Requirements to run MS FS20 on 12gen with Xe iGPU

[paul456]

I am about to change my 9 year old 4x4" sized Haswell NUC for a same sized NUC 12 Pro. Normally I only use Office type programs which the Haswell NUC runs easily, so had hoped to replace with another 4x4" NUC with i7-1265U 15W TDP as I gather 'P' series has a very wasteful idle consumption. I cannot find a 'U' series NUC so considering the i7-1260P

At first I thought a NUC 12 Pro would be fast enough to play the MS Flight Sim20 at low 1080p resolution with good terrain detail, but fine-shading effects & weather turned off, ~30-40 FPS. But I can only find MSFS20 hardware requirements stated for PCs without iGPUs, where :
Minimum: i5-4460 + GTX770 8GB RAM. 150GB HDD
Recommended: i5-8400 + GTX970 16GB RAM 150GB HDD
It stated ideally an SSD, which today is the norm.  Since FS20 launched 2 years ago, I read it may have been recently improved to run better on weaker hardware but seen nothing definitive ?
Not having used MSFS20 I know little about how it uses the CPU & GPU.

Re. CPU: all I have gleaned (flightsimulator.com 17/10/22, esp post by Bishop398) is although the CPU can benefit from upto 6 cores, it requires strong single-core performance because a) most tasks cannot benefit from parallel processing, b) there is a main thread that may bottleneck use of threads waiting on other cores.

Re. GPU: I got impression from various sources even 96EU Xe iGPU not strong enough to run FS20 with above settings, so was about to give up on expecting a NUC12WSHi7 with 2x8GB DDR4-3200 + 1TB NVMe to run FS20 without needing an expensive TB4 connected eGPU.

And yet, I found just 2 YouTube videos indicating low TDP CPUs with iGPU can ? :
1) 1 Jan 2022 YT video of FS20 running smoothly on a 18W APU Ryzen 7 4700U Vega 7 iGPU.
2) 28 July 2021 YT video (Portuguese) GPD Win 3 - i7 1165G7 - Intel Iris Xe - Microsoft Flight Simulator.   
Author of the 28 July post re. i7-1165G7 has some English comments stating FS20 benefits from FAST RAM,:he used 16GB LPDDR4X 4266Mhz - whereas NUC limited to DDR4-3200. This makes me ask why NUC 12 Pro doesn't allow use of LP version, or better still LPDDR5 as the newer ram more energy efficient and now cost effective ?

Start of the video indicates FS20 settings may be set to 1080p x 0.75, ie about 900p ?  Also Terrain set to low value, but I rather keep Terrain detail HIGH, and cut other things.

I seek more substantial evidence before taking chance on buying the wrong SFF PC

Does anyone have experience using FS20 on NUC 12 Pro or equivalent ?
I would appreciate any insights as to what FPS I can expect from running FS20 on a NUC12WSHi7 iGPU only.

My Haswell NUC on 24/7 idling most of the time consumes 7.1W, climbing little with Office programs or browsing.  I want to run FS20 only very occasionally, so rather avoid a SFFPC with idle consumption much higher than Haswell NUC.  Unlike Haswell NUC launch, I can find NO reviews of NUC 12 Pro, so asked in the NUC forum what is its IDLE consumption - as yet unanswered.

If no good FS20 experience on NUC12WSHi7 iGPU, can anyone suggest a circa 4x4" or even slightly bigger 12Gen 'U' series, or Ryzen equivalent ?

Thank you.

[Jean_Intel]

Hello paul456,

Thank you for posting on the Intel️® communities. I understand that you are looking for information about the NUC 12 Pro.

Regarding your question about the Game performance, you should consider that the minimum game requirements state that you should use a discrete graphics card (dGPU) to run the game (NVIDIA GTX 770 or AMD Radeon RX 570). Since the game developer recommends using a dGPU in their requirement, this would indicate that the Xe iGPU may not be capable of running the game.

Best regards, 

Jean O.  

Intel Customer Support Technician

[Jean_Intel]

Hello paul456,

I hope you are doing fine.

I have not heard back from you. So I will close this thread. If you need any additional information, submit a new question, as this thread will no longer be monitored.

Best regards.

Jean O. 

Intel Customer Support Technician.