Microsoft Flight Simulator

The Microsoft Flight Simulator dataset pairs a 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D with the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT. Measured FPS were taken at four settings (Low, Medium, High, Ultra) and three resolutions (1920x1080, 2560x1440, 3840x2160). Twelve data points are available, with only Medium settings recording minimum and maximum values. The combination holds the 1156th position out of 3714 tested combos, and all results are marked as measured rather than estimated.

Settings Recommendations

For players seeking a smooth experience across all resolutions, Medium preset is the safest choice. At 3840x2160 Medium produces an average FPS of 71 with a recorded minimum of 60 and maximum of 81. That is the only preset at 4K that maintains a frame rate at or above the 60 fps threshold in the data, while High averages 53 fps and Ultra averages 51 fps. Low at 4K scores 91 fps, but the missing min/max columns suggest that preset might not be representative of typical flight conditions, and the visual quality is far below the intended experience for a simulation.

Stepping down to 2560x1440, Medium delivers 96 fps average with a min of 82 and max of 110. High yields 72 fps and Ultra 69 fps, both without reported extremes. Low reaches 123 fps, but again no min or max values are present. At 1920x1080, Medium produces 119 fps average, 101 min, 137 max. High and Ultra report 90 and 85 fps respectively, while Low hits 153 fps.

The Medium preset consistently outperforms High and Ultra across all three resolutions, and it is the only preset where the minimum FPS data exists, indicating a more predictable frame pacing estimate. The gap between Medium and High is substantial: 119 vs 90 at 1080p, 96 vs 72 at 1440p, and 71 vs 53 at 4K. The GPU headroom at Medium allows more consistent rendering, which is crucial for a flight simulator where camera pans and frequent terrain loading can cause sudden dips.

Given that the game includes a mix of cockpit views, dense scenery, and dynamic weather, the Medium preset appears to strike the best balance between visual fidelity and fluidity. The measured results indicate that the RX 6800 XT is capable of handling the title at this class of presets without compromising too much on detail. For users with a variable refresh rate monitor, Medium affords enough headroom to avoid large frame-time spikes, as evidenced by the minimum values.

FAQ

Q: What is the average FPS in Microsoft Flight Simulator at 3840x2160 with the Medium preset?

A: The measured average FPS is 71, with a minimum of 60 and a maximum of 81.

Q: How many cores and threads does the Ryzen 9 9950X3D have?

A: It has 16 cores and 32 threads.

Q: What is the boost clock of the RX 6800 XT?

A: The boost clock is 2250 MHz.

Q: How does this CPU compare to its closest rival in the benchmark ranking?

A: The Ryzen 9 9950X3D has an average benchmark score of 75779, while the nearest rival AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 9755 scores 75738, a delta of 0.1%.

Q: Is there any preset at 4K that maintains at least 60 fps on average?

A: Only the Medium preset shows a minimum of 60 fps and an average of 71 fps at that resolution.

Q: What is the rank of this CPU+GPU combination among all tested combos?

A: It ranks 1156 out of 3714 combos.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is a RDNA 2.0 part with 4608 shading units, 288 texture mapping units, 128 ROPs, and 72 ray tracing cores. The architecture is fabricated on a 7 nm process, containing 26,800 million transistors on a 520 mm² die. Its memory subsystem uses 16 GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus, delivering 512.0 GB/s of bandwidth. The pixel fill rate is 288.0 GPixel/s and texture rate is 648.0 GTexel/s, while the FP32 performance is 20.74 TFLOPS.

The clock profile lists a base of 1825 MHz, a boost of 2250 MHz, and a game clock of 2015 MHz for the GPU. In synthetic benchmarks, it scores 48477 average, as percentile against all GPUs of 85% – placing it in the upper quartile. Its closest rivals in the GPU benchmark list are the NVIDIA RTX A1000 Mobile (avg speed 47743, delta +1.5%), the Intel Arc A550M (49737, delta -2.5%), the RTX 5070 Ti (49957, delta -3%), and the AMD RX Vega 64 (50001, delta -3%).

In this game, the 16 GB frame buffer prevents any concerns about texture memory exhaustion at 4K Ultra settings. The large bandwidth supports streaming of high-resolution terrain, and the high ROP count ties to the ability to fill pixels at the rates measured in the FPS table. The GPU's peak fill rates manifest as a 90 FPS average at 1080p High, only falling to 53 FPS under the stress of 4K.

• The card’s 300W TDP and dual 8-pin connectors reflect its responsiveness to heavy load. However, the data shows that the GPU at Medium settings is often the main performance driver, as the frame rate scales down when resolution increases, a sign of pixel throughput becoming the limiting component.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 3840x2160 (4K), we observe the following averages:

• Low: 91 FPS (no min/max)
• Medium: 71 FPS (min 60, max 81)
• High: 53 FPS
• Ultra: 51 FPS

At 2560x1440, the averages are:

• Low: 123 FPS
• Medium: 96 FPS (min 82, max 110)
• High: 72 FPS
• Ultra: 69 FPS

At 1920x1080, the averages are:

• Low: 153 FPS
• Medium: 119 FPS (min 101, max 137)
• High: 90 FPS
• Ultra: 85 FPS

Turning to the low preset, the 1080p Lare Ultra 153, 1440p 123, and 4K 91. The Medium preset remains the most stable, with the only min/max readings across all resolutions. At 4K, the Medium preset has a 60 frame minimum, meaning that the game never dips below a full 60 FPS in that config. At 1440p the floor climbs to 82, and at 1080p the floor is 101. The High and Ultra presets do not have recorded min/max data, so their average FPS values cannot be scrutinized for variability. As such, the median between High and Ultra is less than Medium in all cases, yet the missing min values leave the reliability of these settings unquantified.

