Best Graphics Cards for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is the most demanding mainstream sim engine I have on my PC. Harder than sim titles iRacing, harder than Assetto Corsa Competizione, harder than Assetto Corsa Evo, harder than EA WRC. When Tom’s Hardware put 23 GPUs through it, only one card cleared 60 FPS at 4K Ultra. The RTX 4090. And it only “barely cleared the mark with 61 FPS” – Jarred Walton’s words, not mine.

That single fact reshapes the whole “best GPU for MSFS 2024” conversation. This isn’t a sim where the 5070 is the obvious sweet spot. This is a sim where AMD GPUs quietly outperform their Nvidia counterparts, where 8GB VRAM cards stutter into oblivion at 4K, where in-cockpit instrument clarity makes DLSS Quality look worse than plain TAA, and where buying a 5090 for a 1440p monitor leaves most of the silicon idling because the CPU bottlenecks first. The honest answer to “best graphics card for flight simulator” depends on what resolution you fly at, whether VR is on the table, and how much you fly DCS on the side. Flight Sim is a more complex and nuanced discipline, something I absolutely love about it.

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What MSFS 2024 asks of a GPU | DLSS, FSR and XeSS – per-sim support | The cockpit clarity problem (TAA vs DLSS) | RTX 4090 vs RTX 5090 in MSFS | VR flight sim and the Pimax Crystal Super | DCS World – the multiplayer sidebar | My picks for MSFS 2024 in 2026 | CPU and RAM pairing | Sources | Other flight sim guides

What MSFS 2024 actually asks of a GPU

When MSFS 2024 launched in late 2024 it was much harder to render than MSFS 2020 was at the same point in its life. Walton’s Tom’s Hardware testing put the gap at “MSFS 2020 typically runs about 30 to 40 percent faster than MSFS 2024”. So if you arrived at this guide with 2020-era expectations – that a mid-range card would happily push the sim at 1440p Ultra – that’s no longer true.

The four resolution tiers in the chart below set the realistic GPU thresholds for hitting a smooth 60 FPS at the Ultra preset. The numbers come courtesty of Tom’s Hardware’s 23-GPU comparison, and they match what I see in my own flying on a 4090.

The numbers worth attention in this chart:

• 1080p Ultra (60 FPS): the RTX 4070 or the AMD RX 7800 XT are the realistic floor. The 4060 Ti 8GB is the one to actively avoid here – the 8GB VRAM choke at 1440p+ is well documented.
• 1440p Ultra (60 FPS): RTX 4070 Super, the older RTX 3080 or the AMD RX 7900 GRE. Walton’s data shows AMD with a notable edge in MSFS 2024 – the 7900 GRE beats the RTX 4070 by 22 percent at this resolution.
• 4K Ultra (30 FPS minimum): any GPU above about $500 manages the minimum. Anything below that is a struggle, and the 8GB cards go into stuttering single-digit territory whenever VRAM exhaustion hits.
• 4K Ultra (60 FPS): the RTX 4090, and only the RTX 4090, in Tom’s Hardware’s testing. The RTX 5090 lifts that ceiling, but I’ll come to the size of that jump in a moment.

A quiet finding from that test is that the VRAM allocation in MSFS 2024 tops out around 24GB even on a 32GB card. The 5090’s headline 32GB number is meaningful for VR (more on that further down), but for 2D flying on a monitor, you won’t fill it. 16GB is the realistic floor for 4K. 12GB is borderline at 1440p. 8GB is not a smart option.

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DLSS, FSR and XeSS – which flight sim supports what exactly?

Here’s where flight sim diverges hard from gaming-GPU advice. The three main flight sims have wildly different upscaler stories, and that determines whether features like DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation or AMD’s FSR 4 are useful to you or completely irrelevant.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024: the modern sim. Features full DLSS 4 Super Resolution and Multi Frame Generation on RTX 50-series cards, DLSS 3 frame generation on RTX 40-series. FSR 2 supported but no FSR 3 or FSR 4. No XeSS. The lack of FSR 3 is something Walton calls out as inexplicable in his Tom’s Hardware piece: “a game years in development couldn’t spare the week or two that it might have required to test and validate FSR3 and XeSS support? That seems ludicrous.” He’s right, but the situation is what it is.

DCS World: no engine-level DLSS at all. Eagle Dynamics has not integrated the DLSS SDK. What does work is Nvidia’s driver-level DLSS Override via the Nvidia App, which adds upscaling outside the engine. It’s better than nothing but introduces artefacts and you give up some of the visual quality DLSS would deliver natively. For a sim with a heavy VR-led audience, that’s a constraint worth knowing about.

X-Plane 12: Vulkan-based renderer, no DLSS SDK, only an older version of FSR. Laminar Research has been quiet on DLSS support. Same as DCS, you can use the Nvidia driver Override on RTX 40-series and 50-series cards to get upscaling outside the engine, and the gains can be 30 to 50 percent in heavy scenes. OpenXR Toolkit is the VR scaling tool of choice for X-Plane VR users.

