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.

6. On the plus side, MSFS has a cool add-on available, VFR Map, which uses the Simconnect.dll to place a moving icon of your plane on a map in a browser window. This map is from Open Street Maps, and you can overlay Air Navigation data on it. It's so nice that I wish FSX had this capability.

Well, that's my take on MSFS. It's a frustrating mix of amazing capabilities and astounding visuals, contrasted with several "missing features" that we all loved in FSX, and seasoned with more than it's fair share of stability problems, and burdened with hardware requirements that put it out of reach of almost all long-time FSX enthusiasts unless thay want to invest at least $2,000 in a new high-end PC.
 

Thanks for sharing your hardware specific experience and opinions with us....

Edited May 21, 20215 yr by blueshark747

First, the slew controls on MSFS are the best, most precise, easiest to navigate, and a real joy compared to any other simulation I've used. But it doesn't come mapped to the controllers that way.

But all you have to do is map slewing to the yoke or stick and the yaw slew to the pedals and slew forward and  back to the throttle. When you are not in slew mode the controllers work for normal flight. But as soon as you enter slew mode the stick and pedals and throttle all have another purpose altogether, providing you mapped them that way. Move them slightly and you move up down left right yawright yawleft back and forward very slowly in very small amounts. Move a controller further and all your slewing speeds up very nicely. Such as when you are slewing around in the air while pointed at a landing strip and you are going to save a flight at that airstrip to practice landings.

 

My 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.

My cpu is identical. The gpu is super 2060 and I only have 16 gB VRAM.

I am locked in at 30 fps with all MSFS on all settings ultra (except resolution scaling is 100). Smooth no stutters (except in very heavy scenery e.g. the bespoke AP's in France. Smooth as glass at JFK or MSFS enhanced San Francisco, or anywhere else I've flown to (like Atlanta and all bespoke airports in the UK).

Everywhere but France, Benelux and the new world update no stutters, absolutely no freezes. MSFS.

You might try another gpu like from Amazon whose return policy is legendary. Wife and I sent back a super heavy waterbed mattress and Amazon paid for the return shipping. Our reason for return was we found out the old one was not leaking after all. No questions asked, set the return up with the cheerful Amazon service Chat feature in a couple minutes.

 

1 hour ago, lgcharlot said:

I
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.

 

You did you research wrong. There are rotorcraft and gliders. There is also F-15 and supersonic seems achievable 

Look for my thread about Bell 47

 

57 minutes ago, sd_flyer said:

Look for my thread about Bell 47

 

Ah! So there are helicopters! How does it handle? I was never able to fly any of the rotorcraft in FSX with any kind of proficiency. Trying to land even the Robinson R22 on a helipad was almost impossible for me without overshooting it or just crashing the aircraft. I assume this Bell 47 is from a 3rd-party developer like Carenado? There are no helicopters, or sailplanes, in even the Premium Deluxe package in MSFS, at least not when I got my copy. So I assume there are 3rd party ones available. How would you launch a glider in MSFS, or keep it aloft? Has Asobo added thermal updrafts and tow planes like FSX, and I haven't received that update yet? I suppose you could slew a sailplane into the air a few thousand feet and then just let it glide down, but that's kind of cheating.

I agree about all terms of your FSX/MSFS comparison, with the exception about performance.- My rig is an old i7 extreme 990X , 6 cores, 12 threads, @ 4,4 Ghz,  24 Gb RAM, a Gforce 1060 6 Gb VRAM, a 24` monitor at 1920x1080, and MSFS runs reasonably well, with all settings at High and a few at Ultra.- At highly dense zones as NY, flying the default B747 from Newark to La Guardia  I get between 18 and 27 fps, with no stutters. The same flight with the Carenado Piper Arrow, gets me from 25 to 35 fps

 

2 hours ago, lgcharlot said:

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.

Are you running it on the 4K monitor? I don't get it either why some people have problems and some don't. I don't know anything about AMD, but I have an Intel i7-8700, 16 GB RAM, a 1060 with 3 GB RAM, a 1080 monitor, on Medium with some adjustments, so Custom. I get 30-40 fps, and with as weak a graphics card I have that should not happen I don't think? Now at KSFO, in my CRJ-500/700ER, sometimes fine, more than often, NOT!

And you are right helicopters, sailplanes, and a few other things you mentioned are NOT included in the default sim, no matter the version.

SLEW works fine, just have to get used to the MSFS settings and keys, or customize it.

FPS, you have to be in Developer Mode, etc...

Make your own Gauges, not sure they are gonna allow that?

