I was wondering what people’s experiences are with RT in MSFS? Is anyone using it, and how bad is the performance dropoff? Also, what GPU are you using and what resolution?
I’m seriously considering getting a card with RT cores in the next year or so, for two reasons:
The jagged cockpit shadows
The screenspace reflection artifacts, especially over water.
The two items above are Immersion Killers™ for me (as is my 3 year old and my boss, but I can’t do much about those) and it’s bugging me enough that I’m actually considering a RT capable card. I’ll probably stick with my 1080p ultrawide, which would be a bit easier to run than a 1440p monitor.
There is no ray tracing support in MSFS 2020; 2024 has limited ray-traced illuminiation in the cockpit according to the dev streams. I don’t know if this was included in the tech alpha last month or not, but we can’t assume anything specific from the state of the tech alpha.
Note in particular that the screen space reflections artifacts are not fixed in any demo or footage or alpha that has been shown so far, and from dev streams it seems clear that this will continue to be the case.
Hardware isn’t ready for RT yet, maybe in the next couple GPU generations. At least MSFS is only dabbling in it in a limited form. Look at the performance hits in typical AAA games, it’s a insane hit on hardware. Some top systems see things from 150FPS to under 60 with RT activated. In 2-4 years it will be just like just clicking anisotropic to 16X without thinking about it today. The thing about it is, it’s incredibly easy for game devs to enable it rather than the workarounds they use now.
This is probably my biggest 2024 disappointment. I was really hoping they would have been able to incorporate that efficiently somehow. Oh well, certainly not the end of the world.
Nobody’s figured that out yet, and in far smaller environments than ‘planet Earth’. If they implement it only on the aircraft itself like a racing game I’d be more than happy with that.
I’m pretty sure it was enabled. My RTX 3070 GPU was pegged at or near 100% during much of testing, even in circumstances and areas where MSFS2020 normally only pulls 40% - 60%; further, I was getting 55 fps at most in those basic GA planes that normally I would be getting 65 - 70 fps in MSFS while my GPU would be coasting.
Increased GPU use is more likely to be a consequence of the CPU related improvements meaning the GPU is no longer bottlenecked.
I also wouldn’t expect the limited use of ray tracing in 2024 to have such a performance hit, even on older cards. From what I understand, ray traced direct shadows are relatively cheap.
I seriously doubt that. But yeah, I don’t mind the perf hit most of the time when the visuals are good. For example Alan Wake 2. I think the way asobo have been conservative about using ray tracing in this game is a good thing for now. The ray traced shadows should fix the inaccurate and sizzling shadows in the cockpit without too much perf hit. In other games ray traced shadows don’t matter as much but because in msfs in cockpit environment, shadows are front and center in the view, it’s good to have better shadows.
I don’t believe so, at least not in my case. Since I sim at 1440p, MSFS has NEVER been close to GPU limited for me. I can only get to 100% GPU usage with specific GPU benchmarking tools like Furmark or MSI Kombustor. I saw nothing in the FS2024 settings that could drive my GPU higher than MSFS does currently.
EDIT: another possibility occurs to me - could be the new sim is off-loading some of the computationally-heavy aspects of the simulation such as the CFD to the GPU rather than the CPU on systems where that’s possible, which would be smart. But I don’t know how scalable that would be, especially on older and lower-end cards.
That sounds like you’re confirming what I suggested.
Like most people, you’re significantly CPU limited in 2020 and the GPU doesn’t get anywhere near 100%. In 2024 the CPU multi-threading has been improved, so the bottleneck is alleviated - or hopefully removed completely - and the GPU can run at 100% where necessary.
Not really, at least in my case. As I said above, at 1440p, my GPU simply doesn’t need to push that many pixels. It doesn’t matter how efficient the CPU is, the engine just isn’t that graphically demanding that I should be running 100% GPU usage down the Grand Canyon near sunset. This is not Cyberpunk with raytracing enabled, or Portal RTX. THOSE engines will push your GPU to whatever limits it has. MSFS won’t.
The only way the GPU should loaded under those circumstances would be if the new engine offloads pure computational tasks like CFD and turbulence to the cuda cores, or if they’ve got ray tracing working silently (e.g. no setting to enable/disable).
Okay, I have seen numerous posts and videos from even top level streamers who keep mentioning Ray Tracing when talking about the general visuals of the world. This is a complete misrepresentation of the implementation we have in the sim, and Microsoft and Asobo have also been very careful not to be specific about this so more people can be duped by the marketing speil. Hopefully I can clear this up for folks:
Ray Tracing can be and is broken down into several sub categories
These include Ray traced global illumination, Ray traced ambient occlusion, Ray traced reflections, and Ray traced shadows.
Where all of the above are utilized, it is effectively referred to as path tracing
What we have in the sim is ONLY ray traced shadows, and ONLY in the virtual cockpit. Nothing else in the sim is ray traced
For example one of my biggest gripes with 2020 also was the terrain reflections on water bodies, which display very clear artifacting indicative of screen space reflections. When the air frame is covering parts of the terrain, this occludes the reflection of the terrain around the air frame
I can show some screenshots of this later on but just wanted to get this off my mind…
Yes, I also hope for ray traced reflections at some point, everything else like RT lights and path tracing is basically irrelevant to me. The global illumination system which is currently in place is just fine with some tweaking.
Well, at least they improved SSR a bit - they now stretch the water reflection to the screens edge so at least there it’s not just disappearing.
