Is P3d Better Than Msfs

[Mara Ermogemous]

Imight give XP12 a try when it comes out, as the whole cloud based architecture of MSFS also has disadvantages. If I will like it, will also depend on the visual quality, as a perfect mathematical flight model is to be appreciated, but my eyes like to be pleased as well

flight models may be impressive, but nowhere i found evidence that xp 12 will even look remotely better than 11. Same dull washed out grey/green landscapes, boxed shaped buildings. the trailers are all eager to zoom in on details to avoid the sight of the overview that will be disappointing once again.

Laminar Research has made creating a commercial flight simulator a priority, now that they have been relegated to the #2 slot for consumer flight simulators I suspect they will double down on marketing X-Plane for commercial use as well as consumer use.

I have a foot in both camps so I have no axe to grind either way. I love what MS/Asobo are doing to make the world a really interesting and dynamic place to fly in. For exploring the world, its got no competition. But I also love Laminars passion for making their flight model as good as it can be.

MSFS is, when it comes to flying known aircraft as good as XP is. The core uses the same models right now (blade element theory and CFD simulation - that was not the case with FSX), the only big difference is that MSFS is limited on how many lifting surfaces one can add to an aircraft. This especially is important when it comes to stall characteristics on multi-wing aircraft.

If you want to fly just from A to B with some aircraft like the C172 or the A32N there is no real difference in their behavior on both simulations (if the aircraft flight models were tuned accordingly! I speak about similar aircraft ). Keep in mind that aircraft FDEs need tuning on both simulations - default aircraft on both sims are usually not study level.

I've been a flight sim enthusiast for at least 25 years, the last 15 of them in FSX. I can't even begin to enumerate how many hours I've spent messing around in FSX, designing my own custom instrument panels and airports, and tinkering with aircraft config files to soup up some of the planes with a bit more performance. Just about a year ago, I built my first PC with adequate hardware performance for MSFS as one of the considerations: I knew that the game was going to be released in 3 or 4 months, and I wanted this computer to be ready for it. The CPU is a Ryzen 5-3600, 6 cores, 12 logical processors, 4.2 ghZ. Memory is 64 gB of 3200 mhz DRAM (I know, this is overkill, but memory is cheap), and the GPU is an AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT with 8 gB of VRAM. The system handles FSX-SP2, with all the graphics settings at Ultra, without breaking a sweat, figuratively speaking. Even in the densest scenery areas like the San Francisco Bay Area, it has no problem delivering 30 to 40 FPS, without running the CPU or the GPU utilization above 40%. I have two 1920 x 1080 monitors and one 4K monitor (the middle one), and I can set FSX up to show three view windows, and a couple of my custom instrument panels, all running at once, and still not crash the machine or reduce the frame rate below 24 FPS.

As for MSFS? It barely runs on my GPU. On final approaches in dense urban scenery, the frame rate drops to as low as 8 FPS, and this is with the graphics settings at "Medium". At high altitude, it's not bad. It will deliver 30 FPS at 15,000 feet or above, but the lower the altitude, the worse the frame rate. Trying to land a big airliner that's moving at 145 knots when the frame rate is below 15 FPS is a dicey proposition at best. About 3 out of 5 approaches, the sim freezes, then does a CTD, somewhere between 200 and 1500 feet altitude - right when the scenery is moving past the windows at the fastest rate of the flight. It's painfully obvious that MSFS requires way, WAY more graphics processing power than my $215.00 RX 5500 XT can crank out, and I'd willingly spring for the RX 6800 XT at $650, if there any to be had. But thanks to COVID, and a huge surge - tens of millions of people world wide - buying new PC's for home offices (and gaming), there are no new high-end graphics cards to be had, at any price. The RX 6800 and 6900 XT have both been back ordered for 9 months, and it's anyone's guess when the supply will be adequate to meet demand again. Surprisingly, my CPU doesn't seem to be an issue: I've never seen MSFS push it past 30% utilization; it's the GPU that's the bottleneck, with utilization between 95 and 100 percent almost continuously, even at high altitudes.

