Comments on: Major OS Upgrade? What Could Go Wrong?

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Sun, 30 Aug 2015 01:09:13 +0000

In reply to Harry. We'll have a beta on Steam when 1040 is a release candidate.

By: Harry

Harry — Sat, 29 Aug 2015 15:35:50 +0000

yo Benny my man, yo where’s 10.40 for STEAM bro? 🙂

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Fri, 28 Aug 2015 12:50:46 +0000

In reply to MikeS.

I Think this post answers the question of why DX12 is not a first-tier contender:

http:/2015/06/heavy-metal-2/

By: Jiri Kocman

Jiri Kocman — Fri, 28 Aug 2015 09:37:42 +0000

In reply to Patrice Aubry.

Do you have source to your market share statistics or it is only wishfull numbers? I think that share 0.4% for Win10 was about 3 days after release.

For example… this page: http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-201508-201508-bar says market share 4.65% for WIN10 which is more than W8 and about 2/3 of OS X share. Win7 dropping constantly – 48.18% market share.

By: MikeS

MikeS — Fri, 28 Aug 2015 03:53:32 +0000

Ben,
I am one of the people that keep an close eye on your blog and I am surprised to hear that you do not take in consideration developing a version of XP with DX12 capability. In the long run will bring you a lot of happy customers considering that Win10 will be on the market long years from now. Maybe having a version compiled for WIN10and let the customer buy the one that work with their systems. Same with the hardware limitation…( have a low end XP for low end computers and one fully optimized for high end systems like mine) I am running XP on a Titan X and I have the feeling that the GPU is capable of pushing more fps but is limited by the OGL or XP code. OGL also is very poor optimised (ex. with some sceneries I got 11Gb of VRAM loaded). I know that require a lot of work for your team but hopefully you will get an edge over the competition, this way attracting more developers by the time Prepar3d and FSX will come up with a 64bit fully optimized version. Just my 2 cents…
Anyway I’m a big fan of your product and I look forward to see what new features the new versions will bring.

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Fri, 28 Aug 2015 01:32:12 +0000

In reply to Carsten. If a plugin did not load (e.g. win.xpl for the airplane), at that point _all bets are off_ as to whether anything will work - the airplane depends on the plugin for integral features including custom datarefs backing a panel.

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Fri, 28 Aug 2015 01:29:38 +0000

In reply to matthew hobin.

We are not and will never be optimized for “direct X 12” because we -do not use directX-.

With that in mind, the underlying OS code that manages the GPU and display may not be as friendly to the GPU driver writers as win 7/8 is.

This is -not- something for us to fix – if the same X-plane code on the same hardware runs slower on the NVidia or AMD driver on Win10 than on Win7 or Win8, that’s for MS and AMD/Nvidia to fix.

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Fri, 28 Aug 2015 01:28:27 +0000

In reply to jb1238.

We have -never- pre-tested a Microsoft beta OS in the past. It has not been necessary.

Until Windows 10, that has pretty much -never- been a problem. Microsoft has, in the past, done a superb job of making sure that APIs continue to work as expected in the OS, and we don’t use exotic features of Windows.

What we do do is keep an ear to the ground to what users are telling us about pre-release OSes, with the option to step in if things look screwed up. The preliminary reports of Win10 sounded like “driver issues only”, which is something we can (and did) report on to the GPU teams but can’t fix.

So you can say in hind-sight that we should be more aggressive in beta testing our software on the latest OSes, but the flip side is that when we spend time looking at new OSes, _X-Plane doesn’t get any better_. It just stays still while we look at issues introduced by the platform moving under us. It’s a zero sum game.

By: Carsten

Carsten — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 21:17:43 +0000

In reply to Ronald N. Wall. Now that you have explained this issue, I remember that I have also seen something like this with the Alabeo DA-40. Sometimes I couldn't use the knobs or buttons in the virtual cockpit, but I didn't thought that it was an issue with Windows 10, because I never used the DA-40 with Windows 7 or 8. This issue was temporary and not easy to reproduce. We both should find out how to reproduce this and file a bug.

By: John

John — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 16:02:04 +0000

I tried it, because I had great luck with a few laptops and really do like the looks and feel of it. I rolled my flightsim computer back to Windows 7 today, because I have had several x-plane update problems and I have had two CTDs, which I never had before. My X-Plane is more important than the latest and greatest, so here I go with my 777 and 757 validations again, but it’s worth it. Maybe the two will “shake hands”, but, until they do, I’m Win 7 on this computer.