I must say I do like AO for the cockpit because it really adds depth to the otherwise flat shaded view, especially for everything below the yoke/panel (rudder pedals, central consoles, seats, etc…). What works better for the outside view to me is ground and contact shadows instead (unless you’re flying in the middle of tall buildings where AO will add a sense of realism, or when looking at buildings facades with a snow cover beneath). If they could at least optimize it further it would make it a no brainer.
DX12U (ultimate) opens the world of RT (Ray Tracing) and with this there are novel ways to do AO and other stuff usually done in screen space for perf reasons. The neat thing is that it is using silicon which is doing nothing otherwise, therefore it is like adding a 2nd GFX card just doing this. The cons though is that AMD RT is brand new and less performant than NVidia’s and if they calibrate the use of RT based on XBox AMD GPU, we won’t get the full potential for the 85%+ simmers on PC using an NVidia card.
As for DLSS, it is important because it allows raising the effective pixel count without raising per-pixel cost. It is not dissimilar a cost/benefit balance as when using TAA50+SS100 but instead of using the pixel shader, it will be using specialized silicon which is also dormant otherwise and it is stretching the lowest resolution render to higher resolution view in creating convincible pixels as-if it was rendered natively at the higher resolution.
This is the main advantage of all these techniques: the NVidia GPU is 3 in 1:
- Rasterizer/Shaders (the GPU as we know it)
- Ray Tracing
- Tensor Cores
Each of these is dedicated and separate silicon, which means if you’re not using RT and TC for example, you’re only using 1/3 of the GPU silicon available (it is not 1/3 in number of transistors but 1/3 in functionality). Whenever you’re using the 2/3 remaining, you’re adding computing power to the final view render.
But I’m starting to believing the only reason they’ll add DX12U support is because it is the only API on XBox and they’ll use it for what the XBox is offering only. It is just because it is cross platform the PC version will be in DX12 as well, not because they’re intentionally porting to DX12 to get access to the additional capabilities NVidia RTX cards have to offer. This makes sense too because although 85% simmers are on NVidia, not all of these are RTX either, but by the same token, I believe it is a wasted PR opportunity not pushing the envelop and raising the bar specifically for people having an RTX.