Max specs….
http://www.x-plane.com/blog/2006/12/this-one-goes-to-11/
It’s not a question of max specs. Since different machines have different capability AND users can select different levels of quality for different parts of the scenery AND different regions have different rendering load, clamping max scenery load to ensure a minimum fps anywhere in the world at max settings would mean mediocre scenery for a lot of people a lot of the time.

I see your point here. It actually highlights what I said. By my experience, it’s not the GPU or any other component on my PC. It _maybe_ seems to be the CPU. This fact is supported by the fact that when I aim the camera directly at an airport without scenery, e.g. just runways and ground, fps increase 3X! Yet when I aim it at the surrounding landscape it bogges down fps. just interested what causes this fact if I already have a very powerful system. Does this mean X-Plane with max settings was designed beyond the specs of any current computer? Even with some settings reduced it runs so.

Ahh ok, did not know that. Thanks , will x-plane move to a higher bit configuration

X-Plane is a 32-bit application. 32-bit applications are restricted to 4 GB of memory by definition.

Hi,

I don’t know who exactly says X-Plane 9 “uses resources more wastefully and produces less graphic output than some other software out there which have a smaller resource footprint and better graphic output”. If you or someone else has a specific, quantifiable claim about graphics throughput or tech, we can discuss it; without real data it’s just speculation and rumors.

I will try to write a post later about GPGPU/OpenCL. I think it would not help X-Plane to adopt these technologies, but the explanation is a bit long. NVidia PhysX is not particularly interesting to us..a number of other game developers have written criticisms of PhysX, but the bottom line is that PhysX as an idea (e.g. we will all have physics DSP accelerators just like we have graphics accelerators) is over – the most likely acceleration of PhysX is on the same hw that can run CUDA, and PhysX was bought by NVidia. So there is no advantage of PhysX over CUDA/OpenCL.

It is _always_ a goal to make X-Plane’s rendering engine cleaner, faster, and more efficient. But utilizing CUDA or OpenCL isn’t going to help people with low-end systems run X-Plane. CUDA and OpenCL require a high-end GPU (E.g. a DirectX 11 GPU) – if you have one of those, by definition you don’t have a low end system! No one is sitting around with a computer that can’t run X-plane but _can_ run a powerful CUDA app.

In the end, to support lower end systems, we can only do two things, both of which we are trying to do in X-Plane 10:
1. Make the rendering engine as _efficient_ as possible.
2. Make the “expensive” rendering settings be optional so that users can pick their trade-off of quality vs framerate.

Yesterday’s sweet spot becomes today’s bare minimum and then it becomes too low even for that. I’ve always doubled the amount of RAM between my system builds. My single-core machine had 1GB, then I built a new one around a dual-core CPU and 2GB RAM, and now my Quad core system has 4GB. My next system will be 6 or 8 cores with 6 or 8GB of RAM. Looks like the pattern of 1GB per core has been holding true for a while.

can’t wait for v-10

Wow, Ben… coming from a Mac developer, that’s saying something! I’m liking Laminar research more and more. 😉

Blessings, Patrick

P.S. Please wish your Mom a happy Mother’s Day for me!