The takeaway for buying decisions: if MSFS 2024 is your only sim, the Nvidia DLSS 4 advantage is real and worth paying for. If you split your time between MSFS, DCS and X-Plane, the upscaler advantage shrinks because two of your three sims don’t use it natively. AMD’s RX 9070 XT becomes more competitive in that scenario.

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The cockpit clarity problem (and why TAA often beats DLSS)

This one took me a while to come around to, and it’s where flight sim diverges meaningfully from sim racing in how you should think about image quality. In a car, the bulk of the field of view is the car body, the track surface, the run-off areas and the other cars. Upscaling artefacts on those surfaces are easy to tolerate.

In a cockpit, the bulk of the value is in the gauges, the digital readouts, the autopilot panel and the FMS. Those small high-contrast elements show DLSS artefacts much more visibly than a piece of bodywork does. Mark at Wij to Fire UK shows this clearly in his 4090-vs-5090 comparison – even with DLSS 4 in quality mode there’s noticeable smearing on cockpit numbers as the camera moves. TAA at native resolution renders the same numbers crisply. For a flight sim pilot whose entire job is reading instruments, that’s a real cost.

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His findings on frame generation match what I see when I fly. Frame generation at 2x is broadly fine – the smoothness benefit is there and the visual cost is minimal. Frame generation at 3x or 4x (the new Multi Frame Generation tier on RTX 50-series) introduces enough ghosting on small cockpit elements that I would not run it for a serious flight session. As Mark puts it, “the graphical penalties within the cockpit outweigh any benefit”. For a fast-paced shooter that argument doesn’t hold; for an IFR approach into a busy airport, it does.

The practical implication: if you’re spec-ing a build around MSFS 2024, don’t budget on the assumption that DLSS Quality plus 4x frame gen will let a mid-range card pretend to be a 5090. It might in the FPS counter; it won’t in the cockpit.

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RTX 4090 vs RTX 5090 in MSFS 2024 – the disappointing answer

If you already own a 4090 and you’re looking at the 5090 with intent, the honest answer based on Mark’s side-by-side testing on the same rig (14900K, 64GB DDR5-6400) is that the jump is smaller than the headline marketing suggests.

• 4K Ultra, TAA, no frame gen: 5090 averaged 62 FPS, 4090 averaged 50 FPS. A 24 percent uplift.
• 1440p Ultra, TAA, no frame gen: 5090 hit 64 FPS, 4090 hit 59 FPS. Only an 8 percent gap. Both cards are CPU-bound at 1440p in MSFS 2024 – the 5090 has nothing to do.
• 4K Ultra, TAA, with frame gen: 34 percent uplift for the 5090 – the largest gap of all the tests.
• 4K DLSS Quality: 4090 and 5090 essentially identical. Both bottlenecked on the CPU. Mark commented that “I couldn’t see a single difference” between the two cards in this configuration.

Two things to pull out of that. First, the 5090 only stretches its legs at 4K native, and even then the gap is 24 percent – meaningful, not transformative. Mark concluded that if you’re upgrading from a 4090, “personally I’m not convinced”. I agree with him for monitor-based flying. Second, the 5090 draws roughly 100 watts more than the 4090 under load, which feeds into your case airflow, your PSU choice and your electricity bill.

Where the 5090 does earn its money is VR, and that changes the calculation completely.

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VR flight simming and the Pimax Crystal Super

This is where flight sim and sim racing converge again. VR headsets have moved fast over the last 18 months, and the Pimax Crystal Super at 57 pixels per degree is now the standard high-end flight sim headset. Pimax’s own benchmark data – which I have no reason to dispute – shows that 57 percent of Crystal Super DCS players are running an RTX 5090.

The reason: Crystal Super renders something like 24.5 million pixels per frame after distortion correction, which is the highest practical pixel count in consumer VR. An RTX 4090 is the realistic floor for hitting 90Hz at that resolution. An RTX 5090 is what Pimax themselves recommend for stable performance at full settings. In Pimax’s own DCS testing the 5090 delivered 28 percent more FPS than a 4090 with TAA, and 20 percent more with DLSS 4. Both are larger gaps than what we saw on a monitor.

If you’re already on a Pimax Crystal or Crystal Light – my own VR rig sits in this bracket – then the 4090 still flies well at the lower PPD settings. For Crystal Super specifically, the 5090 is where you end up if you’re chasing the headset’s full capability. The other headset in this space is the Bigscreen Beyond 2, which has similar pixel demand and similar GPU recommendations.

For more accessible VR flight on a Quest 3 over Air Link, the RTX 5070 is the realistic floor, and the RTX 5070 Ti is the more comfortable pick. The Quest 3 streams a compressed video feed and the Nvidia video encoder is meaningfully better than AMD’s on that path – a real reason to default Nvidia in VR.

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DCS World – the multiplayer sidebar

A brief note on DCS World because the GPU question shifts in two ways once you’re in DCS rather than MSFS.

First, DCS multiplayer with a heavy mission load saturates a build in a way that single-player flight rarely does. The combination of asset streaming, AI logic, network traffic and dense scene complexity will push even high-end machines below their MSFS averages. This is one of the few places in flight sim where 64GB of RAM, not 32GB, becomes a defensible spec – covered in detail in the gaming PC guide for sim racing.

