs and 128 TMUs are the hardware resources most stressed by the game’s heavy use of antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, and the data indicates that these units saturate before the shading units do, as evidenced by the moderate frame rate gains from High to Ultra (only 0.5 FPS at 4K, from 33.3 to 33.8 FPS).

The GPU’s benchmark scores place it in the 72nd percentile of all GPUs, with an average score of 29024, and its nearest rivals include the AMD Radeon RX 6800M (29011, deltaPct 0) and the AMD Radeon RX 470 (28996, deltaPct 0.1). This tight clustering suggests that the RX 6650 XT’s performance is well-understood and consistent with mid-range expectations, but in Microsoft Flight Simulator specifically, the game’s unique rendering demands expose the GPU’s memory bandwidth limitations more than synthetic benchmarks would suggest. The 17.5 Gbps effective memory speed and 280.3 GB/s bandwidth are adequate for 1080p and 1440p, but at 4K, the frame rate at High (33.3 FPS) is only 54% of the 1080p High result (61.5 FPS), which is a larger drop than the pixel count alone would predict (4K has 4 times the pixels of 1080p). This indicates that the GPU’s L2 cache and memory controller are being overwhelmed by the game’s streaming geometry, and users should expect that any future content updates that increase texture fidelity will disproportionately impact this card at high resolutions.

How This Combo Ranks

The combination of the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G and the AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT ranks 1167 out of 1795 tested combos in Microsoft Flight Simulator, placing it in the 35th percentile of all system configurations in the database. This ranking reflects the fact that while the GPU is a competent mid-range part, the CPU is an APU with integrated graphics that was not designed for maximum gaming performance, and the pairing produces a system that is adequate for 1080p and playable at 1440p, but struggles at 4K. The rank of 1167 suggests that there are 628 combos that perform worse, which is a significant portion of the tested population, but it also means that the majority of systems with dedicated high-end GPUs or newer architectures will outperform this combo. The data indicates that this combination is best suited for users who already own the Ryzen 7 5700G for productivity tasks and want a discrete GPU that can handle flight simulation at moderate settings, rather than for users building a dedicated high-end simulator rig.

Within the context of the CPU’s own benchmark performance, the Ryzen 7 5700G scores in the 83rd percentile of all CPUs with an average benchmark score of 25626, and its nearest rivals include the AMD Ryzen 7 6800U (25706, deltaPct -0.3) and the Intel Xeon D-2752TER (25532, deltaPct 0.4). This means that the processor is not the primary reason for the low combo ranking; instead, the RX 6650 XT’s 72nd percentile GPU score (29024) is the limiting factor for high-resolution play. The combo rank of 1167 out of 1795 indicates that users should not expect this system to handle Ultra settings at 4K, but the measured data shows that Medium at 1440p (62.9 FPS) and High at 1080p (61.5 FPS) are both viable configurations that deliver a smooth simulation experience. The ranking also implies that upgrading either component would yield significant improvements: replacing the GPU with a higher-tier card would push the system into the top quartile for 4K, while upgrading the CPU would help maintain higher frame rates at 1080p where the processor is currently the bottleneck.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 7 5700G is an 8-core, 16-thread processor based on the Zen 3 architecture, with a base clock of 3.80 GHz and a boost clock of 4.60 GHz. Its 16 MB of L3 cache and 512 KB of L2 cache per core provide adequate data locality for the flight simulator’s complex scene graphs, but the processor’s 65 W TDP and integrated Radeon Vega 8 graphics indicate that it was designed as a balanced APU rather than a high-end gaming CPU. In Microsoft Flight Simulator, the CPU’s role is most apparent at 1080p, where the frame rates at Low (104.3 FPS) and Medium (82.5 FPS) are significantly higher than at 4K (60 FPS and 45.9 FPS respectively), suggesting that the processor can generate enough draw calls to feed the GPU at lower resolutions. The CPU’s multi-threaded performance is strong, as evidenced by its Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 20755 and 3DMark max-threads score of 6627, but the single-threaded score of 899 in 3DMark single-thread indicates that the processor’s single-core performance is only average, which is critical for a game that relies heavily on a main simulation thread.

The benchmark results show that the Ryzen 7 5700G’s nearest rivals in terms of average score are all mobile or low-power processors, such as the AMD Ryzen 7 6800U (25706, deltaPct -0.3) and the AMD Ryzen 5 7640U (25485, deltaPct 0.6), which suggests that the desktop APU trades blows with laptop chips in synthetic tests. However, in Microsoft Flight Simulator, the CPU’s 16 threads are utilized for terrain loading, AI traffic simulation, and weather physics, and the measured FPS at 1080p High (61.5 FPS) indicates that the processor can maintain a playable frame rate even when the GPU is not the bottleneck. The 3.80 GHz base clock and 4.60 GHz boost clock provide a 21% boost headroom, which is sufficient for the game’s bursty workload, but the processor’s lack of PCIe Gen 4 support (it uses Gen 3) means that the RX 6650 XT operates at a reduced bandwidth compared to systems with newer CPUs. This is unlikely to impact the measured results significantly, as the game’s asset streaming is primarily bound by storage and memory bandwidth, but it is a factor to consider when evaluating the combo’s overall performance ceiling. The CPU’s 51.2 GB/s memory bandwidth on dual-channel DDR4 is adequate for feeding the GPU’s frame buffer, but the 180 mm² die size and 10,700 million transistors suggest that the processor’s thermal and power headroom are limited, which could lead to clock throttling during extended simulation sessions.