When the entire resolution list is considered, the CPU does appear to shift from a GPU-bound to a CPU-bound situation at low settings and lower resolutions. At 1080p Low, with 153 FPS, the GPU core clocks and CPU frequency likely reach high utilization. At 4K Low, the 91 FPS suggests the GPU is no longer the bottleneck, since the pixel workload is huge. The raw 512.0GB/s memory bandwidth and 4608 shading cores appear capable of sustaining near-triple-digit rates even at the highest resolution.

Resolution Scaling

From 1920x1080 to 3840x2160, the pixel count doubles beyond a factor of four, while the FPS decreases across all presets. This combination of resolutions leads to a clear trend: the higher the render resolution, the heavier the GPU load, resulting in a steady drop in average frame rate. The 1440p midpoint yields values roughly 75% of the 1080p values for High, Medium, and Ultra. For High, the 90 drops to 72 and then 53 when moving to 4K. Medium goes from 119 to 96 to 71. Low has 153 to 123 to 49? Actually 153 to 123 to 91. That is a consistent pattern, indicating that the pixel pipeline is indeed the limiting factor at any of these preset.

The significant point is that the CPU is not preventing the FPS from rising at lower resolutions. The 1080p High (90) and the 4K High (53) show a difference of 37 FPS, but we cannot quantify the delta without inventing numbers. What we can say is that the pattern confirms the GPU is the main ingredient. The fact that a single-core CPU would likely throttle at 1080p. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D has a single-core 3DMark score of 1292 and a 2-thread score of 2549, indicating robust per-core speed, but at the highest resolutions, such performance is far above the GPU’s capacity. When running 4K, the GPU renderers have to push 8.3 million pixels per frame, and the RX 6800 XT’s fill rate is 288.0 GPixel/s, meaning a theoretical maximum of 1.8ms per plane.

Therefore, we can interpret that at 4K, the CPU is rarely challenged, and the distance between Low and Medium presets at that resolution (91 vs 71 FPS) comes almost entirely from GPU shader job. In contrast, at 1080p, the 19 FPS gap between Medium and High (119 vs 90) suggests the CPU plus the GPU combine to influence the outcome, but no specific CPU metric can be isolated from the measured numbers.

CPU Role

The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D is built on the Zen 5 architecture (Granite Ridge), with 16 cores and 32 threads spread across two chiplets on a 4 nm process. It has 16 TB of L2 cache, 128 MB L3 cache, and a base clock of 4.30 GHz paired with a boost of 5.70 GHz. The CPU supports DDR5 memory (dual channel, 89.6 GB/s) and is placed in the desktop segment with a TDP of 170W.

In raw CPU performance, the 9950X3D achieves a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 42018 and a single-core of 2258. Geekbench single-core is 3064 and multi-core 26736. The 3DMark single-thread test scores 1292, and the 1-thread test 2549. A Passmark single-score of 4737 and a multithread of 70255 further confirm its capability.

In Flight Simulator, the CPU carries global tasks: ground traffic, air traffic, weather physics, building and tree culling, and the flight model calculations. The low-resolution performance at 23clue suggests that the engine can utilize the strong up to 5.7 GHz arrival by single-core threads, yet the highest measured 153 FPS at 1080p likely sculpted by the multithreaded performance. The L3 cache of 128 MB is an ally when loading large zones of detail, as the data of multiple terrain tiles can be kept close to the dies.

The benchmark data of the 9950X3D shows a percentile rank of 95 versus all CPUs, and its average benchmark score of 75779 slightly outmatches the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 9750 by 0.1%, the Ryzen 7 PRO 9750X3D by 0.1%, the EPYC 8224P by 0.3%, and the Core Ultra 4 285 by 0.4%. This edge is more visible in lightly-threaded responsiveness, which is probably important for flight simulator’s near-real-time rendering pipeline. But the data does not allow us to split the CPU’s contribution, so we only can state that the CPU receives a strong synthetic profile and the measured FPS data is consistent with typical bottleneck scaling.

How This Combo Ranks

The combo rank for this specific CPU–GPU pair is 1156 out of 3714 total tested combinations. That places it above the median, roughly in the 68th percentile (since 1156/3714 ≈ 0.31, the lower rank, the higher the area above? Actually rank 1156 means 1154 combos are better, 2556 are worse, so it is roughly in the top 31% of the tested configs). Thus the Ryzen 9 9950X3D + RX 6800 XT pairing holds a position inside the first third of the leaderboard, but it does not belong to the very top echelon. The GPU percentile is 85, meaning it is beaten by about 15% of higher-level cards, and the CPU percentile is 95, meaning it is underneath the top 5%.

Given the 1156 spot, the system balanced enough to support the solid framerates seen at 1440p and 4K UHD. The strong CPU does not hold back the GPU at 1080p, as shown by the 153 average FPS at low settings. On the other opposite side, the 35 FPS at 4K Ultra is not competitive with the leading combos, but it is still playable for those who value fidelity over hitting triple digit frames. This rank suggests the mix fits for users who prioritize high resolutions with stable Medium/High settings, rather than those chasing the absolute highest scores on the benchmark list.

The choice of the RX 6800 XT is clearly the driving factor at 4K, since the CPU is among the fastest mainstream processors. If the CPU were weaker, the FPS at 1080p low settings would be unlikely to reach 153; that value proves that the 3DMark single-thread score of 1292 and boost clock of 5.70. Most combos ranked higher would probably include a higher-end GPU or a more powerful Nvidia card, but with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, it aggregates to a very capable combination for flight simulation. The existing measured data provides a useful reference point for users who are considering this exact pairing.