Microsoft Flight Simulator

# Resolution Scaling

The measured FPS data for Microsoft Flight Simulator with the Intel Core Ultra 5 135H and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 reveals a clear and consistent pattern: performance scales predictably with resolution, but the rate of scaling differs markedly between settings presets. At Low settings, the frame rate drops from 151 FPS at 1920x1080 to 122 FPS at 2560x1440, a reduction of 29 FPS, and then further to 90 FPS at 3840x2160, another 32 FPS drop. This represents a 40% overall reduction from 1080p to 4K at Low settings. In contrast, at Ultra settings, the drop is less steep in absolute terms: from 84 FPS at 1080p to 68 FPS at 1440p, and finally to 50 FPS at 4K, a total reduction of 34 FPS or approximately 40% as well.

The Medium settings curve shows the most complete data set with minimum and maximum FPS recorded at every resolution. At 1920x1080 Medium, the average is 118 FPS with a min of 100 and max of 135. Moving to 2560x1440 Medium, the average falls to 95 FPS, with min at 81 and max at 109. At 3840x2160 Medium, the average drops to 70 FPS, with min at 59 and max at 80. This Medium preset demonstrates a very consistent scaling pattern: each resolution step costs approximately 24-25 FPS on average, suggesting a balanced load between CPU and GPU at this setting level.

The High settings curve behaves similarly but with lower overall numbers. Starting at 88 FPS at 1080p, it drops to 71 FPS at 1440p, and then to 53 FPS at 4K. The scaling from 1080p to 1440p costs 17 FPS, while 1440p to 4K costs 18 FPS. This near-linear degradation across resolution steps indicates that neither the CPU nor the GPU is becoming the sole limiting factor at High settings; instead, both components are contributing to the performance ceiling in a roughly equal fashion.

What this resolution scaling data suggests about the limiting component is nuanced. At Low settings, the game is likely more CPU-bound, as evidenced by the fact that even at 4K, the system still manages 90 FPS, which is well above the 60 FPS threshold for smooth gameplay. The relatively smaller absolute FPS loss from 1080p to 4K at Low settings (61 FPS) compared to the percentage loss suggests that the CPU's 14 cores and 18 threads are keeping up with the game's simulation and physics demands even when pixel count rises. However, at Ultra settings, the GPU becomes more of a bottleneck, as the 4K average of 50 FPS falls below the 60 FPS target, indicating that the RTX 4080's 16 GB of VRAM and 9728 shading units are being pushed harder by the increased draw distances and texture detail.

The Medium preset's min FPS data provides additional insight into frame time consistency. The 59 FPS minimum at 4K Medium is remarkably close to the 60 FPS target, suggesting that even in demanding scenes, the system maintains acceptable performance. The 81 FPS minimum at 1440p Medium and 100 FPS minimum at 1080p Medium further reinforce this stability. This consistency is notable for a flight simulator, which must handle variable scenery density and weather effects that can cause sudden frame rate spikes in less optimized configurations.

# GPU Role

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 in this configuration brings substantial graphics horsepower to Microsoft Flight Simulator. Its 16 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 256-bit bus provides 716.8 GB/s of bandwidth, which is critical for a game that streams vast amounts of terrain and aircraft texture data. The GPU's 9728 shading units, 304 texture mapping units, and 112 raster output pipelines are backed by 76 ray tracing cores and 304 tensor cores, all operating on the Ada Lovelace architecture built on a 5 nm process by TSMC. The chip itself, designated AD103, contains 45,900 million transistors across a 379 mm² die, yielding a transistor density of 121.1M per mm².

Clock speeds are notably high, with a base clock of 2205 MHz and a boost clock of 2505 MHz. The memory operates at 1400 MHz with 22.4 Gbps effective data rate. These clocks directly influence the measured FPS results, particularly at higher settings where the GPU must sustain high fill rates. The pixel rate of 280.6 GPixel/s and texture rate of 761.5 GTexel/s are theoretical maxima that help explain why the GPU can handle 4K Ultra at 50 FPS average, a demanding workload for any graphics card.

In terms of its benchmark standing, the RTX 4080 achieves a percentile of 86 against all GPUs, with an average benchmark score of 54247. Its closest rival in the data is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER, which scores 54209, a delta of 0.1% — essentially identical performance. The AMD Radeon Pro W5700X scores 54828, which is 1.1% higher, while the AMD Radeon RX 6750 GRE 12 GB scores 55698, a 2.6% advantage. The AMD Radeon 8060S leads this group at 55757, 2.7% higher. These rival comparisons place the RTX 4080 in a competitive but not dominant position, which aligns with its measured FPS in this simulator.

