Flying around the world is something that we took for granted before COVID 19. While the world has been on lockdown Microsoft Flight Simulator has been a great way to experience the miracle of flight from your own home, if your PC is powerful enough that is. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 has received a patch to fix many “in-sim” issues that have been reported by the community.
As spotted by Anshel Sag, patch 1.8.3.0 comes in at 11GB and provides performance enhancements including an optimizations to load times, something that many have found painfully slow.
- Optimized cockpit screen display when screens are not displayed on screen.
- New option available to control cockpit screen update frequency.
- Tweaked CPU thread priorities to reduce interruption of frame critical threads.
- Optimized loading system to reduce overall loading times.
- Optimized heavy airport scenes impact on CPU.
- Reduced the amount of GPU overdraw to improve GPU performance.
- Memory optimizations to reduce software memory footprint and improve performance on memory limited computers.
- Overall performance optimizations.
The update also provides enhancements to ATC (Air Traffic Control) communications including three different voices for Azure generated ATC communications and a fix for incorrect voice packs being used. The patch goes further to improve the aerodynamics of aircraft and improves the simulation of weather and engine performance.
More details of this extensive patch can be found on the official Microsoft Flight Simulator website.