And after flying the same sim for 15 years, there is a learning curve. Some things are close to the same, some not at ll.

And No Replay either.

Unless you are on the 4K monitor, and I have no clue if it matters, in a GA settings you should be fine. Now, commercial all the time, if you just built it and it is newer then my machine, why would it not work? Try a C-172 at a small airport and go into Developer Mode and check your FPS? Don't forget to Quit that mode as hours are not recorded in the sim when in Developer Mode!

2 hours ago, lgcharlot said:

Ah! So there are helicopters! How does it handle? I was never able to fly any of the rotorcraft in FSX with any kind of proficiency. Trying to land even the Robinson R22 on a helipad was almost impossible for me without overshooting it or just crashing the aircraft. I assume this Bell 47 is from a 3rd-party developer like Carenado? There are no helicopters, or sailplanes, in even the Premium Deluxe package in MSFS, at least not when I got my copy. So I assume there are 3rd party ones available. How would you launch a glider in MSFS, or keep it aloft? Has Asobo added thermal updrafts and tow planes like FSX, and I haven't received that update yet? I suppose you could slew a sailplane into the air a few thousand feet and then just let it glide down, but that's kind of cheating.

I don't remember how helicopters used to fly in FSX. I can only can compare with XP11 and DCS. Flyinside Bell is very close to DCS Gazelle or XP11 Dreamfoil S300CBI in my opinion.

49 minutes ago, sd_flyer said:

I don't remember how helicopters used to fly in FSX. I can only can compare with XP11 and DCS. Flyinside Bell is very close to DCS Gazelle or XP11 Dreamfoil S300CBI in my opinion.

I could fly a helicopter in FSX, so it was easy 🙂 Although I did not always succeed at the helicopter missions. So maybe I just stink at flying helicopters. I like the Coast Guard one in XP-11, and the Huey in DCS World! Curious to see what MS/Asobo'.s will be like? First off they have to work on PC and X-Box, will there be a free one and MS/Asobo payware ones. There will for sure be more 3rd party ones. There already is!

Edited May 21, 20215 yr by in2tech

to op, you have to take into account , fsx only got good after several years , after the 2 updates.

about performance, my very low system runs this (msfs) better than fsx with orb regions..and looks way way better.

 

9 hours ago, lgcharlot said:

Ah! So there are helicopters! How does it handle? I was never able to fly any of the rotorcraft in FSX with any kind of proficiency. Trying to land even the Robinson R22 on a helipad was almost impossible for me without overshooting it or just crashing the aircraft. I assume this Bell 47 is from a 3rd-party developer like Carenado? 

The Bell 47 is by Flyinside and uses an external physics module for it's flight model.

I mean no disrespect, but if you had issues flying the FSX Robinson then this thing will be a real handful for you.  The FSX R 22 is an absolute pussycat in comparison.  This Bell 47 certainly sorts the men from the boys!

The Freeware H135 is luckily a lot easier to get to grips with as you'd expect from an all singing and dancing modern Heli.

 

As for your performance issues it can only be your GPU as i have the same CPU and half your memory, coupled with a 2060 Super and had no issues flying the FBW a320 into LAX with pretty much all ultra settings and maintaining a locked 30FPS all the way down to the tarmac.  (it went down to 26FPS taxiing  to the gate)

Edited May 21, 20215 yr by The_Moose

It is beyond me why people still compare a sim that has been out for many many many years with one that just got out if the oven. You have to give ASOBO time, at least a couple of years.

I can remember when FSX came out, so many of us complaining about this and that, now it seems like is on par with MSFS. Go figure!!

  I was a dedicated FSX user from the day it appeared in 2006 until last September, when it was displaced by MSFS. FSX, enhanced by Ultimate Terrain and other mods, was a great flight simulator in its time. Today it is a museum piece, interesting as an important part of flight sim history but terminal as far as further development is concerned. Some simmers will continue to use it for a while, but we are in a new era defined by MSFS. This seems undeniable.

2 hours ago, CarlosF said:

It is beyond me why people still compare a sim that has been out for many many many years with one that just got out if the oven. You have to give ASOBO time, at least a couple of years.

I personally believe it depends on the viewpoint. From the autopilot code though, it is nearly the exact same code running since FS9 (and up to P3D5 as well). It is a good code by the way, but 3rd parties can't use the good code already there because of the SDK.

Here are more details, including actual FS source code (redacted) which is quite technical but illustrating this point:

 https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/open-up-communications-with-reality-xp/392140/51?u=cptlucky8

Edited May 21, 20215 yr by RXP