With all the recent moans about the Xbox’s ability to handle very complex aircraft and scenery without CTD’ing, it seems like a good time to resurrect the discussion re the proposed(?) Xbox Series X Elite, which was first (briefly) detailed in 2021. I saw a piece online yesterday that now claims it’s happening next year.
So, is it going to become a reality, or has the rumour mill been working overtime?
If there’s any truth to it it’s quite exciting, as an Xbox simmer! Such a refreshed console would surely solve all the issues many Xbox users are currently experiencing? The only thing that makes me sceptical is that, apparently, 95% of current Xbox Series S/X games aren’t using the consoles’ full power — so any new, more powerful machine would only really benefit MSFS, of the current crop of advanced titles.
But this whole thing leads me to another question: is the obligation to make the sim 100% accessible to the Series S in any way restricting what can be done on Series X? I would say no, given the increasing CTD issues experienced by Series X simmers, but I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable in the field of computing to know…
Not a console gamer, so don’t have any skin in the game, but, given MSFS is a “10 year project” I’d suspect the future would also include a new console to go along with the development, otherwise the XBOX is going to get left behind as the sim advances, or the sim is going to get held back.
There is only so much optimization you can do to squeeze the life out of the Series X|S (can’t get blood from a stone so to speak) while PC’s can easily be upgraded during the evolution.
The XBOX Generations (AVERAGE) 5 years, (with different variations in between) so the next “GEN” if on course would be around 2025, but could see current gen new “variations” before then.
Yes, I’m inclined to agree. Maybe I’m fantasising a bit here but the way things are going in the field of gaming, big titles like MSFS could actually span several console generations, with each incremental upgrade being ultimately based on the original sim. As the hardware advances, so do the techniques used to improve aesthetics and realism. Yesteryear’s consoles certainly don’t become as redundant/obsolete as they once did, and it’s quite normal for manufacturers to be concurrently producing and selling more than one generation.
I really do hope we get an Xbox Series X Elite (or whatever they wanna call it) in 2024!
Thing is we don’t need a new generation of console, power and graphics wise this one is where it needs to be.
We just need a mid-generation refresh that doubles the RAM.
I really don’t see it happening for the foreseeable future, they’ll follow the money and it’s not there, way too few users interested to make it viable.
It isn’t a new generation, it’s supposedly a refresh (which would no doubt increase the RAM). Nothing official from Microsoft but some reputable sites have reported the story.
Isn’t it funny how the PC gamers saw performance issues when it was released on xbox, and now the Series X users are suggesting its nobbled so that it works on Series S. The problem is without optimising / having specific builds for each piece of hardware, it will always be hamstrung by the lowest common denominator. And as such, a series X Elite or whatever it might be called will simply have more unused resources.
To be honest I’m not convinced the Series S is holding MSFS back, in spite of my suggesting it. There was a noticeable drop in performance on Series X a few months back, and it seems to get progressively worse with each update. Some of the PG now looks terrible, whereas it looked pretty good before.
Something’s going on, and we’re all suffering, irrespective of platform.
I’ve looked at ultimately getting a PC but reading the complaints of PC owners leads me to believe the grass ain’t always greener. There seem fewer performance issues on PC but they certainly still persist!
It’s not really the cost that puts me off PC, but the complexity. The ‘plug ‘n’ play’ nature of Xbox is something that, for me, outweighs any performance increase the PC might offer. A gaming PC capable of running the very latest/best add-ons will cost at least 4x the price of Series X — but will I get a 4x better experience? Doubtful.
Agreed, and the same goes for the next version of Xbox. More money for limited if any performance increase. Theres a sweet spot for bang per buck and the latest and greatest is never it…
Topic moved from General Discussion.
The “Tech Talk” sub-category is meant for simmers to discuss, ask or answer any questions related to sim installation, performance, crashes (CTDs), graphics and optimization, hardware, peripherals, community folder/add-ons, and anything that falls under the umbrella of “running the sim”.
Its not really the case, but i know where your coming from. When the rolling cache is working it will actually load that info from you disk (or SSD OR Nvme etc) as its stored there after you’ve streamed it once.
Difficult to tell which route the upgraded consoles will take. There isn’t enough takeup of 8k to justify it, the current gen consoles are supposed to be able to do 8k albeit probably 30fps max. 4k however, is on the up and even that is achieved through dynamic scaling (sometimes) and the like at present. This is then an area consoles could look to improve. The other question is, will they utilise a Zen 3 or Zen 4 APU?
The human malware has really put a dent on the console lifecycle, it took 3 years for average Bill to pop into his local electronics store and pick one up. Is there a wider market for an Elite at the moment?
