During yesterday's official live stream, Studio Asobo unveiled a massive performance boost that will be implemented later this month in Microsoft Flight Simulator, with the next update scheduled to launch on July 27th.

　　Microsoft Flight Simulator is undoubtedly one of the most taxing PC games to date, so it's great news to hear it'll soon run more smoothly for everyone.

　　Asobo CEO Sebastian Wloch explained:

　　We've been working hard on the Xbox version but there's some really great benefits coming to the PC as well. We've been working hard mostly on the simulation engine. Basically, we have rewritten a lot of the parts of the engine, of the architecture, and improved it in order to get the maximum performance out of the sim and minimum I would say resource or memory or bandwidth footprint.

　　We did two forms of improvements, a lot of CPU optimization and re-architecturing and moving around things and some GPU improvements too.

　　When asked how these improvements would benefit the VR version of Microsoft Flight Simulator, Wloch replied that it's unclear yet, though performance should be better even in VR.

　　We are in the process of testing all sorts of configurations, because the impact is gonna be not the same depending on what CPU you have, what GPU you have. Definitely there's going to be a positive impact on VR, that's for sure, we just don't know exactly how much, but maybe it's the same than what we see here, maybe it's more. I think it's gonna depend on which VR headset, which GPU and which CPU, but it should definitely be better.

　　The performance improvements don't even include DirectX 12 support yet, as Studio Asobo is still working on that. According to Wloch, DX12 will enable ray tracing support, better water, better shadows, and more.

　　There won't an Xbox beta for Microsoft Flight Simulator ahead of the official release (also due on July 27th), but there's good news for Xbox fans who uses a VRR compatible display. While Microsoft Flight Simulator will be locked to 30FPS on consoles (4K on Xbox Series X, 1080p on Xbox Series S), the lock can be removed by enabling Variable Refresh Rate.

　　Last but not least, the developers are considering techniques like AMD's FSR and NVIDIA's DLSS, but for the time being their implementation of temporal antialiasing doesn't seem to be much worse.