We may be able to get better diagnostics by running some tests and looking at fps. It is a bit tricky because the single result (low fps) can have multiple causes.

We’ll get there eventually. We need to get the sim stabilized on a range of hw and get a bit more diagnostics in place before we can do broad fps testing.

You don’t need to do no-instancing … X-Plane will do that for you in 10.0b2. The 8800 drivers are better in later OS versions, run 10.6 or 10.7. I don’t know what the fps differential there is, it’s not as bad as 10.5. Maybe someone can post fps test numbers once we’ve got v10 a little more stabilized.

The 8800 does not support hardware instancing (it does support a version of it via UBOs but then the Mac doesn’t support UBOs, so there we are 🙂 so it won’t compete with Mac ATI hw (which is later-gen anyway).

Hi Ben,

Since you already have the fps_test on the code, can’t you just ask on first time startup if the user wants his machine profiled, then run the tests under the scenes and, based on that, get some appropiate defaults? You could even, asking for user’s permission, send that perf data to yourself to have a good performance database..

I’m running on a early 2008 iMac 3.06ghz Intel Core 2 Due, 4gb RAM and 512mb Nvidia 8800 graphics card. Is there anywhere I can get updated drivers?

Finally, has anyone tried running X-Plane 10 in Windows via bootcamp? I recall I tried X-Plane 9 in Windows via bootcamp in the past and the fps were quite a bit better than in OS X. However, I decided I’d to just run though OS X as it was more convenient. I’d be keen to know if I’d get betters results if I used bootcamp instead.

I was heard that the Nvida 8800 drivers for OS X are quite poor in comparison to Windows. Does anyone know if this is true?

Go to local map, click on your airport and you’ll see all the frequencies there – Or you can use real world ™ charts…

Is that something you still plan on doing?

Such a tool could potentially help LR as well, so you could have a better idea of what’s the class of hardware that’s out there, and where to focus your optimization efforts. Users could even opt-in to automatically upload the results to a server directly via the tool so you could do some automatic data mining.

Thank you very much , Ben.
I can hardly imagine how you can work and be able to answer all these questions we ask…. thank you again.
Cheers, Andrzej

Youre right the 9400 is ridiculous. Just the sun lens flare will reduce FPS from 28 to 20 in v9, for example.