X-Plane 12 Graphics Settings | Complete Settings Guide

[Music] hello there friends and followers and welcome back to the channel in this x-plane 12 video we are going to be taking a look at x-plane 12's graphic settings this is meant to be a guide to help you set up the simulator to the best of your system capability let's get started for the purpose of this graphic settings guide for x-plane 12 we have just landed the default cessna 172 at innsbruck airport runway 2-6 please do note that i'm not using any third-party or any scenery enhancement add-ons in this settings guide video everything that you see here is default x-plane 12. you can access the graphics settings in x-plane 12 from either the main menu or by hovering the mouse on the in-flight menu and selecting the settings icon for the purpose of our first landing footage i have set all graphic sliders to the maximum possible it to say that these settings are not sustainable for every situation and aircraft let us begin with the texture quality setting the texture quality controls the resolution of the cockpit textures and other objects in the world it uses a lot of vram when at the maximum setting if you have a gpu that is less than 12 gb of vram i highly recommend that you push this either to the high or medium position however if you have a graphics card that has more than 12 gb of vram feel free to push this all the way to the maximum the ambient occlusion quality ssao is really an option that was introduced in x-plane 11 but has very little effect on visual fidelity as a matter of fact the change from ultra to none is almost non-existent there is very little change in what you see in the rendered scene we're going to take a look at an example here we are now looking at the rendered scene with ambient occlusion set to the ultra setting i have enabled the fps counter right here and i'd like to direct your attention to the area underneath the aircraft specifically the area right here and on the edges around the blade and where the pole connects with the aircraft and the aircraft landing gear what we're going to do now is we're going to turn off ambient occlusion completely to the non-position and take a look at the effect of both the visual fidelity as well as fps we have now turned off ambient occlusion looking at the fbs it is unaffected however we lost a little bit of visual fidelity as you can see the area here and on the edges of the blades as well as the landing gear my recommendations as far as ambient occlusion is concerned if you are experiencing fps issues by all means turn it off as the difference in visual fidelity is extremely minimal my recommendation to laminar research is that this slider doesn't make much sense as a slider as the difference between the ultra high medium and low and none is really very minimal my recommendation is that this is changed to either an on or off button the rendering resolution fsr super sampling setting is really intended for higher resolution displays if you are using a monitor with less than 4k display i highly recommend that you keep this off and render the scene at full resolution changing fsr super sampling to any setting other than the off setting will cause image quality deterioration on lower resolution monitors the anti-aliasing setting controls the object edge smoothness of your aircraft and many other objects in the sim obviously this is a gpu dependent setting and setting it to 8x msaa will definitely tax performance moving this slider down to 4x msaa or 2x msaa will definitely improve performance at the expense of introducing jagged lines it might also introduce shimmering on some machines i have found that the best setting for the rtx 3090 is between 2x msaa and 4x msaa you might want to explore with this setting for the best performance versus visual fidelity anastrophic filtering is another anti-aliasing option basically it is gpu dependent and it sharpens the runways and flat surfaces it does not really have a lot of effect on performance and most graphic cards will benefit from having this at 16x without any degradation in performance the cloud quality settings has three positions maximum medium and low when setting the slider to the low position as you can see the scene looks extremely disturbing and it is totally unflyable and unacceptable as a setting and moving this to the medium position is also not acceptable in my view as you can see here again you can see all the shimmering there and the pixelation of the clouds which does not look very good now the only setting that is acceptable and usable in the sim is the maximum setting as you can see this is the only setting where the scene is smooth i'm not sure why laminar has introduced the medium and low settings when they are totally unusable however for the purpose of having a pleasant experience in the sim it is my recommendation that you keep this at the maximum settings at all cost and lower other sliders if you are having performance issues let us now take a look at the shadow quality setting it is largely cpu dependent and as you can see at the maximum settings you get no jagged lines and the shadows look very nice and as you can see here as we move the time the shadows remain very sharp and very realistic but let's see how much is this affecting our fps as you can see we are getting about 45 46 fps in this particular setup so we're going to change