Is Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 the new Crysis?

In terms of graphics and tech of course I don't see anybody else on PC pushing graphics this hard not counting VR what do you think ? I'm not into flight sims at all but damn this game looks amazing graphically.

Not really. It's one thing to render photorealistic static maps viewed from afar. It's quite another to render complex objects, rig them for physics simulation, and animate them for close-up viewing.

It looks impressive for sure, but I don't think it's as hardware-intensive as it looks.

I think yeah it is, the graphic quality is amazing. Hope so, for 2 petabytes of images. Guessing always online then.

I think op is comparing the graphics not how intensive it is on the hardware.

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Flight Simulator will feature Asobo's in-house developed game engine, and leverage Bing Maps data, accessing over two petabytes of data from the cloud on demand.^[1]AzureAI analyzes map data and photogrammetry to generate photorealistic 3D models of buildings, trees, terrain, and so on. This allows the simulator to depict most parts of the world in 3D photo-realism, and other parts in high definition.^[2]

There will also be realistic physics and weather systems, and utilization of real-world weather data. An example used at E3 2019 was that if it was raining somewhere in real life, it would be raining in-game. Individual clouds will have their own behaviors and they will impact aircraft performance depending on its location within the system.^[3] Asobo has created their own flight model engine, allowing thousands of surfaces and 3D forces and moments to be fully simulated.^[1]

Flight Simulator will populate roads with vehicles, water will flow realistically based on wind direction, grass will have individual grass blades and trees will have individual leaves, creating the illusion of a living world It will feature over two million cities and towns and more than 40,000 real-world airports

If you were to point at a "next gen game", this would be it.

Most contemporary flight-sims are intensive on computers when not scaled back.

Even putting graphics aside, what they're pulling off is very impressive.

I give zero shits about flight sims, but still interested in checking it out at some point.

I can't wait!

@warmblur: I am looking forward to this game a lot.

Will it support VR? I hope it does, sims are made for VR even if they don't know it yet haha

I just hope to god they support mods with this game; would love to see the community come up with planes, places, and so on. History is filled with all kinds of cool, whacky, effective, and failed aircraft that are just too cool to ignore.

If this game is as true to its word as it says, the first thing I'm going to do is take off from my local airfield and fly to the municipal airport near my folks place haha. Then I might fly down to where I went to school.aaaaaaa

Yeah I think the big thing will be good-looking textures and rendering detail at distance, that might make it stand out from other flight sims.

But yeah if you're essentially just flying over what is more or less a static image with little to no AI, it doesn't seem all that demanding.

With that said, I feel this game will be impressive without pushing the limits of hardware; while it's nice to look at eye candy that makes your processors so hot you can fry an egg on them, imo it's even more impressive to make a really amazing looking game that feels alive, but also is insanely optimized and not demanding. I imagine that is more challenging to do as well.

It looks great but its a flight simulator. That shit is boring as hell.

Crysis was heavy on the cpu & gpu. That game had uncompressed teztures that made most cpu & gpus pushed to the limits. Flight sim(from what i know) was and always been heavy on the cpu. Prob to render at its max one might need a threadripper or i9 or prob one of those xeon cpus

Its a flight simulation. not a video game. no one going to play it unless one want to become a pilot.

Crysis of this gen is Metro Exodus.

in many ways, yes. it is. They really introduced tons of groundbreaking tech.

@ghosts4ever: Have you played Sam's story yet?

not yet. will do.

It's a lot more like Exodus than the more linear the Two Colonels was.

I don't know, it looks like nothing else but to be the new Crisis it had to be a terribly optimized game.

It's jaw dropping, and when I saw traffic actually moving it blew my mind. But you know, it's a MS game so if you wanna be one of the cool dudes you have to say it look just OK.

Edit: I want to eat space cake and play it.

It is impressive and I look forward to playing it. However, like @madrocketeer said, it is not going to be as demanding as you think. It will not be pushing hardware like Crysis did.

In the process of saving up for a new rig just so I can play this at max on release. Game looks too good to be true.

Gonna be soooo saweeet.. Xsex FTW. :P

It's way more taxing on the consumer grade computers hence the reason it will be streaming it from the cloud. All in all, it's a very impressive piece of technology and easily up there. It's not 'pure' graphics but the actual technology is something that haven't been done before.

On topic, this and Star Citizen. The rest of the games are nothing but small increments.

People still pushing the myth of Crysis being un-optimized? What year is this, 2007?

Man I can't wait to play this in VR

@pc_rocks: I'll correct my self; It was a game ahead of its time and when finally the hardware catched up with the software THEN the game unleashed all its potential and looked outdated.

Oh noes PC boi gonna cry.