The GPU's role in Microsoft Flight Simulator becomes clearer when examining the FPS differences between Low and Ultra settings at each resolution. At 1080p, the jump from Low (151 FPS) to Ultra (84 FPS) represents a 44% reduction, indicating that the GPU is heavily taxed by the Ultra preset's enhanced lighting, shadow, and terrain detail. At 1440p, the Low-to-Ultra gap is 54 FPS (122 to 68), and at 4K, it is 40 FPS (90 to 50). The narrowing absolute gap at higher resolutions is somewhat counterintuitive but reflects the fact that the CPU's simulation overhead becomes relatively more significant as pixel count increases, limiting how much the GPU can flex its capabilities.

The RTX 4080's 16 GB VRAM capacity is particularly relevant for this game, as Microsoft Flight Simulator is known for loading large texture packs for aircraft, airports, and photorealistic scenery. The measured FPS at 4K Ultra (50 FPS) suggests that the GPU's memory bandwidth and capacity are sufficient to avoid severe stuttering, though the average remains below the 60 FPS ideal. At 4K Medium, the 70 FPS average with a 59 FPS minimum indicates that even when VRAM usage is reduced, the GPU still delivers playable performance.

# CPU Role

The Intel Core Ultra 5 135H is a mobile processor from the Core Ultra Series 1, featuring 14 cores and 18 threads. This hybrid arrangement includes performance and efficiency cores, though the data does not specify the distribution. The base clock is 3.60 GHz with a boost clock of 4.60 GHz, both of which are relevant for a flight simulator that relies heavily on single-threaded performance for flight dynamics and weather simulation. The processor's 18 MB of shared L3 cache, 2 MB L2 cache per core, and 112 KB L1 cache per core provide a substantial cache hierarchy for storing frequently accessed simulation data.

The CPU's integrated graphics are Arc Xe-LPG 96EU, though in this benchmark configuration, the discrete RTX 4080 handles all rendering duties. The processor's memory support includes DDR5 with dual-channel configuration, providing 89.6 GB/s of memory bandwidth. This bandwidth is shared with the GPU for system memory accesses, but the RTX 4080's dedicated 716.8 GB/s VRAM bandwidth means the CPU's memory bandwidth is primarily used for game logic and asset streaming.

In synthetic benchmarks, the Core Ultra 5 135H demonstrates its multi-threaded capabilities. The Cinebench R23 multicore score of 11875.5 and single-core score of 1700 highlight a balanced design. Passmark multithread score of 22422 and single-thread score of 3521 further confirm this. The processor's percentile against all CPUs is 81, with an average benchmark score of 29093. Its nearest rivals include the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X (29123, -0.1% delta), Intel Xeon Phi 7210 (29245, -0.5%), AMD Ryzen 5 5600XT (28940, +0.5%), and Intel Core i5-13500HX (29270, -0.6%). These rivals are all within 0.6% of the Core Ultra 5 135H, indicating that this mobile chip competes well with desktop processors in general compute tasks.

For Microsoft Flight Simulator, the CPU's role is most evident at low resolutions and low settings where the GPU is less burdened. At 1080p Low, the system achieves 151 FPS, which reflects the CPU's ability to feed the GPU with enough frame data to reach such high rates. The 18 threads allow the game to parallelize various simulation tasks, including terrain loading, aircraft systems modeling, and AI traffic management. The 4.60 GHz boost clock ensures that single-threaded bottlenecks in the game's core loop are minimized.

However, the CPU's limitations become apparent when comparing its performance to what a more powerful desktop processor might achieve in the same game. The fact that at 4K Low, the system still hits 90 FPS suggests that the CPU is not severely limiting at that resolution, but the 40% drop from 1080p Low to 4K Low (151 to 90 FPS) indicates that the game's simulation workload scales with resolution in some capacity, possibly due to increased draw call counts for distant objects. The 14-core, 18-thread configuration provides sufficient headroom for the game's multi-threaded aspects, but the measured FPS at Ultra settings suggests that the CPU's single-thread performance (Cinebench R23 single-core of 1700) may hold back the RTX 4080 in scenes with heavy CPU-side computations.

# Measured FPS Breakdown

The complete measured FPS data for this combination in Microsoft Flight Simulator is as follows:

At 1920x1080, the Low preset delivers an average of 151 FPS, the highest of any configuration tested. Medium averages 118 FPS, with a minimum of 100 and maximum of 135, providing a wide performance envelope. High averages 88 FPS, while Ultra averages 84 FPS. The gap between High and Ultra at 1080p is only 4 FPS, suggesting diminishing returns from the Ultra preset at this resolution.

At 2560x1440, Low averages 122 FPS, a 29 FPS drop from 1080p. Medium averages 95 FPS, with min 81 and max 109. High averages 71 FPS, and Ultra averages 68 FPS. Again, the High-to-Ultra gap is minimal at 3 FPS, reinforcing the idea that Ultra's additional visual features do not significantly impact performance at 1440p.

