In case someone has a similar setup, I’ll document my settings here which in my opinion result in a valid compromise between acceptable frame rates and visual quality.
My system is rather old, about 5 years now, with one exception: I recently bought a new graphics card, which is a 7800 XT. The specs of my PC are as follows:
- AMD Ryzen 3700X
- 32 GB DDR4
- 550W PSU
- Radeon RX 7800XT with 16 GB VRAM, with a little reduction in clock speed to keep power consumption within limits I and my PSU can live with (=<220 W)
- No VR, I use TrackIR
Despite being rather old, the Ryzen 3700X CPU still has more than enough power, it rarely exceeds 50% usage in FS2024, usually somewhere between 30 and 40%. And since FS2024 doesn’t use raytracing a lot, it didn’t hurt (me) to leave Team Green (had a RTX 2060 SUPER before) and join Red for a more reasonable pricing (still hurts, but less). NVIDIA’s gone nuts since the “rise of AI”. Unbearable.
By the way, I’m intentionally limiting FPS to 60, because for me that’s enough and the setting reduces the power consumption as well as heat generation of the card significantly.
My FS2024 settings are as follows:
- terrain LOD 100
- displacement mapping off
- buildings high
- trees high
- plants high
- rocks high
- grass medium
- objects LOD 100
- clouds high
- texture res high
- water waves medium
- rt shadows off
- shadow maps 1536
- terrain shadows 512
- contact shadows high
- ambient occlusion medium
- cubemap reflections 256
- raymarched reflections high
- light shafts medium
- cockpit refresh medium
- traffic airport high
- road traffic high
I do not use any upscaling technology like DLSS or FSR because it hurts perceived sharpness of the graphics. Letters, numbers and other details get blurry. That’s a deal breaker for me. I want to be able to read instruments on the dashboard without zooming in too much. I use TAA, and of course this means a performance impact, but I’ll live with that.
My configuration is based on this awesome video which compares the different graphics settings and their impact on the performance/fps.