X-Plane 12 Runs Smoothly After NVIDIA Setting Change ✈️

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to another Nocturnal Simulations Tech Tip.

Today we’re talking about X-Plane 12, which has seen a huge number of improvements—both visually and performance-wise—since its release. Honestly, it’s gotten so good that it’s pulled a lot of my sim time away from Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 lately.

Now, one of the most common complaints I hear about XP12 is how demanding it is to run—and that’s a totally fair observation… because it is. Even with top-of-the-line hardware, I still find myself wishing for a few extra frames on short final, especially when you’re trying to nail those life-changing approaches and landings. And if you’re on more mid-tier hardware, you often have to make some pretty serious visual sacrifices just to maintain an FPS you’re comfortable with.

So… what if I told you there’s a way to essentially double your perceived FPS in X-Plane 12?

Last year, NVIDIA announced something called Smooth Motion. So what exactly is Smooth Motion?

At a high level, NVIDIA Smooth Motion is a driver-level AI feature that generates an additional frame in between two rendered frames. The key thing here is that this works even in games that don’t support DLSS Frame Generation natively.

Another really important detail: Smooth Motion works with DirectX 11, DirectX 12, and Vulkan—and that last part is what makes this such a big deal for X-Plane.

X-Plane currently does not provide motion vectors, which are required for technologies like DLSS Frame Generation or FSR. So no matter how much you tweak those settings, you’re unlikely to see a meaningful performance increase.

But… Smooth Motion doesn’t require motion vectors.

That means if you’re running an RTX 40-series GPU or newer, you can take full advantage of this feature in X-Plane 12—and turning it on is incredibly simple.

No more fiddling with lossless scaling trying to get it to work correctly or having to boot another app.

All you need to do is open the NVIDIA App, make sure X-Plane.exe is added to your games list, then scroll down to Smooth Motion under the driver settings and toggle it on.

That’s it.

Now let me show you a live example so you can see exactly what this does in real time.

With this single setting enabled—combined with the X-Plane 12.4 beta—I’ve seen some genuinely impressive gains while running at 4K with pretty beefy graphics settings. One of my go-to stress-test scenarios is loading into JFK at a random gate, since it’s one of the most demanding environments in the sim.

In this exact scenario, I went from around 20 FPS or less to over 40 FPS—just by enabling Smooth Motion.

To help quantify this, I’m also using the NVIDIA App’s built-in FPS counter, so you can clearly see the difference before and after in real time.

Now, keep in mind: this is perceived smoothness through frame interpolation, not raw rendered frames—but the end result is a noticeably smoother experience, especially on approach and in heavy scenery.

So go ahead and give this a try, and let me know in the comments how much performance you see on your system. I’m really curious to see how this scales across different hardware setups.

And as always, if this video helped you out, a like and subscribe would be greatly appreciated.

Happy flying