the shadow quality from maximum to high now we can see that with moving the time that the shadow quality still looks pretty good and our fps has increased just a little bit to about 45 46 fps it still looks good the edges are still pretty sharp and it still looks very realistic now we're going to move the slider to the medium setting you can see that with the medium setting we are now getting a little bit of jagged lines and the but still looks pretty good and the fps is steady at about 46 47 fps so not much difference in terms of performance or visual fidelity between the medium and high now let's take a look at the low settings and the low settings you can immediately see that there is definitely a change in the visual fidelity and you can see the jagged lines of the shadows here and this does not look very good it still is it still is acceptable but it just really ruins the experience in my view you can see all the jagged lines here down here and up here and this does not look very good and in terms of performance we have gained somewhere between 2 to 3 fps with the setting turning off shadow quality aircraft only setting the shadow quality setting to aircraft only will disable all shadows of all the objects in the world except for those being casted on the aircraft and did the aircraft cast on the ground as you can see we have gained a little bit of performance here and the visually actually this is very pleasing as you can see the the quality of the shadows are very good inside the aircraft but nothing else has shadows let's take a look at the outside and as you can see the aircraft is casting the shadow on the ground however no other object will cast shadows in this case let me turn the option back on again and i'm going to put it again on the maximum setting so that you can see the difference with the shadow settings set to maximum we can see that the light pole is now casting shadows the buildings are casting shadows as well as the con here is also casting shadow my recommendation for shadow quality for most of you guys out there is to set it on medium this is probably the best balance between visual fidelity and performance the rendering distance is really the draw distance how far will objects be drawn in the scene ahead of you obviously the higher the setting the lower the performance and what i've noticed is that rendering distance and anti-aliasing are the two settings that are most demanding of your computer resources putting this on maximum in every situation will definitely degrade performance now with this setting i have noticed that you will gain a lot of fps anywhere between 5 to 10 fps moving it to the high position what changes in terms of visual fidelity is very little let's take a look we are now here at innsbruck we have all settings set to maximum quality and we're clocking about 40 fps or so let's go ahead and change the draw distance from maximum to high as you can see now after changing the draw distance we are now getting up to about 46 47 frames the frames do fluctuate a lot in x-plane 12 but you can see that we are now getting about 46 uh maximum as opposed to 41 maximum and the maximum set a draw distance setting i'm gonna go ahead and change this back to medium as you can see with the medium setting we are not getting as much objects drawn ahead of us we can see that everything ends at about this point here which isn't a problem in my view and we can see that we have a considerable jump in performance to about 48 50 frames 48 about 48 frames so again significant improvement from about eight frames from the high setting maximum setting all the way to the medium setting now setting this any lower than the medium will actually not look very good so if we take this to low and say okay let's take a look at what happens to the scene as you can see with the draw distance set to low we're getting absolutely nothing beyond this point here and the scene does not look very good it still looks okay for the immediate area here and we do gain a little bit of fps but the overall scene does not look very convincing uh from uh for with with this setting being at low the perfect balance for the rendering distance setting between visual quality and performance is really to put this on high and i've noticed that this setting is the best setting for my machine you might want to take this notch down to medium if you are having performance issues but mainly on high you should be fine and you should not really have any major degradation in performance or deterioration of the image quality the world object density is probably one of the very few settings that affect cpu to a great extent and basically what this does is the number of buildings roads and cars in the world setting this obviously to the maximum on my machine has no effect on performance as we can see we are having now 40 fps i'm going to move this to the high position and we're going to take a look at the performance as you can see with the world object density slider set to high from maximum we are still getting decent amount of buildings and objects here in the sim and the performance hasn't really we haven't really gained much now if we move this of course this is again a cpu dependent and i am clocking right now at five gigahertz so uh we can move this back now to medium and let's take a look moving the world density slider from high to medium has definitely