Second, the lack of native DLSS in DCS means the 5090’s frame-generation advantages don’t translate cleanly. The Nvidia driver Override works, but the result is less polished than native engine integration would be. For a DCS-heavy pilot the calculation is less about which Nvidia generation and more about raw raster horsepower – and that’s a place where the AMD RX 9070 XT becomes properly competitive on a per-dollar basis.

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My picks for MSFS 2024 in 2026

These are the cards I’d point a flight sim pilot at, organised by what you actually fly. Same Amazon affiliate pattern I use elsewhere on the site.

Best 1080p Ultra (or older triples / Quest 3 VR baseline): Intel Arc B580 12GB at around $250 is the budget pick that doesn’t feel like a compromise. AMD RX 9060 XT 16GB at $340 is the safer multi-year choice if you can stretch.

Best 1440p Ultra (60 FPS, Nvidia side): the RTX 5070 12GB at around $550 to $650. 12GB is the realistic 1440p VRAM floor, DLSS 4 is supported in MSFS, and on the Nvidia side you also get the encoder for any Quest 3 VR you might add later.

Best value for 1440p / 4K mixed use (AMD side): the AMD RX 9070 XT 16GB at around $770. AMD’s stronger-than-expected performance in MSFS 2024 makes this a genuinely interesting pick if you split your time between MSFS, DCS and X-Plane. Per Walton’s Tom’s Hardware data, the RX 7900 GRE was 31 percent faster than the RTX 4070 at 4K Ultra – the 9070 XT continues that trend. The trade-off is the encoder gap if you do PCVR over wireless.

Best 4K Ultra (Nvidia, the sensible high-end): the RTX 5080 16GB. Sits comfortably between the 5070 and the 5090 on price and performance, holds 4K Ultra in MSFS with frame gen 2x, and is the right pick for Pimax Crystal Light or Bigscreen Beyond 2 at sensible PPD settings. The MSFS 2024 sweet spot for most readers if 4K is your target.

Best for Pimax Crystal Super VR or DCS VR at full settings: the RTX 5090 32GB. For monitor-based flying it’s overkill; for Crystal Super VR or DCS at high PPD it’s the realistic answer. The 57 percent Pimax Crystal Super DCS player adoption rate tells you the community has already voted with their wallets. Worth noting that the 32GB VRAM is genuinely useful here – VR pushes allocation higher than 2D monitor flying.

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CPU and RAM – the bit that gets undervalued for flight sim

Walton’s CPU testing in the Tom’s Hardware piece had one finding that surprised me. At 1080p Medium in MSFS 2024, the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D was 49 to 59 percent faster than an Intel i9-12900K depending on which GPU it was paired with. That’s a much bigger CPU gap than you see in most modern games. MSFS 2024 loves the 3D V-Cache that the X3D parts ship with.

At 4K Ultra the spread compresses – all four CPUs Walton tested came within margin of error of each other with the 7900 XTX, and within 8 percent with the RTX 4090. So if you’re already CPU-bottlenecked at low resolution, the X3D is the right pick. If you’re spec-ing for 4K Ultra and the GPU is the obvious bottleneck, the CPU choice matters less.

On RAM, 32GB DDR5-6000 CL30 is the sim racing sweet spot, but flight sim is where 64GB makes a defensible case. MSFS 2024 with a couple of premium add-on aircraft will saturate 32GB. DCS multiplayer will do the same. The gaming PC guide for sim racing covers this trade-off in detail along with the chassis and PSU decisions.

One housekeeping note worth flagging: the MSFS rolling cache file (rolling cache.ccc) accumulates well above 16GB over time, and clearing it after every sim update is the single most useful piece of stutter-prevention you can do. Same with the Nvidia shader cache via the Nvidia App. Aussie Suffer’s sim-update-5 fix video walks through both. Worth doing after every major Microsoft Flight Simulator patch.

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Sources and further reading

• Tom’s Hardware – Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 PC performance testing and settings analysis (Jarred Walton) – the 23-GPU benchmark that underpins most of the threshold numbers in this guide
• Wij to Fire UK – RTX 4090 vs RTX 5090 in MSFS 2024 (Mark) – the side-by-side test that informs the 4090-vs-5090 section
• Aussie Suffer – MSFS sim update fix walkthrough – rolling cache and shader cache hygiene
• Pimax – Crystal Super Ultimate DCS Setup Guide – the source for the 57 percent Crystal Super DCS RTX 5090 adoption stat
• Laminar Research – X-Plane 12 system requirements – confirmation of the Vulkan engine and the lack of native DLSS
• SimRacingCockpit – Best graphics card for sim racing – the companion piece for car-based sims where DLSS support varies and iRacing has none at all
• SimRacingCockpit – Gaming PC buyer’s guide for sim racing – the full build picture including 64GB DDR5 for flight sim and DCS multiplayer
• SimRacingCockpit – VR headset comparison 2026 – Crystal Super, Beyond 2, Quest 3 and the rest of the current VR roster

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Other flight sim guides on SimRacingCockpit

Topic: Flight Sim Gear