So which sim is "best"? FSX or MSFS? I've broken down this question into a few functional areas:

1. Visuals - here's where MSFS shines the brightest. We all saw the advertising trailers last year, with the gorgeous scenery, and photo-realistic aircraft textures and cockpits. The image resolution of the instruments is much clearer than in FSX, and even the seat upholstery looks better. The airframes and engines are gorgeous, with amazing details, almost down to the individual rivets, nuts, and bolts if you zoom in close enough. Some of the smaller planes even have the interior passenger seats modeled. The scenery is beautiful. From a few hundred feet, it's almost photo-realistic, unless you put your viewpoint right down on the ground, and then you can see that the buildings are mostly "generic". There are thousands of landmark buildings, however, that are hand-modeled, and these are in fact photo-realistic. FSX scenery is far less accurate. Clouds in MSFS are more realistic looking than they are in FSX, and the color and texture of the sky is too, at any time of day. Water surfaces look better, too. But here's where I'm going to say something that might raise some eyebrows: In my opinion, the scenery textures that are provided in the game look BETTER than they do with the real-time scenery data streaming enabled. In undeveloped areas, the real-time scenery looks more like it really does - for example, in Death Valley, Racetrack Playa and Badwater Basin both look better with the real-time data. But in the Bay Area, or over the California Central Valley, where development is heavy, the real-time scenery looks "muddy", somehow. I just like the embedded scenery better in those areas.

There are a couple of areas where MSFS fails visually: No water effects, and no contrails. When you land the ICON amphibian on water, there's no spray, no waves spreading out. The water effects in FSX were primitive, but at least they were there, and amphibious aircraft behaved more or less like you would expect: you had to get the Grumman Goose and Albatross, or any of the float-equipped planes, "up on the step" before they would lift off the water. The Icon in MSFS lifts off the water too easily. And the lack of water effects makes it hard to tell when you have actually contacted the water on landing. Asobo needs to do a lot more work here.

When you fly any of the jets in FSX above about 25,000 feet, they make contrails. No contrails in MSFS hurts the realism of flying at high altitudes, where you expect to see contrails of other jets sharing the airspace with you.

2. Realism - Runways in FSX are flat, in MSFS, then can be either flat, or follow natural ground contours, making for more interesting takeoffs and landings. In Death Valley National Park, the Stovepipe Wells Airport, and the "Chickcen Strip" (KLOO) at Warm Springs, in Saline Valley, are both modelled to follow the ground contour, and as such, are way more sloped than their equivalents in FSX. The Monument Valley airport in Utah is also sloped with the ground contour. The flight model in MSFS is much more realistic than in FSX, and the various sounds are a lot better, including engine noise, the rumble of landing gear, mechanical noises of flap and landing gear motors, etc.

3. Customization potential - FSX wins. You can build custom airports, scenery, and airplanes in MSFS, but not custom instrument panels, and this is a serious lack in my opinion. All of my favorite planes in FSX have custom panels.

5. Overall capability. MSFS has lovely visuals, but it's missing a few things that FSX has:

a) No Support for gliders. MSFS has no modelling for thermal updrafts, and no way to call for a tow plane, so it's not surprising that there are no sailplanes provided.

b) No support for supersonic flight. All of the simmers who loved to strap on one of the jet fighters that were so much fun in FSX, like the F-14, F-15, F-16, F-18, and SR-71, are out of luck with MSFS. None of those jets will fly properly in MSFS until/unless Asobo adds supersonic airflow modelling to the flight model in some future release.

c) No rotorcraft. I don't know if this is just because Asobo hasn't gotten around yet to building some for MSFS, or if the flight model won't accommodate helicopters at all. But there are none provided in either the base game or the premium packages.

d) No support for multiple view windows. You can stretch the sides of the main window out onto two or even three monitors, but if you "turn your head" to look out the side windows, the perspective is badly distorted. And you can't put a custom instrument panel on that second or third monitor, even if there was a way to build a custom panel.

e) The slew controls are AWFUL, and there is no way to slew the aircraft slowly and precisely. Pressing the arrow keys in Slew mode moves the aircraft way too fast and too far - like a couple of hundred feet minimum - and there is no way that I've found to slow it down. The only work around is to enable slewing with the joystick, but even this way, it's hard to produce slow, precise movements of the aircraft.

f) There are a couple of data display features that FSX has, that are missing in MSFS: No on-screen display of the sim rate. It can be hard to tell if you are running at a sim rate other than 1x, unless you look at the cockpit clock (if there is one), and note how fast or slow the seconds are ticking off. And there's no way to display Latitude/Longitude. None of the Garmin 1000 equipped planes have this capability on the MFD (I suppose Garmin thinks this data is unnecessary), and there's no screen overlay like FSX has. This Lat/Long overlay can be shown in FSX by pressing Shift-Z, if I remember correctly, and the data appears in the upper-left corner of the screen.

g) MSFS "requires" Windows 10. FSX will run quite happily on Windows 7 or even XP, if anyone is still running that OS.

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