Wow! 100 new replies when I opened this topic 
The point is that people using PC benefit from it as well, just not those that bought new PCs just for the sim.
Not sure about that. Maybe not those buying budget PCs now, but just 1-2 years ago, 8GB was all you needed (and for most games is totally sufficient if you don’t have many other applications running).
More than 35% of PC players on Steam have 8GB or less as of July 2021.
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Technically, there is no bottleneck at all for tuning things up again !
When talking graphics quality and effects, these are in General Settings / graphics.
Relevant - the PC still has a General Settings screen for graphics, with all 4 levels… the XBox user hasn’t got these. XBox is fixed on its own quality level, that allows it to run at 30Fps. So the answer to your question is: no… for PC’s there are no limitations, more levels just need to be activated !
Personally, I love making screenshots. I hate this level clipping. But I think the current settings only served the available time table for Asobo… and Microsoft XBox marketing purposes, on the first day of release. I expect with SU-6, you can fly 12-25 Fps again with super quality, if you choose to do so. When you’re an XBox-user, you may be able to tweak the UserOpt.cfg file if you don’t need 30Fps, but I’m not sure about that.
Developments in graphics are never finished. I think PC users have an advantage: they will get to see ray tracing appear first… a more advanced weather model, better streets, better cloud shapes, better reflections, better ground textures… PC users will get all of that first. We will be the testing ground for these changes. We have been a testing ground since august 2020.
Basically we are bottlenecked by that 8GB limitation in the future.
So in the coming 10 years they won’t implement new features that can potentially make the sim exceed that 8GB limit.
No, we’re not.
We are, new features of the sim need to run on both Xbox and PC. Those features cannot exceed the 8GB limit of the Series S.
They don’t need to, as long as you have settings that allow tuning down the memory usage.
That’s how things in the market work for decades now.
I have upgraded from 8 to 32 GB RAM especially for the Sim and from 20 mbps Internet to unlimited speed (100 mbps in my area) but with the new update the Sim only uses 10-12 GB as opposed to 20 and the photogrammetry looks like if I has some connection issue, because even on the ground level it stays as a mess of a blurry pixels.
IMO,
“Optimized RAM usage” The app uses memory more efficently, but there we see that the SIM refuses to take advantage of bigger RAM. I wouldn’t personally call it “optimization”.
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They want feature parity between the platforms. The Xbox won’t get a way to change graphics settings, so every feature they implement must be able to run on the Series S, which in 6 years time is an ancient piece of hardware with 8GB RAM.
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Lower levels need less memory… we are on low and (a little enhanced) medium now, but on my PC (16Gb RAM) I still see the good old 10GB usage on Medium, that is clip at 90-96% for me, when flying over London. When you fly over London with 32G on board, it will clip at 20Gb… London may need 35 or so to let the scenery shine on Ultra and perform properly. All a matter of size. You see a lower footprint atm, because MS/Asobo had to compress textures to let things fit. The quality penalty (popping scenery) will disappear as soon as DirectX-12 is put in, I hope with SU-6…
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Feature parity is in most cases no issue. The graphics will evolve on the PC more than on the XBox (but with further optimization they can get more headroom there as well).
How long the XBox will be sufficient depends on what they plan to do. But that will affect current mid-tier PCs alike.
I’m pretty sure there will be ways to keep the support, especially to keep current mid-tier PC supported.
Other Flightsims didn’t raise the system requirements despite many years of development. It’s the addons that cause fps drops etc, but that will simply mean that these might not be available on the XBox, that’s it.
All that talk about XBox braking innovation is more elitism from some PC players than anything else.
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I bet next year they’ll need an XBox-X upgrade ! Version next… MS does not need to change much… put 32GB and let the rest of the work be done at AMD: 12GB on that GPU… and some tricks to accellerate it further. It’s not all MSFS that sets the agenda for that… In several popular games, they are pushing scenery to the max also… more far away sceneries, high poly round objects, complicated skeleton shaders… many games need tricks like DLSS, to perform at >60Fps for single shooters… For PC, we’ll see cheaper 30xx when the chips deficit has ended. NVidia will keep developing things as well… at some point, ray tracing will come into view. Most PC’s and XBox-X can’t do that. So it will come to PC first.
That, and a sense of deja vu coupled with disappointment. I’ve been around long enough to know that multi-platform releases are a product born of compromise, and it’s usually the PC that suffers.
So I gladly look forward to imminent developments that will help put those concerns to rest.
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Absolutely. Development for PC, Xbox X and S had to start somewhere, and it makes perfect sense for it to start with all platforms being equal.
Still, long term players are gonna be on PC. They must know that
My guess would be that Microsoft has done some market research.
Not sure why people are fixated on the 8GB of RAM for Series S - the Velocity Architecture in the Series S|X allows up to 100GB of storage to be accessed as RAM. With the SSD speed and the hardware decompression block, its fast access:
The idea, in basic terms at least, is pretty straightforward - the game package that sits on storage essentially becomes extended memory, allowing 100GB of game assets stored on the SSD to be instantly accessible by the developer. It’s a system that Microsoft calls the Velocity Architecture and the SSD itself is just one part of the system.
For Dirt 5, its fast enough to be used as GPU memory:
The drive is so fast that I can load data mid-frame, use it, consume it, unload and replace it with something else in the middle of a frame, treating GPU memory like a virtual disk. How much texture data can I now load?
Besides, devs can query how much memory they have to play with and adjust frame-buffers and other settings on the fly, on any device, for decades now. With the speed of console (and PC) SSDs, anything not able to fit into RAM can be written in and swapped out, very quickly. I suspect the developers are already doing this on Xbox Series consoles for MFS.
Expect frame-buffers to reduce in size too. With image reconstruction tricks like temporal reconstruction and DLSS on PC, the days of native 4K frame buffers are coming to an end, freeing up more memory.
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