I watched the first 5min and it is just gorgeous and detailed, that is why I found the images so strange, because even at a very low resolution the feel should have kept somewhat.

it did, in motion

Yep, I believe they done the ultra at 540p just to compare the aspects on the effects, because when playing it wouldn`t made much sense to pair both (well unless DLS2.0 done miracles to upscale it).

God I wish they had DLSS. Specially since they are planning to put ray tracing and have VR support in the future. If the performance seems low now, just wait until you enable Ray Tracing and VR. It will make a PowerPoint engineer have an orgasm.

Ars also said when flying low to the ground or through clouds. Take off being a huge hit on performance and DF also said big hits while going through clouds. Those DF screenshots are in clear skies high above, flying over a texture far below.

The difference is, DF says it scales well, Ars says it doesn't.

Eurogamer:
The cloud system, for example, is very heavy on the GPU, while low altitude flying at ultra is more CPU-intensive, to say the least. But fear not, because Flight Simulator scales very well both on the GPU and CPU, based upon various graphics options they offer here.

Ars:
Adjusting those settings from highest to lowest would sometimes only recover 4-5 fps, which doesn't line up with how much fidelity is gained or lost when making those changes.


DF used
Ryzen 9 3900X with an RTX 2080 Ti

Ars:
i7-8700K CPU overclocked to 4.9GHz and an overclocked RTX 2080 Ti, both humming on an NVME SSD and 32GB of DDR4-3000 RAM.

Maybe the CPU makes a difference


And weird, at 540p, no visible difference between low and ultra. I would expect a bigger difference in frame rate as well between the two ends of the spectrum under optimal conditions (high in the air, far under the clouds)

Anyway this is what it looked like last time I played flight simulator at sub 18 fps in 2006




There is no way this is going to disappoint, I'm just not counting on stable or high frame rates, which I never have as you can see in those screenshots, 12.2 fps, 16.9 fps and 11.7 fps in order at 1280x1024

DF did also test with a i5 8400 and paired it with a 580/1060 on medium and it ran fine which is another reason they said it scales well. Idk how extensive that i5 test was though. 

Wow, I can really understand it still needs a lot of refinements to run well on mainstream HW, MS woke up after so many years with a really huge and ambitious project.
About graphics compared to more gorgeous titles: it's still a simulator, accurate simulation of flight should still be the main goal, with updated graphics a welcome addition for visual realism, but graphics will never be the main goal.

Yep, they said they were getting 30 to 40 fps at 1080p on medium settings. They don't say where though, was it another clear skies high above test.

It seems my CPU is slightly worse than the i5 8400
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-8750H-vs-Intel-Core-i5-8400/m470418vs3939

Only problem with a gaming laptop is the heat and enabling turbo on the cpu quickly heats it up throttling both cpu and gpu. FH4 runs fine without turbo enabled but with turbo soon gets heat limited and actually goes down in overall performance. Guess I'll be keeping an eye on the cpu/gpu temps next to the aircraft instruments haha. Base clock of my cpu is 2.2 ghz vs 2.8 ghz of the i5, same amount of cores yet the i7 has twice the amount of threads. PC gaming :)

I personally use throttle stop on my laptop to keep the temps in check. The annoying thing with a lot of laptops is their voltages don't get tuned properly from the factory so with throttle stop, you can generally get much better performance at lower voltages which keeps the heat in check. Ironically with 10th generation intel cpus, you can't do that anymore due to a vulnerability. More reason to get Ryzen mobile I suppose loll.

Hopefully they will get the kinks worked out sooner than later though. My laptop has a 512GB Nvme SSD so most likely, I will be playing it on my desktop which has 1TB Samsung 970 Evo+ but with a 3900x and 1080. The best part about this game is that it supports Ultrawide screens.