I just perchased the x-plane and : forget it the software runs in constant fog even with minimum or low settings. Sandy bridge is ok for normal everyday stuff but forget it .You need a GPU with VRAM as much as possible if you are to have fun with x-plane.

If any one out there have any tips I am open to read about them

with crossfire disabled, the sim boots fine.

just wondering if you’ve heard of this phenomenon, or had any suggestions.

You’re probably drawing too many objects in the distance. Start with low settings and work your way up to see what’s hitting fps. Discuss with other people on x-plane.org who have similar hw.

(In the case of large resolutions, frame buffer access doesn’t necessarily scale as well as shadero perations. Running at a huge resolution has to, by definition, result in more frame buffer access, but FSAA trickery can optimize some of this away.)

In conclusion, comparing different resolutions as the means of determining GPU utilisation makes more sense. The compared resolutions need to be of similar size, like 1 and 1.5 MPix, comparing resolutions which are far too different is not a good idea, since every graphic card suffers a drastic penalty from extreme resolution at some point. Some GPUs go to their knees at 1920×1200, some at 2560×1600, so compare the drop in performance in similar class of resolution. If it does drop by the same amount of % the resolution increased, then it is fully utilised. If it does no drop at all, the GPU is waiting underutilised. “RivaTuner” utility can be used with any GPU to display the 3D framerate.

Mario.

Please email me directly…X-Plane should not require more than a gig of RAM under normal circumstances.

(Please use the bug report page to report bugs, not my blog!)

Parallelism: X-plane already utilizes multiple cores to some extent – the amount of benefit will increase over time as we continue to refactor code to take advantage of parallelism.

Clearly the market is moving toward multi-core in a big way. On the other hand, the gap between an entry system and a high-end game system is also widening, so while it is good to utilize multiple cores, I think our assumptions about the minimum number of cores must be very conservative.

This kind of refactoring will take time…changing an application to be threaded is a major redesign.

I am running a quad core Mac Pro. I presume, you won’t question Apple’s stupidity (money-hunger, if I may) of shipping only 1 GB memory with a 4CPU system. Anyway, I have recently bought 2GB more and now I have 3GB of memory. In 1GB days, I was not able to:
1. Complete a long flight
2. Load a situation movie and make a QuickTime movie
3. Position aircraft to another airport (which is usually on another continent)

I suspected memory, because right before X-Plane gets stuck, I hear disk is spinning and VM usage peaks (X-Plane approaches well around 1 GB, entire system is closer to 10GB marks). It’s bluntly funny to see X-Plane to get stuck, if you enable too many options (or, if you overestimate your PC’s CPU-GPU power). After making Apple happier by buying extra 2GB memory, my Mac can afford more visual options.

I would love to learn, on a quad core Mac Pro (Intel) with 1GB and NVIDIA 7300GT (256MB), why X-Plane gets stuck. I am familiar with FreeBSD (and Windows, of course), but not with Mac OS X. Therefore, I have absolutely no idea what kind of features (API) does Mac OS X have that enables applications to handle out-of-memory conditions (well, assuming it’s an out of memory, but may not be). X-Plane runs, I can see it makes syscalls and it’s swapping, it’s even calling some OpenGL functions. Nothing but a kill (force quit) helps.

I can enable many more CPU-intensive options, but this breeds another question; is X-Plane ready (i.e. designed with parallelism in mind)? You see, we have 4 core CPUs, we can make hundred core CPU, but this doesn’t make any sense to most of software we use today, because payload is not designed to fit on to multi-core system! The first example I can think of right now is Microsoft Flight Simulator X. It might be designed concurrency in mind, but it just wasn’t good enough because it didn’t go any faster with my 4 CPU computer. Hopefully, they are fixing this.

Since X-Plane is the only simulator on Mac OS X, which is today shipped with at least 4 CPUs, it’d benefit a lot by implementing parallelism.

Regards,
Ismail

– Rendering settings
– Weather settings
– Screenshot of flying like this, with the data output for fps on screen, as well as lat/lon/altitude and camera location.

please send all as uncompressed original pngs.