My 980ti has 6GB of VRAM. You think you’re worried?
They said in an older Q&A that they will optimise the engine to consume less RAM and VRAM.
It still amazes me that they didn’t make the game DX12 in the first place in 2020 - they would’ve saved all of this time, solved a lot of the current performance issues (if they did it well), and made the Xbox release more straight forward for themselves.
Does anyone know why this wasn’t the case? It’s like a lot of things with this game, the developers seem to have chosen the most difficult way of doing things which creates lots of problems as a result when they could’ve just made better choices to begin with.
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It seems reasonable to me that Asobo and Microsoft realize many sim pilots do not have the ability to run DX12.
Why do you say that? Sims have always been the most hardware-intensive games, period. Most sim pilots have fairly beefy specs.
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It’s a decades-old code base, so it probably would’ve taken more effort to port all their rendering to DX12 while also rewriting a lot of it for the new graphics abilities in this version.
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Why would you say that? DirectX 12 is supported on GPUs since the Kepler NVIDIA 600 series and RX200 AMD cards from 2015 with the release of Windows 10. It uses system resources more efficiently than DirectX 11 too.
I doubt anyone is playing this game in a satisfactory way with specs as old as that, if they’re able to play at all.
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I thought this was found to be mostly false and there’s very little shared between MSFS and FSX/P3D in terms of code? Since they always planned to release on Xbox it’s not like they had the option - they were always going to have to add DirectX 12, so why not just do it at the beginning and reap all the benefits.
I think the minimum required configuration does support DX12. I know mine does, and even though it’s a generation older than the recommended, it’s a tiny bit above it in performance.
Now, it might be that the performance boost a lot of people reported with games moving from DX11 to DX12 will not be quite as significant for older hardware, but they will be able to run it just fine.
Found by whom?
I don’t know about that… FSX was DX9 when it came out, so if they were porting or upgrading it the effort would be the same to upgrade it to DX12 as it would be for a DX11 upgrade, and DX12 has been available for years before they started development. The Steam version was DX10/11, but i don’t know if Asobo had access to Dovetail’s code. And even if they did, the graphics engine seems to be completely rewritten from the bottom up.
I think there is perhaps a better explanation. Either the game engine is not completely new, and has been ported over from some other game (not FSX), or some other DX11 codebase was ported over from some other project. A short Google session indicates that The Crew 2, on of Asobo’s latest games, is built in their Dunia engine, which is DX11. A Plague Tale: Innocence uses a custom game engine (which also happens to be DX11), and so does FS2020. It’s not too much of a stretch to believe that both of those custom engines are built on top of or starting from Dunia, and are thus DX11.
I’m pretty sure that MSFS 2020 is, in fact, derived from the same codebase as FSX, with a large amount of changes. I’ve never ever once seen any claim otherwise.
In general, DirectX11 is a small change versus earlier versions compared to DirectX 12, which is an entirely different API structure (equivalent to moving from OpenGL to Metal or Vulkan), so it’s a much bigger upgrade than earlier versions of DX.
I was talking just about the graphics engine, and it’s pretty clear that it’s a new engine. It’s not just an upgraded FSX engine simply because of the way that old engine did things, which made it incredibly sluggish even on modern hardware. Besides, P3D has that same FSX engine, upgraded all the way to DX12 now, and it still looks worse that FS2020, and performs worse too. Furthermore, even though P3D does run on multiple cores, the main physics thread is still bound to a single core, which makes it badly optimised for multi-core CPUs. These points make it obvious that FS2020 uses a game engine that has nothing to do with the old FSX game engine.
But yes, a lot of FSX is still there. The old flight model is still there, as the legacy flight model. The new flight model is perhaps built on top of that, but i doubt it. The ATC and AI system is still there but with some tweaks (which actually make it worse, in my opinion). The weather system is new, i believe.
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Sounds like that’s all evidence that it is a derived system: graphics have improved because of additional development on graphics, and it’s still main-thread-bound.
Following your reasoning, why don’t you play in dx9 flight simulators? Dx12 or vulkan can bring more features and better performance if well used.
I don’t see how that follows from his reasoning…
There’s nothing in DX12 that really inherently requires more VRAM; it allows the programmers writing a game or other 3d application to do more things at once, though, which could use more VRAM.
VRAM is used as a pool for many things – textures, model information, other data that needs to be used in the rendering.
At any given time, a certain minimum amount of data will need to be live in memory at once in order to render the scene, below which things start failing.
However anything past that is “extras” – loading higher resolution textures and models so they can be displayed more nicely.
So when you have more VRAM, it’s sometimes possible for the game engine to load more detailed data and produce a prettier view of the scene.
Other times, additional VRAM adds nothing because you didn’t need more than you already had, or the additional details don’t add much visible changes.
In general don’t worry about having 11 GiB of VRAM – that’s more than my RTX 2070 Super has.
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So how much, approximately, did DX12 improve frame rates in P3D?
Thought I saw in one of the earlier threads that MSFS isn’t DX12 because start of development pre dates DX12.
DX12 has been around since 2015 or 2016, so that’s not the case. I think it’s DX11 because the graphics engine is built in is probably a derivative of Dunia, the game engine used for The Crew 2 (made by Asobo), which is DX11. And Dunia itself comes from CryEngine, probably created during the DX11 days.