given a few fps not much though probably two or three and we can still see the objects now by the way the vegetation is controlled by another setting but the buildings we can still see the houses here and around the area here it's not as visually appealing when the slider is set to maximum but it's still acceptable my recommendation for the world object density setting is to set it between medium and high for medium end machines and to set it to the maximum for high end machines the vegetation density is a slider that is gpu dependent and uses a lot of vram now one thing to say about this slider is when you move this slider to let's say high or medium the overall generation of trees will be reduced significantly let's take a look all right as you can see the number of trees has now significantly reduced in this area we don't see as much by the way it's not just the trees but it's all the shrubs the trees and anything to do with vegetation in the sim will be reduced we can see the reduction of it here and i'm going to go ahead and by the way the performance isn't really affected that much at least on my machine moving the slider to medium there is definitely a lot less vegetation generated in the scene now this is still acceptable in my view and it would still look good however it looks a lot better with the vegetation slider set to maximum my recommendations for the vegetation density slider is that if you have a capable gpu you will benefit a lot in terms of visual fidelity by keeping this on maximum however if you are having performance issues you can take this down all the way to medium without really affecting the visual fidelity too much let me now give you my recommendations for high medium and low end machines based on extensive testing that i have done in the sim in terms of texture quality you can keep this at maximum as long as you have a capable gpu that has more than 12 gb of vram ambient occlusion quality ssao keep it on ultra rendering resolution fsr super sampling keep this off unless you have a 4k display in that case you can move this to ultra anti-aliasing set this to 2xmsaa androstropic filtering can stay at 16 times cloud quality at maximum shadow quality maximum rendering distance to high world object density to high and vegetation density to maximum on a high end machine those settings will give you the maximum visual fidelity and performance for medium and machines i recommend the following settings texture quality to high ambient occlusion quality is off rendering resolution fsr super sampling is off full resolution unless you are on a 4k display i recommend moving this to ultra anti-aliasing 2x msaa anastropic filtering 16x cloud quality maximum shadow quality on high rendering distance on medium world object density on high vegetation density on maximum for low end machines i recommend the following settings texture quality on high or medium ambient occlusion quality ssao turned off rendering resolution fsr super sampling is off full resolution anti-aliasing 2x msaa if you're having issues you can move this to fxaa however i recommend that you keep this on 2x msaa and turn on fxaa from the nvidia control panel anastropic filtering 16 times cloud quality maximum shadow quality aircraft only rendering distance medium world object density medium vegetation density medium those settings will provide you with the best visual fidelity and performance on a low end machine well folks this pretty much brings us to the conclusion of the complete settings guide for x-plane 12. i hope that you found this video to be useful informative and insightful if you have any questions as usual please do post them in the comments section below if you like this video please consider giving it a like and if you're not subscribed to the channel please consider subscribing and hitting that notification bell button so that you're notified of the latest tutorials guides and live streams here on the qa pilot channel until next time please do take care of yourselves and each other and i will see you all very soon thanks for watching and bye bye for now

Channel: Q8Pilot

Views: 88,533

Keywords: q8pilot, x plane 12, q8pilot x plane 12, x plane 12 settings, x plane 12 graphics settings, x plane 12 max graphics, x plane 12 ultra graphics, settings guide x plane 12, performance tweaks x plane 12

Id: _jc0ot48S_U

Length: 19min 43sec (1183 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 12 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/TomC69]

All pretty good suggestions for playing on a monitor but not so much for PCVR. Even with my fairly high end PC (i9 9900k 5Ghz oc water cooled, rtx3090, 32Gb 3000 ram) I need to drop a few of the recommended sliders down a bit in order to maintain fps, reduce shimmering, and reduce stuttering. Also depends on what and where you are flying. No real one setting fits all right now and since xp12 is still beta these will need to be adjusted later anyway.

[u/[deleted]]

The FSR setting if you DSR with Nvidia being off depends I think. I have mine off upscaled to 4k. I’m not sure if that’s accurate on my behalf but worth noting.

Edit: Unsure why this is being downvoted, it was a question as again I’m not certain how DSR works with FSR…

[u/SuperSixBravo44]

What an insult to have inbuilds on an XP12 video.... Unsubscribed /s

[u/loki1942]

This game is atrocious. I went back to X-Plane 9.