Crysis was demanding, not unoptimized. Small difference, but a difference none the less.

It actually still looks pretty good, have you played it recently? Plus there are mods for it, you can turn it up to 11.

It's coming out for Xbox too? That's good news!

@mrbojangles25: I know it looks good but also dated.

Looks nice.

I mean, all we had to really compare it to is XPlane 11, and Flight Simulator shits all over it.

As far as what can be done with the genre, FS looks like the real deal so far.

Easily the most photorealistic game out there.

Who cares? It's a flight sim. It'll look great for aeronautic fanatics but sitting in a virtual plane for hours as the world ever so slowly goes by is not fun for the majority of gamers so the graphical effects aren't going to replace most any other game. Now I'm sure if something like Just Cause 5 had all of these graphical features included it would have a lot more relevance.

Crysis looked outdated when hardware caught up? Ummm...what? Are we living in the same reality? There was no game on par with it technically until its sequel came out and consolites had to wait 2 years on top of that. Hell, it still looks great today.

Why would I cry? Correcting the misinformation is not called crying. Oh and it was future proofed not ahead of its time. There's a difference. No one forced anyone to play at its highest preset. It blows all the games of the time even on medium.

That game is beyond impressive. I'm not a huge fan of flight sims, but may check it out at some point when it is on sale just to play around with it.

The question is if the flight and physics modeling are up to xplane's standards (FAA approved for pilot training), if not then I don't feel like this is going to have any staying power.

Also I'm pretty sure that xplane footage is with settings turned down, you can even tell it's low resolution.

It is unoptimized.

Dropping below 60FPS on a i9 9900K and 2080Ti is laughably bad optimization, but they decided to code for 2 cores and expecting the future to deliver 10ghz CPU's.

On top of this, Crysis does not look that great anymore. It was a very mediocre game at best also.

You cannot not use todays tech and say it's unoptimized. Back in 2007, people really only had dual cores, some did quad core but that's it. No wonder they decided to only code for dual cores. That just makes sense at the time.

Meanwhile I'll be playing FF7 Remake, Last of Us 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Nioh 2, and many many more games.

Digital Foundry did a video a week or two back on Crysis with the highest end hardware at the time of its release with modern performance measuring tools. An 8800GT and a Intel Q6600 couldn't play Crysis at 1182x665 at max settings at 30fps even at high settings it would drops into the 17-20 fps range when a lot was going on. A modern equivalent be Star Citizen running at 1440p sub 60 fps on a RTX 2080 ti. If the highest end hardware that came out a month before it's release not even being able to play the game maxed out at 720p It's no wonder people said it was unoptimized and the phrase "But can it run Crysis?" was born. I believe Crysis wasn't optimized to utilize multi-core/multi-threaded CPUs either which is why the game runs bad on even today's high end hardware because you need one really fast CPU core/thread to compensate for it. Being a single threaded designed game screwed it over. Digital Foundry did say that in Crytek's defense they were pioneers for a lot of the tech used in that game hence why Crysis has aged so well and has beaten high end games that came out after it for years. The only games I can remember that beat or rivaled Crysis in graphics that generation without mods was Shattered Horizon, Battlefield 3, STALKER: Call Of Pripyat, Metro 2033 & Last Light, The Witcher 2 and of course Crysis 3.

Is there some reason we wouldn't be able to play those as well?

@uninspiredcup: He just want people to know he only owns a PS.

Well 2 out of the 4 games you will be more like watching lol.

Why are you so jelly over a shitty flight simulator???

what if it was car simulator?

Yeah no kidding. Not here to shit on Microsoft Flight Simulator, glad to see we have fans of it in SW but I'm not into Flight sims myself unless its sci-fi space ships, than I can work with that at least. I'm not in it for the top-of-the-line graphics, it's impressive for sure but not my type of game to play.

And you're point is? Last I check, you have a PC right? So I failed to understand this logic you are trying to pull.

It wasn't designed to run at 4K and the example you provided is not relevant to optimization. Learn the difference between demanding/future proof vs un-optimized.

You specifically mentioned the core count limit. The game was made in a time when performance was still widely expected to come in a form of higher clocks.

But when the reality kicked in, the same team designed CE 3 - the first engine to support 8 cores/threads.

What if it was a brain simulator you'd be shit out of luck :)

They're doing a pretty big overhaul of the physics engine. 6:33 is relevant part, for some reason timestamping isn't working.

Yes, so now it is unoptimised, is this hard to understand?

The volumetric clouds in MS Flight Simulator are amazing! Reminds me of RDR 2.

Nope, it isn't. Unoptimized means technical defect or bad engineering. It was demanding and was exactly as it was intended.

It went completely over your head.