At 3840x2160, Low averages 90 FPS, Medium averages 70 FPS (min 59, max 80), High averages 53 FPS, and Ultra averages 50 FPS. At 4K, the High-to-Ultra gap narrows to 3 FPS again, but all presets except Low fall below the 60 FPS threshold for smooth gameplay. The Medium preset's 59 FPS minimum is just barely below 60, indicating that even in the most demanding scenes, the system nearly maintains playable frame rates.

The data shows that the Medium preset offers the most consistent performance across resolutions, with the smallest relative drop from 1080p to 4K (48 FPS, or 41%). The Low preset drops 61 FPS (40%), High drops 35 FPS (40%), and Ultra drops 34 FPS (40%). This consistency across presets suggests that the performance scaling is driven primarily by resolution rather than settings, which is typical for a game where the simulation engine's workload is resolution-independent.

# How This Combo Ranks

In the database of tested combinations for Microsoft Flight Simulator, this specific pairing of the Intel Core Ultra 5 135H with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 ranks 917 out of 2996 tested combos. This places it in the 69th percentile of all configurations tested, meaning that roughly 31% of combos perform better. Given that the GPU is a high-end mobile part (RTX 4080) and the CPU is a mid-tier mobile processor (Core Ultra 5 135H), this ranking reflects a combination where the GPU's strengths are partially mitigated by the CPU's limitations in this simulation-heavy title.

The rank of 917 out of 2996 indicates that while this combo is above average, it is not among the top performers. The RTX 4080's 86th percentile GPU ranking and the Core Ultra 5 135H's 81st percentile CPU ranking would suggest a higher combo ranking if performance were purely additive, but Microsoft Flight Simulator's unique demands on CPU single-thread performance and GPU memory bandwidth mean that the combination underperforms relative to the sum of its parts. The 14-core CPU's Cinebench R23 single-core score of 1700 is respectable but not exceptional, and the game's reliance on this metric likely prevents the combo from cracking the top 500.

Comparatively, the combo's performance is consistent with what the nearest CPU rivals would suggest. The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, which is 0.1% faster in average CPU benchmark score, would likely produce similar FPS in this game when paired with the same GPU. The Intel Core i5-13500HX, 0.6% faster, might offer a marginal improvement in CPU-bound scenes. However, the GPU's nearest rivals — the RTX 4080 SUPER at 0.1% higher GPU score — would likely produce nearly identical FPS, as the delta is within measurement noise.

The 917th rank out of 2996 combos places this configuration in the upper third of all tested systems, which is a solid result for a mobile CPU paired with a desktop-class GPU. The data suggests that users seeking higher rankings would need a stronger CPU, such as one with higher single-thread performance, to better complement the RTX 4080's capabilities in this simulator.

# Settings Recommendations

Based on the measured FPS data, the optimal settings preset varies by target resolution. For users with a 1920x1080 display, the Medium preset at 118 FPS average (min 100, max 135) provides an excellent balance of visual quality and performance, well above the 60 FPS threshold. The High preset at 88 FPS is also viable, offering better visuals while still maintaining smooth frame rates. The Ultra preset at 84 FPS is only 4 FPS below High, so users who prioritize maximum visual fidelity can choose Ultra without significant performance penalties at 1080p.

At 2560x1440, the Medium preset at 95 FPS (min 81, max 109) is the recommended choice, as it provides a comfortable margin above 60 FPS with good visual quality. The High preset at 71 FPS is playable but leaves less headroom for demanding scenes, while the Ultra preset at 68 FPS is similarly borderline. The Low preset at 122 FPS is unnecessary given the Medium preset's strong performance.

At 3840x2160, the situation changes dramatically. The Medium preset at 70 FPS (min 59, max 80) is the only preset that averages above 60 FPS, though its 59 FPS minimum may cause occasional stutters in dense scenery. The Low preset at 90 FPS provides the smoothest 4K experience but sacrifices significant visual detail. The High preset at 53 FPS and Ultra at 50 FPS are below the 60 FPS target and are only recommended for users who prioritize visual fidelity over frame rate consistency.

Overall, the Medium preset emerges as the data-driven recommendation for most scenarios, offering the best balance of performance and visual quality across all three resolutions. The measured min/max FPS for Medium (100-135 at 1080p, 81-109 at 1440p, 59-80 at 4K) demonstrate the most consistent frame pacing, which is critical for a flight simulator where smooth camera panning and instrument readability depend on stable frame delivery. For users with variable refresh rate monitors, the High preset at 1440p (71 FPS) and Medium at 4K (70 FPS) both fall within typical 60-75 Hz VRR ranges, providing a more immersive experience without the visual compromises of Low settings.