Microsoft Flight Simulator

# Microsoft Flight Simulator — Intel Core i5-13400F + AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT

The measured data for Microsoft Flight Simulator with the Intel Core i5-13400F and AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT reveals a system that scales predictably across resolutions, but with some notable behavior at the extremes. The combo ranks 612 out of 1795 tested configurations, placing it in the upper third of all pairings. Across all twelve measured data points, the frame rates range from a low of 47.5 FPS at 4K Ultra to a high of 149.7 FPS at 1080p Low, indicating a wide operational envelope depending on how the user configures the game.

Resolution Scaling

The FPS drop from 1080p to 4K is substantial, but not uniform across settings. At Low settings, the average frame rate falls from 149.7 FPS at 1080p to 120.2 FPS at 1440p, then to 91.1 FPS at 4K — a cumulative reduction of 58.6 FPS, or roughly 39% from the 1080p baseline. This scaling pattern suggests that at Low settings, the GPU remains the primary limiter even at lower resolutions, though the CPU's role becomes more apparent as resolution drops.

At High settings, the progression is steeper: 92.2 FPS at 1080p, 71.1 FPS at 1440p, and 54 FPS at 4K. The drop from 1080p to 1440p is 21.1 FPS (23%), while the drop from 1440p to 4K is 17.1 FPS (24%). This near-linear percentage decline across the two resolution steps indicates that the RX 6800 XT is being progressively more taxed as pixel count rises, with no sudden cliff that would suggest a CPU bottleneck emerging at 1080p.

The Ultra preset shows the most dramatic scaling: 84.8 FPS at 1080p, 70.4 FPS at 1440p, and 47.5 FPS at 4K. The 4K result is less than half of the 1080p figure, which is a larger relative drop than seen at High settings. This suggests that the Ultra preset introduces effects that disproportionately burden the GPU at higher resolutions, likely related to the RDNA 2.0 architecture's handling of complex shading workloads in this flight simulator.

Comparing the Medium preset reveals an interesting anomaly: 121.9 FPS at 1080p, 93.8 FPS at 1440p, and 67.7 FPS at 4K. The 1080p Medium result is 29.7 FPS higher than High at the same resolution, yet the gap between Medium and High narrows to 22.7 FPS at 1440p and only 13.7 FPS at 4K. This convergence indicates that the CPU, with its 10 cores and 16 threads, has less headroom to differentiate settings at lower resolutions, while the GPU becomes the overwhelming constraint at 4K.

Settings Recommendations

For users targeting 60 FPS as a baseline, the data shows that 4K Ultra falls short at 47.5 FPS, while 4K High achieves 54 FPS — still below 60. The only 4K setting that clears 60 FPS is Medium at 67.7 FPS, making it the practical choice for 4K displays if smoothness is prioritized over visual fidelity. At 1440p, High delivers 71.1 FPS, which comfortably exceeds 60 FPS, while Ultra trails at 70.4 FPS — a marginal difference of 0.7 FPS that suggests the Ultra preset's extra visual features come at nearly no measurable cost at this resolution.

The 1080p results reveal a different story. Ultra runs at 84.8 FPS, High at 92.2 FPS, and Medium at 121.9 FPS. For high-refresh-rate monitors, Medium at 1080p offers more than double the frame rate of 4K Ultra, making it the best experience per the measured rows for users who prioritize responsiveness over resolution. The Low preset at 1080p reaches 149.7 FPS, but the visual compromises in a flight simulator — where terrain detail and cockpit readability matter — make this less appealing than the 121.9 FPS Medium result.

The data implies that the sweet spot for this combination is 1440p High, which balances the 71.1 FPS average with the visual quality expected from a game of this genre. Users with 4K displays should accept Medium settings, as the jump to High costs 13.7 FPS but the jump to Ultra costs an additional 6.5 FPS, pushing the experience below the 50 FPS threshold.

CPU Role

The Intel Core i5-13400F brings 10 cores and 16 threads to this pairing, with a base clock of 2.50 GHz and a boost clock of 4.60 GHz. In synthetic benchmarks, the CPU scores 21279 in Cinebench R23 multicore and 3004 in single-core, with a Passmark multithread score of 25032. The 3DMark results show a significant scaling from 2 threads (1880) to 8 threads (5591), but only marginal gains beyond that: 16 threads scores 7314 versus 7307 at max threads. This indicates that the CPU's performance is nearly saturated by 16 threads, which aligns with the game's known behavior of benefiting from a handful of well-optimized threads.

The CPU's 82nd percentile ranking among all CPUs, with an average benchmark score of 25236, places it just 0.1% above the Intel Core i7-13620H and 0.5% below the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X3D. In the context of this flight simulator, the 1080p Low result of 149.7 FPS suggests that the CPU is not the limiting factor at the lowest settings — the GPU can still produce over 150 FPS, which is well beyond typical refresh rates. However, the fact that 1080p Ultra only reaches 84.8 FPS, while 4K Ultra drops to 47.5 FPS, implies that the CPU's 20 MB of shared L3 cache and Raptor Lake architecture provide enough headroom to feed the GPU at lower resolutions, but the GPU's workload dominates as resolution climbs.

The L3 cache of 20 MB shared across 10 cores is noteworthy for a flight simulator, which often involves streaming large terrain datasets. The 3DMark 16-thread score of 7314 versus 2-thread score of 1880 shows a 3.9x scaling from 2 to 16 threads, indicating that the CPU can effectively utilize its multi-threading capabilities when the game demands it, but the game's engine may not fully exploit all 16 threads simultaneously.

