Microsoft Flight Simulator

Microsoft Flight Simulator running on the Intel Core Ultra X9 388H paired with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Mobile is a measured-data combination ranked 815th out of 3714 hardware pairings for this title — a mid-upper placement that reflects a real-world limitation: this 2020 flight simulator is one of the most demanding CPU-bound titles in the database, and even a high-percentile mobile pairing can't fully escape that. The RTX 4090 Mobile sits in the 84th percentile of all GPUs, and the Core Ultra X9 388H in the 88th percentile of all CPUs, so neither component is the weak link in isolation. The data shows where the friction comes from, and this page walks through settings choices, resolution scaling, and the exact measured frame rates at every tier.

FAQ

Q: Can this pairing run Microsoft Flight Simulator at 4K?

A: Yes. The measured data shows 58 FPS average at 3840x2160 on High, 77 FPS on Medium (with a minimum of 65 and a maximum of 88), and 55 FPS even on Ultra. Dropping to Low at 4K raises the average to 98 FPS. So 4K is fully playable — the question is only which preset you're willing to accept.

Q: Which settings preset should I actually use at 1440p?

A: Medium is the sweet spot. It measures 104 FPS average at 2560x1440, with a minimum of 88 — enough headroom to stay smooth during scenery-heavy moments. High still delivers 78 FPS, and Ultra 74 FPS, so the gap between High and Ultra is small enough that Ultra is a reasonable choice if you want maximum detail.

Q: How does the CPU compare to rival processors?

A: The Core Ultra X9 388H posts an average benchmark score of 44466, landing it in the 88th percentile. Its nearest rivals are extremely close: the AMD Ryzen 5 7500X3D averages 44573 (just 0.2% higher), the Intel Core i9-13950HX averages 44342 (0.3% lower), the AMD Ryzen AI Max 385 averages 44309 (0.4% lower), and the Intel Core i5-13600 averages 44240 (0.5% lower). All four sit within half a percent of each other, so CPU-side differences between these chips in this game will be marginal.

Q: Is the 16 GB of GPU memory enough for this game?

A: For the resolutions tested here, the data indicates yes. The measured results are stable across 1080p, 1440p, and 4K, and the RTX 4090 Mobile's 16 GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus with 576 GB/s of bandwidth is well above what the tested presets demand.

Q: How strong is the GPU in absolute terms?

A: The RTX 4090 Mobile scores 27212 in PassMark G3D, 180831 in Geekbench OpenCL, and 170774 in Geekbench Vulkan. Its nearest rivals — the Quadro M6000, RTX 5050 Mobile, Quadro M6000 24 GB, and RTX A6000 — all sit within roughly one percent of its average score of 43667. That's a top-tier mobile GPU.

Q: What frame rate should I expect at 1080p on Ultra?

A: The measured average is 92 FPS at 1920x1080 on Ultra. On High it rises to 97 FPS, and on Low it reaches 166 FPS.

Settings Recommendations

The measured rows make the preset hierarchy clear at every resolution, and the pattern is consistent: Low, Medium, High, Ultra form a tight, predictable ladder with no cliff edges anywhere.

At 1920x1080, the ladder runs 166, 129, 97, and 92 FPS from Low through Ultra. Look closely at the top of that ladder. High to Ultra costs only 5 FPS — from 97 down to 92. That is a trivial trade for maximum visual fidelity, and it means 1080p Ultra is the obvious recommendation for this pairing. There is no reason to sit at High when Ultra is nearly free at this resolution.

At 2560x1440, the ladder is 133, 104, 78, and 74 FPS. Again the High-to-Ultra gap is small — 4 FPS — so Ultra at 1440p is also defensible at 74 FPS average. But the Medium row carries the most useful data point in the entire dataset: a minimum of 88 FPS alongside a 104 FPS average and a 119 FPS maximum. That minimum figure matters in a flight simulator, where momentary dips over dense urban scenery are what you actually feel. A preset that never drops below 88 FPS is the one that feels smooth in practice, so Medium at 1440p is the recommendation for pilots who prioritize consistency over eye candy. If you'd rather have the detail, 74 FPS at Ultra is still comfortable.

