As a result of pushing the envelope for realism, they have simultaneously pushed the envelope for PC hardware requirements. It really is the: “Can it run Crysis” benchmark of modern times.
It is very neat to see those kinds of technical leaps.
The most interesting thing about it wasn’t the fact that I could travel the world (in fact I flew out of a small airport 5 miles from me and crashed into my apartment first time I tried it) but the fact that it supposedly simulates real time weather and air traffic conditions. Not sure if that’s technically as impressive but still very cool.
FS2020 is weird in regards to performance. I found it ran okay ("shockingly playable") with reduced settings on my 1050, for instance, before my new card arrived. But at high settings, it's possible to sink very large amounts of money at hardware without ever hitting a consistent 60fps. The performance/$ curve is very flat.
When FS2020 came out, I had an i9-9900K, 32 GB of RAM, and a GTX 1070. With the detail settings I run at (pretty high, and in 2560x1440), I was getting around 25 fps flying over NYC. The FPS display told me it was taking about 20 ms of CPU time per frame, meaning even with unlimited GPU power, I'd cap at 50 fps.
Sure enough, I upgraded to an RTX 3080, which has well over double the horsepower of my GTX 1070, and I only went to 40-45 fps flying over that same area with the same detail settings.
What kind of sucks about being CPU-bound is that it means nVidia's DLSS technology won't improve framerates at all. At best, they could create motion-smoothing to generate frames between rendered frames, similar to what a TV does, but doing so introduces latency, since the software needs to gather 2-3 frames (possibly more) to analyze for motion and generate intermediate frames. And of course, just like a TV, this could break down badly when the algorithm fails.
It is very neat to see those kinds of technical leaps.