According to MS themselves, the XBOX isn’t even in the race…
Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer candidly admitted in a recent podcast interview that Xbox cannot win the “console war” against rivals Nintendo and Sony when using conventional strategies . Phil Spencer, 55, made the comments during an appearance on Kinda Funny Games, an Xbox community YouTube channel
I get that doesn’t apply here, since MSFS only runs on the XBOX, but MSFS doesn’t drive the console market for MS alone so will be interesting to see what happens next.
I highly doubt we’ll see a mid generation Xbox update anytime soon. This was floated for years and nothing points to this happening other than a couple of discussions by folks outside MS working a possible refresh into their own production plans, (such as TCL over a year ago), which is itself likely just speculation.
There isn’t really a market for a mid Gen update because outside of MSFS, there hasn’t been many products that test the limits of the Series consoles. And they aren’t going to refresh the console for one product, unfortunately.
The Xbox performance limitations will become a bigger problem over time as addons continue to become more complex, and I think we’ll see a de facto separation between Xbox and PC. This will reduce the relative value of staying on Xbox compared to the sim’s early years.
It’s becoming more common on these forums, social media and elsewhere for folks to recommend not running complex addons on Xbox, which is likely already cutting into sales and will just get worse over time unless something major changes with how MS and Asobo are approaching these performance and stability issues.
I think the last six months have been somewhat of a turning point. I’ve noticed several users on the forums moving away from Xbox after giving it an extended benefit of the doubt over years, and the same is happening on the social media groups I am in as well. The issues with the new PMDG 737 (black screens, CTDs, old nav data with no way to update) will further this trend.
I’ve become more of the mind that they should’ve just shipped Xbox with limited or no marketplace addons. At least the limitations would’ve been clear, rather than providing addon support and allowing the product on console to become an unstable mess that’s driving people away from the platform or even MSFS entirely.
I think they could have got more longevity out of series x and s with FS if they had increased ram slightly or split ram and vram up, even as a more expensive option on launch. Wed all have bought it. The speed of the shared vram/ram was meant to compensate but imo wasn’t enough alone.
I do like otimised scenery / code though, it benefits all FS users. If you give devs infinite hardware resources to play with, often they won’t do such a good job optimising / slimming down the code.
I can’t even count anymore the PCs, GPUs and various little RAM or HDD/SSD updates I have purchased since 1982.
That, almost as much as flying and discovering the world of aviation, is what FS has always been and quite frankly will always be.
I do understand the motivation behind going to XBox for MS, even if I can’t see myself ever using the XBox for that. But I really do think there will be a point where the hardware will limit what can be done in terms of coding etc.
I sure as heck hope MS does not hold back FS for PC users to pacify the Xbox crowd.
I’m charmed reading your writings. I’m not poking fun at you, either. It’s that I said the same things on this very forum for quite some time.
I was surprised to find how wrong I was once I built a really nice PC. I can’t say that it is 6x better than a Series X (what I built is roughly $3k), but it is certainly massively better than the Xbox and that makes it worth it to me. I’ve tried not to come around and talk about it much, because I feel akin to the Xbox user base and I still believe in the platform and want to be supportive of those using it.
However, I cannot get over how much I love the experience on the PC and it continues to amaze me every time I fly. I would never have appreciated it the way I do if I hadn’t migrated from Xbox.
I also don’t mess with the PC as much as I had thought I would. Sure, after the initial build I played around looking to optimize, but now I certainly don’t.
Granted, all I have installed on it is MSFS and related content/utilities. I don’t use this PC for anything else at all, so I’m not trying to chase performance for a myriad of different applications.
I have had this same thought, but all those add-on sales have certainly funded the sim and that continues to be important.
The reverse has been true tbh. We have benefited on PC hugely from optimisations done for XBox. It’s XBox itself that is hitting limits with memory that is the issue. If it had shipped with 16/32GB RAM and 8/12GB VRAM it would be blowing a lot of PC’s out of the water. As it is, it continually seems to hit memory issues because of the 16GB (shared RAM/VRAM on series X) and the 10GB (Shared RAM/VRAM) in the series S when 3rd party sceneries or more complex aircraft are involved.
I’m still not convinced that the problem with Xbox is entirely memory-related. The PMDG 737 is a guaranteed CTD-fest at certain airports (as in, I can’t even get it to load at that particular airport!), but at other, more complex ones it’s fine. The most visually impressive airport I own is Drzewiecki’s Tallinn, yet there are no issues with the 737 there. But Pilot’s Alicante, and FlyTampa’s Corfu… forget it!
Some of the most detailed sceneries function flawlessly on Xbox (a certain Ukrainian dev springs to mind), even with the complexity of the PMDG 737. So at least part of this rests on how effectively the dev either creates or optimises. Some clearly do it better than others.
A fantastical theory, I know, but imagine if every scenery was like a Pyreegue — and the odd thing is, despite the implausibility, it is actually possible!
