October 24th 2019 - Development/Insider Update

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

21 minutes ago, Mucker said:

Many games have expansion packs or add on's with improvements and new content they believe are saleable and Microsoft Flight Simulator had the Acceleration expansion pack so there is history.

I just don't see it being patched in after its release and think it will be DX12 on release but if not an expansion pack a year or so alter sounds much more likely than a simple DX12 patch a few months down the line, not sure why people see that as an odd opinion or contentious in any way but we will have to wait and see what the reality is. 

I think we all agree it would be better to have DX12 at release? 

Acceleration had the new content and the SP2 improvements, but SP2 was also released separately for all users, since DirectX 10 was a promised feature for Flight Simulator X before its release. I still remember those screenshots that turned out to be an artist's rendering so the in-game result wasn't as striking however. From its announcement it was marketed as a showcase for Windows Vista and DirectX 10, and now Microsoft Flight Simulator is being marketed as a showcase for Bing, Azure, and eventually DirectX 12 and DirectX Raytracing. I have the feeling this will go the same way as it did back then.

DirectX 12 on release would be great, but not a rushed implementation like most games right now. Due to the stutters and worse performance, rolling back to DirectX 11 rendering is preferable in most cases. If they need time to get it right, waiting until after release is the best option.

Just now, n4gix said:

No, I for one do not agree. MS/ASBO are aiming at the widest common denominator with regards to video cards. Knowing that the vast majority of potential users do not have DX12 capable video cards, it makes sense to limit MSFS to DX11

The fact that they have managed to replicate "Ray Tracing" programmatically with DX11 is an awesome breakthrough.

I believe that any DirectX 11 GPU is compatible with DirectX 12 on Windows 10.

[n4gix 4,947]

11 minutes ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

I believe that any DirectX 11 GPU is compatible with DirectX 12 on Windows 10.

That isn't the point. Those who are limited to their DX11 GPU won't be able to use advanced DX12 functions, such as "Ray Tracing"...

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

7 minutes ago, n4gix said:

That isn't the point. Those who are limited to their DX11 GPU won't be able to use advanced DX12 functions, such as "Ray Tracing"...

But ray-tracing is unusable with any GPU not containing specialised ray-tracing hardware anyway. Only some select GPUs are enabled to render the effects in shaders, but the performance becomes atrocious in that case. DirectX 11 GPUs can still enjoy the lower driver overhead thanks to DirectX 12, without the ray-tracing effects on. It's a win for everyone.

[HiFlyer 9,360]

16 minutes ago, n4gix said:

That isn't the point. Those who are limited to their DX11 GPU won't be able to use advanced DX12 functions, such as "Ray Tracing"...

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that nvidia recently enabled some RTX features on dx11 cards?

[b737800 470]

Just now, HiFlyer said:

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that Invidia recently enabled RTX features on dx11 cards?

As CB wrote above, only a limited number of them and at a huge performance hit.

[simtom 496]

3 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that Invidia recently enabled RTX features on dx11 cards?

From what I've read it's basically pointless to use DirectX Raytracing on GTX 10XX series of cards, you really need to have the dedicated RT cores. Even the previous flagship, the 1080 Ti, struggles to keep 30 FPS in some games (with DXR enabled). 

Asobo claims they are using a type of raytracing that doesn't require RT cores so I'm very curious as to how they pulled that off.

[n4gix 4,947]

5 minutes ago, b737800 said:

As CB wrote above, only a limited number of them and at a huge performance hit.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/287970-nvidia-enables-ray-tracing-on-gpus-it-claims-cant-ray-trace-effectively

Quote

In fact, Nvidia’s entire blog post seems mostly calculated to persuade people not to run ray tracing workloads on GTX GPUs. The company takes multiple opportunities to note that the ray tracing portion of the rendering algorithm runs up to 10x faster on RTX cards, and that by enabling DLSS, RTX 2080 GPUs are up to 3x faster than GTX 1080 Ti GPUs.

 

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

Yes, they enabled RTX for the GTX 1060 6GB and above for the 10 series, and the GTX 1660 and above for the 16 series. However the ray-tracing calculations are done on shaders, and as testing shows, the performance is unplayable, so this really is useful only if you'd like a real-time preview of the visual benefits and nothing more.

But the point is, any system with an older DirectX 11 GPU can still benefit from the performance improvements that DirectX 12 brings (it reduces the driver overhead on the main thread and threads it out), and any newer features like ray-tracing will just be exclusive to the newer GPUs. Since Microsoft Flight Simulator will only support Windows 10 and newer, there is absolutely no benefit by limiting the simulator to a DirectX 11 renderer, it will be like that on release only because this is what they had to work with when development started 5 years ago.

[n4gix 4,947]

1 minute ago, simtom said:

Asobo claims they are using a type of raytracing that doesn't require RT cores so I'm very curious as to how they pulled that off.

That was my major point. They have accomplished a programming 'miracle' IMHO.

[dtrjones 356]

20 hours ago, Mucker said:

 I have no idea what you are thinking here. How does anything you have said make DX12 coming as a patch more likely than DX12 coming at release?

Sorry Mucker I think I may have misunderstood you, forgive me! 🙂 I don't see DirectX 12 adding much for the end user apart from some possible performance improvements so I don't see this as being a priority for Asobo and certainly doesn't provide the marketting wow factor in the same way that DirectX 10 was to Direct 9 which had clear graphical improvements - although these were never fully realised in FSX.

Therefore I don't really see any need for Asobo to bust there gut and make probably a considerable change to the rendering pipeline for the initial release.I suspect it will however fall inbetween a release for the PC and a release for the Xbox consoles but when that will be is anyones guess.

[Peter Clark 21]

I think a lot of the DX11/12 stuff is going to be driven by what the new 2020 Xbox console is going to have available. Is it going to be DX12? How much of a mountain is it going to be to have a DX12 Xbox and DX11 PC version if that happens? Or do you just upgrade both and be standard. 

[Mucker 93]

2 hours ago, dtrjones said:

Sorry Mucker I think I may have misunderstood you, forgive me! 🙂 I don't see DirectX 12 adding much for the end user apart from some possible performance improvements so I don't see this as being a priority for Asobo and certainly doesn't provide the marketting wow factor in the same way that DirectX 10 was to Direct 9 which had clear graphical improvements - although these were never fully realised in FSX.

Therefore I don't really see any need for Asobo to bust there gut and make probably a considerable change to the rendering pipeline for the initial release.I suspect it will however fall inbetween a release for the PC and a release for the Xbox consoles but when that will be is anyones guess.

No worries. My thinking was that DX12 is Microsoft and Windows exclusive so it makes sense for them to promote it with a Wow" product (Even if much of that wow is not DX12 related) as Vulkan is currently getting the limelight but maybe I am jumping the shark and they are considering it much further down the line.

___________________________

I think someone else wrote DX12 would exclude DX11 cards but as @ChaoticBeauty pointed out that is not the case, it is only important if ray tracing is required which of course is RX enabled.

It maybe that older cards can't take full advantage of new DX12 functions but they will still likely benefit from the faster API.

Now I know there will not be ray tracing at release and that does make perfect sense but it doesn't exclude the possibility of DX12 at release.

[Krakin 5,773]

No company in their right mind is going to charge for a DX12 update.

[TuFun 437]

The Xbox One supports DX12 so I suspect Xbox Scarlett will be the same.

Xbox One DX12

 

[Superdelphinus 718]

It’ll just get added as a toggle like every other game.