At 3840x2160, the ladder is 98, 77, 58, and 55 FPS. The Medium row at 4K shows a minimum of 65 with an average of 77 and a maximum of 88 — a tight spread that indicates stable frame delivery. High at 58 FPS average is borderline for a simulator; it's playable, but the headroom is thin. Medium at 4K is the practical choice, pairing resolution sharpness with a floor above 60.

The short version: 1080p Ultra, 1440p Medium for smoothness or Ultra for detail, 4K Medium. Avoid 4K High as a compromise — it sits in an awkward middle where you've paid most of Ultra's performance cost for slightly fewer frames than Medium guarantees.

Resolution Scaling

Comparing the Ultra column across resolutions tells the clearest story: 92 FPS at 1080p, 74 FPS at 1440p, and 55 FPS at 4K. That's a drop of roughly 20% moving from 1080p to 1440p, and roughly 40% from 1080p to 4K.

Interpret that carefully. In a purely GPU-bound game, quadrupling the pixel count from 1080p to 4K would typically cost far more than 40% of the frame rate. A drop of this magnitude — where 4K still delivers 55 FPS at Ultra and 98 FPS at Low — indicates the GPU is not the sole limiter. Microsoft Flight Simulator is famously CPU-heavy, and the data is consistent with that reputation: at 1080p Low the system reaches 166 FPS, but it cannot scale much beyond that even as the resolution stays fixed and settings climb. The frame rate ceiling imposed by the processor and game engine sits somewhere in that 160s region, and it caps everything below it.

Look at the Medium column for confirmation: 129, 104, and 77 FPS from 1080p through 4K. The gaps between resolutions are moderate and steady, which is what you see when a strong GPU — here, a 32.98 TFLOPS Ada Lovelace part with 9728 shading units — is being fed by a CPU that, while excellent, is a 25 W mobile part. The Core Ultra X9 388H boosts to 5.10 GHz and sits in the 88th percentile of all CPUs, but its TDP envelope is what a flight simulator's main-thread-heavy workload has to work within.

The practical takeaway: raising resolution in this game on this pairing costs less than you'd expect, because you were never fully GPU-limited to begin with. Playing at 4K Medium (77 FPS) instead of 1080p Ultra (92 FPS) trades 15 FPS for four times the pixels — a trade most pilots would take instantly.

Measured FPS Breakdown

All figures below are measured averages from the dataset; minimum and maximum values are included where recorded.

1920x1080:

• Low: 166 FPS average
• Medium: 129 FPS average (min 109, max 148)
• High: 97 FPS average
• Ultra: 92 FPS average

2560x1440:

• Low: 133 FPS average
• Medium: 104 FPS average (min 88, max 119)
• High: 78 FPS average
• Ultra: 74 FPS average

3840x2160:

• Low: 98 FPS average
• Medium: 77 FPS average (min 65, max 88)
• High: 58 FPS average
• Ultra: 55 FPS average

A few observations on the spread. The Medium preset is the only tier with recorded min/max data, and its spreads are tight at every resolution: 39 FPS at 1080p, 31 FPS at 1440p, and 23 FPS at 4K. Frame-time consistency actually improves as resolution rises, which is typical — higher pixel counts level out the variance between easy and demanding scenes.

The Low preset is notable for how little it drops from 1080p (166 FPS) to 4K (98 FPS). Losing only about 41% of the frame rate when multiplying pixels fourfold over confirms again that at Low settings the engine, not the GPU, is the ceiling. If Microsoft Flight Simulator ever adds support that lifts the engine bottleneck, this GPU has the headroom — its 515.3 GTexel/s texture rate and 189.8 GPixel/s pixel rate are nowhere near saturated at 98 FPS 4K Low.

Across all twelve measured rows, the range runs from 55 FPS (4K Ultra) to 166 FPS (1080p Low). Every single configuration measured lands at or above 55 FPS average, which means no tested combination is unplayable. This pairing ranks 815th of 3714 combos in this game — respectable, not elite — and the numbers explain why: it delivers consistent, high-frame-rate gameplay at every common resolution, but its 1080p ceiling is defined by the CPU rather than the RTX 4090 Mobile's considerable rendering capability.

