Xbox Series X a Better Upgrade for Folks With Older GPUs?

Assuming you can purchase them for msrp, it seems the Xbox Series X is a better upgrade choice than getting an RTX 3080 for your PC.

Xbox Series X msrp = US $499
RTX 3080 msrp = US $699

Thoughts?

Hmm … its not quite the equivalent.

We are looking at AMD 3700x / slightly above rtx 2080 Super equivalencies with shared (albeit very fast memory and SOC architecture)

Considering its CPU/GPU/MEM/STORAGE for 500 bucks its a steal from an ENTIRE SYSTEM point of view but on pure GPU performance in a decent first gen gaming rig one would expect better performance with the RTX3080.

I have an box Series X. Its great but i have absolutely no intentions of simming on it. I think a dedicated PC is the best way to go if one can afford it.

Now if you ONLY have 500 bucks and you cant ever see yourself spending any more than that any time soon and you want to go simming. The Xbox will get you there. (in a more restricted capacity obviously).

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Well you can get 3 Xbox X consoles for what the 3080 is really selling for.

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yes xbox is avery good machine for its price, but there are some , beware of things.
its a closed system, so you cannot do all you can do on pc, i mean quite a few addons
will be pc- only.
no twiddling of files possible… if you dont care about those, then get the box, if its available.

If the only reason for me to upgrade my GPU on my PC is to play this simulator, then I think the XBox X Series is a better deal given its performance. It’s just too bad both PC GPUs and Xbox Series X are held hostage now by scalpers.

It’s not apples to apples really.

If you’re not a PC person then Xbox is a better deal. Tradeoff being you’re in more of a walled garden type ecosystem with software and peripherals (you have the choice of Honeycomb and Turtle Beach for yokes right now I believe). Xbox is locked at 30fps Whereas in 12 months you could decide to upgrade your PC and be knocking at 60fps.

I am running a a lot of GoFlight peripherals that I carried over from my FSX/X-Plane days and addons that I’m not going to have if I decided to do Xbox. Navigraph charts with moving map, simbrief, separate monitor just for instruments, etc all that easily accessible stuff for simulation is PC centric

Apples to oranges, depends how deep you want to take your simming hobby really I’d say!

What configuration do you have? CPU, GPU, RAM? Maxisone gave a good answer.

Xeon 5660 OC’ed to 4.2 Ghz
RTX 2060
24Gig RAM
Running at 2560x1600 Ultra settings for the most part.

I get FPS in the 20s outside metro areas. It tanks to single digits in NYC and landing in complex airports. The Xbox Series X should give me 30 fps at 4K according to the announcment.

If you could run any mod on an Xbox that can run on a PC I’d never bother with my computer again.

But mods add a vast amount to the experience for me. There’s no way I’d want to cut myself off from all the development out there by going Xbox.

Maybe we’ll see some mod options but until it’s confirmed I wouldn’t consider an Xbox even though it’ll save a large amount of money and a vastly larger amount of ball ache.

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Good point!

That’s a CPU released more than a decade ago. Even people with i7-7700K usually gains 8/10fps going to 9th or 10th generation Intel in MSFS. And you are running DDR3 as well, and HEDT, which does not have Ring Bus architecture.

I would upgrade CPU / RAM combo first. The RTX 2060 is not the fastest on the block, but it can run 2560 fine. I do have a 1060 6GB and an i7-9700K and I run with 30/40fps with some things in Ultra, and I have a 2560X1080p. I imagine I would have a good bump going to the RTX 2060.

I would buy either the R5 5600X or the i5-11600K. Just run away from Ryzen 3000 series. Bad latency, not as bad as your HEDT, but bad enough to trail in MSFS even to the i5-9400F. If you want to stream or render your videos, the 5800X is a good option.

And I would get 32GB of 3600Mhz CL16 or even CL14.

Then you could wait for the GPUs to lower the prices. Or you could wait without doing nothing and switch when DDR5 comes around. But the Xeon 5660 is a bottleneck. MSFS is DX11 and coded from the old FX code from 2006. So the game is single core dependant as it gets, and even back in 2010 the HEDT series would get beat up by a simple i5-2500K due to single core performance of the Ring Bus architecture.

But don’t expect stellar performance even if you get an i9-11900K and a RTX 3090. MSFS is DX11 and everyone is having heavy CPU bottlenecks with top GPUs in 1080p especially.

This is true but I’m not CPU limited based on my testing. Utilization in in the 50% range most of the time.

Sure, it’s DDR3 memory but remember DDR3 is triple channel.

My GPU on the other hand is at 100% utilization and all 6 GB is used up so I imagine a lot of memory swapping going on.

I’d wait and see how it will handle mods but, performance wise I would replace my laptop anyday.

I think it’s reasonable to know it won’t bring the best graphics available, but sustaining 4k at 30fps, decent settings, without the hassle of drivers, updates, tweaking, nvidia, afterburner and a very remote chance of CTDs (albeit I’ve been lucky on that regard) are major perks for me.

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But that’s not how it works. Most games are not optimized for multicure use. So you do have some people with big 3900X (12 core / 24 threads) running MSFS with 15% CPU utilization that performs worse than a i5-9600K just because the i5 has better single core performance. And we are talking about CPUs released not that far from each other.

I did have a i7-3770K a few years ago and runned il-2 Sturmovik and ROF at about 30-40% CPU usage max. I went to the i5-9600K and gained a good performance improvement and the CPU was just at 20%. So if you think that way, I would still have my old i7-3770K and I would be missing a considerable bump in performance just because my old i7 was not maxed out? Makes no sense.

Given your CPU is that old and HEDT, you will see a clear performance difference.

I’m looking at the utilization of all 12 cores individually, not an average utilization of the 12 cores at any given time. None of the cores are gettting maxed out at any time. So no, I’m definately not CPU bound. Every test I’ve done indicates I’m GPU bound given 100% utilization and all 6GB of VRAM used up…this is when my FPS tanks. If I upgrade my CPU, RAM, and MB…that just becomes too expensive hence my post on Xbox X Series.

Do some research and you will find out that you don’t need to max a single core at 100% to start having bottleneck.

Your CPU is the biggest bottleneck in your rig currently, but do as you please, I’m just trying to help.

Thanks for your intent to help but that’s not how it works and I did my research. In this screenshot, you can clearly see what the bottleneck is. I can in fact prove this by lowering all of my graphics settings and I get a big bump in FPS. When the GPU is not at 100% and VRAM is not pegged at 6 GB usage, I get framerates close to 30 fps.

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You are suggesting a MB, RAM, and CPU upgrade vs Xbox or an RTX3080 and I just don’t think that would be a good investment given the evidence.

You can play this perfectly on an Xbox but there’s a lot of things you can’t do. It’s basically an affordable PC with good performance but a lot of limitations. Probably not a good alternative for everyone.

Yup, the example from Pinkpantees is a good example regarding mods. But it’s a bargain to run 4K 30 FPS for $499 compared to any PC upgrades.

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I believe this is only true for v-sync displays not adaptive-sync displays.