How This Combo Ranks

With a combo rank of 612 out of 1795 tested combinations, this pairing sits in the 34th percentile of all configurations. This ranking reflects that while each component is individually strong — the CPU at the 82nd percentile and the GPU at the 87th percentile — their combined performance in Microsoft Flight Simulator does not reach the top tier. The gap between component percentiles and combo rank suggests that the game's engine does not fully leverage the strengths of both parts simultaneously.

The GPU's nearest rivals provide context: the RX 6800 XT scores 49982 on average, which is 0.5% above the Intel Arc A550M, 1.7% below the NVIDIA RTX A1000, and 2.6% above the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER. This positioning means that in the broader GPU landscape, the RX 6800 XT is competitive with mid-to-high-range offerings, yet the combo rank of 612 indicates that many other pairings achieve better real-world results in this specific game.

The CPU's nearest rivals show a similar clustering: the i5-13400F is 0.1% above the i7-13620H, 0.5% below the Ryzen 5 5600X3D, and 0.5% above the EPYC 9474F. These tiny deltas suggest that the CPU's performance is tightly grouped with several other processors, meaning that the choice of GPU likely has a larger impact on the final combo rank than the CPU choice within this performance band.

FAQ

Q: Is this combination capable of 60 FPS at 4K?

A: No, the data shows that 4K High averages 54 FPS and 4K Ultra averages 47.5 FPS. Only 4K Medium at 67.7 FPS exceeds 60 FPS.

Q: What is the highest frame rate measured for this combo?

A: The highest measured frame rate is 149.7 FPS at 1080p with Low settings.

Q: How does the CPU compare to its nearest rival in synthetic benchmarks?

A: The i5-13400F has an average benchmark score of 25236, which is 0.1% higher than the Intel Core i7-13620H and 0.5% lower than the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X3D.

Q: What is the largest performance gap between settings at a single resolution?

A: At 1080p, the gap between Low (149.7 FPS) and Ultra (84.8 FPS) is 64.9 FPS, which is the largest absolute difference across all resolutions.

Q: Does the GPU outperform its direct competitor in the data?

A: The RX 6800 XT has an average benchmark score of 49982, which is 2.6% above the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER's score of 48704.

Q: How does the combo rank change if only looking at the percentile of each component?

A: The CPU is at the 82nd percentile and the GPU at the 87th percentile, but the combo ranks 612 out of 1795 (34th percentile), indicating that the game does not fully utilize both components' strengths together.

Measured FPS Breakdown

At 1920x1080, the measured average frame rates are: Low at 149.7 FPS, Medium at 121.9 FPS, High at 92.2 FPS, and Ultra at 84.8 FPS. The progression from Low to Medium is a drop of 27.8 FPS (18.6%), from Medium to High is 29.7 FPS (24.4%), and from High to Ultra is 7.4 FPS (8.0%). The small gap between High and Ultra at 1080p suggests that the Ultra preset's additional effects are relatively cheap at this resolution.

At 2560x1440, the results are: Low at 120.2 FPS, Medium at 93.8 FPS, High at 71.1 FPS, and Ultra at 70.4 FPS. The gap between High and Ultra narrows to just 0.7 FPS, making them virtually indistinguishable in performance. The drop from Low to Medium is 26.4 FPS (22%), and from Medium to High is 22.7 FPS (24.2%).

At 3840x2160, the results are: Low at 91.1 FPS, Medium at 67.7 FPS, High at 54 FPS, and Ultra at 47.5 FPS. The drop from Low to Medium is 23.4 FPS (25.7%), from Medium to High is 13.7 FPS (20.2%), and from High to Ultra is 6.5 FPS (12.0%). The diminishing absolute drops as settings increase indicate that the GPU is running out of headroom, with each additional setting level having less impact on the final frame rate.

GPU Role

The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, built on the RDNA 2.0 architecture with the Navi 21 chip, brings 16 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus, providing 512.0 GB/s of bandwidth. With a boost clock of 2250 MHz and a game clock of 2015 MHz, the GPU's 4608 shading units and 72 RT cores deliver 20.74 TFLOPS of FP32 performance. The 128 ROPS and 288 TMUs contribute to a pixel rate of 288.0 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 648.0 GTexel/s.

The GPU's 87th percentile ranking, with an average benchmark score of 49982, places it 1.7% below the NVIDIA RTX A1000 and 0.5% above the Intel Arc A550M. The 16 GB VRAM is ample for this flight simulator, which is known for loading large textures and terrain data, and the 512.0 GB/s bandwidth ensures that data can be fed to the GPU cores without stalling.

The measured FPS data reveals that the GPU's performance ceiling is most evident at 4K Ultra, where it produces 47.5 FPS. This is 46% lower than the 1080p Ultra result of 84.8 FPS, demonstrating a steep resolution penalty. The GPU's memory clock of 2000 MHz (16 Gbps effective) and the 256-bit bus width are sufficient for 1080p and 1440p gaming, but the 4K results suggest that the GPU's compute resources, rather than memory bandwidth, are the limiting factor at higher resolutions.

The DirectX 12 Ultimate support and Vulkan 1.4 API compatibility mean the GPU can utilize modern rendering paths, but the data shows that even with these features, the Ultra preset at 4K struggles to maintain playable frame rates. The GPU's nearest rival, the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER, scores 2.6% lower on average, yet this does not translate to a significantly better combo rank in this game, implying that both cards face similar bottlenecks when paired with the i5-13400F.