Never simmed before - other than maybe mucked about with an F22 on the Sega Mega Drive (age alert).
Saw the trailers for MSFS, thought I need to get a bit of that. In the warm up to it, oddly enough, I bought XP11 on a cheap deal. Literally opened it once, saw how bad it looked and never touched it again.
Then finally MSFS arrived, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Have since spent a lot on hardware - Honeycomb Alpha + Bravo, VKB joystick and pedals and a ton on add ons - more than I care to think about. Loving every minute and all because of MSFS and the pretty graphics.
One thing that can help (and I know no one wants to hear this) is to run at a lower resolution. The sim has to internally use VRAM proportional to the size of the winddow or monitor res you fly at. Jumping from 1080p to 4K doubles the resolution in each dimension (making each pixel half as big) but uses 4x the VRAM for surfaces. Full screen anti-aliasing increases VRAM by its factor (4x MSAA = 4x VRAM) for some of those textures, so it’s more efficient than higher res.
…
(Why don’t we use FSR2 or DLSS? Both of these upscalers require motion vectors as inputs from the rendering engine, something X-Plane does not provide. We may support them in the future, but adding motion vector generation is not trivial.)
So XP cannot use FSR2 or DLSS because they don’t have motion vectors implemented, and Ben Supnik is recommending people tone down the resolution because many people are struggling at 4K.
Meanwhile, we see this video from Nvidia regarding DLSS 3 using the Nvidia 4090 for MSFS at 4K resolution:
Just as a reference point, I had a look on flightsim.to at the “most downloaded” section - just to see what kind of numbers we are talking about. Now I don’t know if this excludes repeat downloads from the same user or not, so there may be some over counting here, but here’s the top 3 in each category:
Liveries:
Easyjet for the FBW A320 - 99,000 downloads
BA for the A320neo - 78,000 downloads
Lufthansa for the A320neo - 64,000 downloads
Scenery:
Gatwick - 207,000 downloads
Global shipping - 142,000 downloads
We love VFR - 95,000 downloads
Obviously some people download more than one of these (I’m an example ). However, this gives us a bit of an indication of how many people have bought MSFS on PC (steam or store, inlcuding gamepass presumably, but not xbox) and then are interested enough to download an add on - which suggests more than a passing interest. That suggests a pretty large engaged user base.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, Asobo has been doing an exceptional job of bringing performance and stability improvements.
From what I can say from my experience: I have the minimum requirement GPU (RX 570). From release until today (SU9), I’ve had a performance gain of 83% on the same settings. I remember before MSFS release, hearing a lot that my PC wouldn’t even load MSFS because people with a much better GPU than mine were suffering from low performance. And today, with that same GPU, I can run most settings on high and keep above 30 FPS.
Meanwhile, XP12 manages to deliver worse performance than its predecessor, which already delivers worse performance than MSFS. If Laminar Research can’t deliver in scenery and graphics, at least performance is almost a must to fix and make XP12 have at least the same performance as XP11 (Which is not enough, by the way). That’s why I repurchased XP12, because I’m curious to know if they’ll even be able to deliver performance improvements until the final release version.
An eventual failure by Laminar to deliver performance optimizations on XP12 could accelerate its downfall. If XP12 delivered twice the performance of MSFS, it would be a bonus that could even compensate for other areas that XP underperforms, but delivering worse graphics, worse scenery AND worse performance than MSFS, it’s extremely difficult to recommend its use even for a specific audience. You can’t recommend XP12 to someone who has a PC that struggles with MSFS, because it’s going to struggle even more with XP12.
Just to add my two cents,
Everytime there is an update to a flightsim.to add-on and a user download it, the download counter goes up
So when trying to detect the nr. Of users from the downloaded counters it is advised to divided it by the number of updates that specific add-on has had
E.g. the easyjet livery had 7 updates
If every user update each time you end up with 14k unique users, but some update are quite close from each other, so maybe we can assume that an average user can have made only 3/4 updates, so a plausible unique users number can be 25k to 30k
That’s already a lot for a single livery, and pretty near to the total number of xplane copies sold ( 42k by the statement of someone )
The topic makes perfect sense to me! It has had very informed and interesting debate covering a wide topic gamut, without the vitriol and childishness that usually runs riot.
I think the moderators have shown resilience, maturity and non-bias in allowing the discussions.
That can only have one answer: yes, it will have an impact.
What that impact would be is then up for debate, just as we are doing right now.
For example, one impact might be that some users give up on XP11, and move to 12 instead of MSFS. Another might be some users switching from MSFS to XP12, and yet another might be some users use both, or even all three.
From trawling this thread you could probably build a Pro’s/Con’s table for both sims, and see where everyone’s interest lies, and what they expect to get from their sim.
For example, I quite enjoy low, and slow bush flights with others. I can’t see myself doing that in XP12 as its effectively impossible.
Although I would suggest that you maybe missed some of the posts that have been quite negative about XP and it’s limitations. Or biased positively toward it.
I just think that discussion on a product, where that is discussed should be taking place on XP forums and not here.
As long as the topic is regarding comparisons between the two products it looks like its allowed.
If you aren’t interested in that topic of discussion you have the option to ignore this thread so it doesn’t appear in your list of unread messages. You can find that at the bottom of the page, changing “Tracking” to “Muted”.
I’m confused why negative or biased comments towards XP12 aren’t “different views” as you mention in the prior sentence? For the most part, this thread is full of honest comparisons.
I tested the stalling characteristics in the XP12 demo Cessna 172 yesterday and ended up in a spin which was difficult to recover from without the correct control inputs (as in real life).
I did the same in the MSFS 172 and just spent several minutes gently mushing down through the (blurred cumulus) clouds with the stick fully back. This is not realistic.
XP12 is for professional Pilot training.
MSFS is a game.
Well I wasn’t clear you are right. I meant different views with respect others opinions.
As a differentiator to potentially libelling another platform through biased or unfounded criticism, or at other end of scale, free advertising another’s products
This forum is afterall paid for by MS.
That’s why I was confused why the post, the way it was worded was permitted to stand.
However, that being said some good comments did come out mostly, interspersed… So yes, well done to the moderators for letting it stay.
Anyway other comment mentioned muting. Now muted so won’t see this thread. Lol.
X-Plane 12 is not as far-ahead with regard flight physics and advanced aircraft as you might have been led to think. And this perception that X-Plane is lightyears ahead of MSFS flight physics will, over time, diminish as MSFS improves towards full maturity, which it still is not at (hell, it still hasn’t got the weather radar working in the airliners).
MSFS has very little to worry about from X-Plane. And that’s not me having a dig at Laminar, I’ve always loved X-Plane, I will have both sims running in due course.
I don’t see the point about more advanced physics. With CFD I would say MSFS is at least on par with X Plane and almost certainly well ahead when it comes to props.
The other point I would add is how each camp sees the others flight model, or at least some.
Those on the MSFS side would defend it as an unfinished product, being only two years old, even though it is built on the back of FSX.
The devs of XP12 appear to doing the same, as well as their users, with the defence that it has been completely re-written, even though it is based on a product from 2017, and 2011 the version before that.
Both sides of the “argument” are using the same defence, to a degree.
If there was an upgrade fee, say £20, to go from 11 to 12 I would probably do that. But $60 is far too much for what I see as a marginal upgrade. I would rather spend that on either a one or two MSFS planes, or perhaps put it towards some new hardware.
). However, this gives us a bit of an indication of how many people have bought MSFS on PC (steam or store, inlcuding gamepass presumably, but not xbox) and then are interested enough to download an add on - which suggests more than a passing interest. That suggests a pretty large engaged user base.