GPU Role

The RTX 4090 Mobile is built on the AD103 chip, fabricated by TSMC on a 5 nm process, packing 45,900 million transistors into a 379 mm² die — a density of 121.1 million transistors per square millimeter. It's a flagship-class mobile part: 9728 shading units, 304 TMUs, 112 ROPs, 76 RT cores, and 304 tensor cores, all within a 120 W TDP.

Clocks are where mobile constraints show. The card runs a 1335 MHz base and a 1695 MHz boost — modest figures compared to what the same silicon could do in a desktop envelope — and the memory runs at 2250 MHz, 18 Gbps effective. That memory subsystem matters for this game: 16 GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus delivers 576 GB/s of bandwidth, which is what keeps frame pacing steady when streaming the simulator's massive photogrammetry scenery datasets. The tight Medium-preset min/max spreads in the measured data are consistent with a memory subsystem that never becomes the choke point.

In benchmark terms, the GPU posts 180831 in Geekbench OpenCL, 170774 in Geekbench Vulkan, 27212 in PassMark G3D, and 12347 in PassMark GPU Compute. Its average score of 43667 places it in the 84th percentile of all GPUs. The nearest rivals cluster within a percent: the Quadro M6000 at 43301 (0.8% behind), the RTX 5050 Mobile at 43268 (0.9% behind), the Quadro M6000 24 GB at 43262 (0.9% behind), and the RTX A6000 at 44075 (0.9% ahead). The takeaways: this GPU trades blows with workstation-class cards, and users of any of those rival GPUs should expect essentially identical Flight Simulator behavior.

For this game specifically, the GPU's role is to be the non-problem. Microsoft Flight Simulator leans on DirectX 12 Ultimate features, and the card supports DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2), OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.4 — full modern API coverage. The FP32 throughput of 32.98 TFLOPS is more than the game's tested presets demand, which is precisely why resolution scaling is so gentle. The GPU is waiting on the engine more often than the engine is waiting on it.

CPU Role

The Core Ultra X9 388H is a Panther Lake-H mobile processor from Intel's Core Ultra Series 3, built on Intel's own 3 nm process. It carries 16 cores and 16 threads — no hyperthreading-style doubling — with a 2.10 GHz base clock and a 5.10 GHz boost clock, inside a 25 W TDP on the Intel BGA 2540 socket. Cache allocation is generous: 192 KB of L1 per core, 3 MB of L2 per core, and an 18 MB shared L3. Memory support is dual-channel LPDDR5X with 153.6 GB/s of bandwidth, and the platform exposes PCIe Gen 5 with 4 lanes from the CPU. The multiplier is locked, so tuning headroom is not part of the equation.

Flight simulation is the genre where single-thread performance matters most, and the single-core numbers here are strong: 309.5 in Cinebench R15, 1849 in R20, and 2200.5 in R23. PassMark single-thread sits at 4280. Those figures, combined with the 5.10 GHz boost clock, are what let this pairing reach 166 FPS at 1080p Low — the simulator's main simulation thread is being fed as well as a mobile platform can feed it.

Multi-core results confirm the chip's overall standing: 2955 in R15, 13101 in R20, and 18911 in R23 multi-core, plus a PassMark multithread score of 36811. The average benchmark score of 44466 puts it in the 88th percentile of all CPUs, and the rival table shows a dead heat at the top — the Ryzen 5 7500X3D leads by 0.2%, while the i9-13950HX, Ryzen AI Max 385, and i5-13600 trail by 0.3%, 0.4%, and 0.5% respectively. Anyone choosing between these four processors for this game is choosing between statistical noise.

What the 25 W TDP means in practice is visible in the resolution scaling section: the frame rate ceiling at 1080p is set by this chip, not the GPU. A desktop-class processor would likely push that Low-setting ceiling higher; the Core Ultra X9 388H instead delivers its performance within a thin mobile power envelope, and the measured data shows it doing so without collapses — every recorded minimum stays above 60 FPS at Medium across all three resolutions. For a laptop pairing running the most CPU-intensive simulator in the database, that is the result that counts.