Biting the bullet and migrating from Xbox to PC - A Journal

To DX12 or not to DX12 that is the question.

So DX12 is great if Asobo didn’t keep breaking it. DX12 is needed for framegen and like it or not framegen is fantastic if you want silky smooth panning with the current CPU limited MSFS2020.

You don’t need to care about getting 200fps it really doesn’t make much difference. At 60fps you get silky smooth flying and panning. At 30fps you get smooth flying but not quite smooth panning. Xbox is 30fps so you know what that looks like.

Realistically even with a 7800X3D, at any major scenery with a study level airliner, moderate traffic, and high/ultra graphics settings, raw 30fps is about as good as you’ll get. To have a consistent 60fps needs framegen. When it works its great.

Now the DX12 bugs, which didn’t used to exist but have been introduced by various SU and sadly not fixed even in SU15.

First is the underlying ground textures showing through in square tiles at modelled airports making a mess of airport aprons and runways. Workaround when it happens is to jump to drone and pull back away from the scene until it fixes.

Second is the shaking that happens with framegen enabled when you switch view. It doesn’t always happen but it really violently messes up the display when you pan, like it’s shaking the image. Workaround when it happens is to switch MSFS to window mode and then back to full screen, using alt-enter twice.

Now you may choose to live with these and the workarounds and if they happen infrequently to you then all good. Personally after couple of months I’ve given up and gone back to DX11 with no framegen. I prefer the scene to look right without having to invoke workarounds every few minutes, and I’ll live with 30fps in the meantime.

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