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X-Plane 10.50 is now final – X-Plane will prompt you to auto-update the next time you run. Steam users – 10.50 should be posted on Steam within a day or so.

We are working now on a new beta of WorldEditor 1.5, which I hope to have in a day or two.

You can find the release notes here.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

33 comments on “X-Plane 10.50 Is Out!”

  1. Yuuupy !!!!!!!
    I have been checking to site for 10.50 update everyday for a month or so.
    now I am waiting to finish downloading.
    many thanks all xplane team for your hard work

  3. Great job on 10.50!!! Perhaps a silly question is in order. I was running 10.5r3 and updated to 10.50. The X Plane App icon is still reading 10.5r3 shouldn’t everything be reading 10.50 after the final update? I installed with updates checked should I have run it with “Check for updates” unchecked?

  5. Hi,

    I just downloaded the 10.50 steam version.
    10.45 was working fine but the updated version isn’t working.
    It freezes when I move the mouse over Xplane window. (it works otherwise)

    I reinstalled everything from scratch in order to see if any scenery/plugin/addon was causing the problem but the problem persisted.
    Log.txt doesn’t show anything relevant.

    I haven a Nvidia card (GTX 980M) with recent drivers – Windows 10.

    Thanks for your help.

  6. Nice to have an 10.50 final, but since 10.50 beta and now final 10.50 , x-plane have tons of micro stutters. (not really smooth as in the past)
    10.45 had the best performence without micro stutters on a locked half refresh rate in the simulator. I don´t know what you have changed in the code, but 10.50 has not only micro stutters, also with the same setting the AA is poorer as in 10.45. !!!
    I tryed a lot of different drivers, without all plugins, komplet new installed X-Plane 10.50.
    Always the same micro stutters, without any addon (stronger with Ortho4XP Photoscenery, but also only in the standard scenery).

    With X-Plane 10.45 with tons of addons an plugins, Ortho4XP ZL18 Scenery W2xp ec.. and Payware planes, not lags no stutters nothing. Sorry Ben for me is 10.50 an step back. I hope you can transfer in future updates the great engine from 10.45 to 10.50 or later version.

    1. Kopelent,

      I also have noticed the micro stutters under Mac OS X Mavericks using an internal spinning hard drive. They don’t seem noticeable under El Capitan, but then my El Capitan install is quite fresh and installed on an external thunderbolt SSD drive with no moving parts. Come to think of it, when I had El Capitan installed on the internal spinning hard drive a while back, I noticed the micro stutters (I have since reverted for other reasons). So perhaps the stutter is related to some kind of intermittent file system I/O performed in the same thread as screen updates instead of a background thread. I’m guessing Laminar Research has been testing on more modern hardware with faster internal I/O than my Mid-2012 MacBook Pro laptop.

    2. It’s a persistent myth that X-Plane itself has microstutters… it’s ALWAYS something else. 10.50 is butter smooth. I had microstutters in each major release, and it was always something else. Europe Library, World Traffic, nVidia drivers … it’s not vanilla X-Plane, for sure.

      1. Robert,

        My thunderbolt external SSD El Capitan install did not have the microstutters.

        My internal spinning hard drive Mavericks and El Capitan installs did have the microstutters.

        Both installs had the same X-Plane with the same plugins running on the same exact hardware.

        Now admittedly, the internal hard drive installs were both derived from the same older Mavericks install (i.e. El Capitan was installed over Mavericks).

        In the spinning hard drive case, I suppose it’s possible some other part of the OS is causing the micro stuttering, but the reason I lean away from that theory is X-Plane 10.45 does not show the microstuttering with the same plugins.

        So in my case, the microstuttering appears when I run X-Plane 10.50 on an operating system using an internal spinning hard drive and does not appear when I run X-Plane 10.50 on an operating system running off a much faster thunderbolt/SSD drive.

        X-Plane 10.45 does not have a microstuttering issue on either the spinning hard drive or the SSD drive.

        This leads me to believe there may be an issue where X-Plane 10.50 is accessing the file system in such a way as to cause small blocks in the display thread. The blocks are not noticeable in the SSD case because the thunderbolt SSD is very fast comparable to accessing a spinning hard drive, which is significantly slower. Users with newer hardware will not notice the microstutters, whereas users with older hardware will.

        It could be something else entirely, of course, but that’s what I’ve observed and that’s where the clues point to so far.

        1. Of course now that I actually go back to try and reproduce the micro stutter issue I saw before, I can’t reproduce it. Seems to run fine when booting from the hard drive. It seemed pretty consistent at the time, but it was one of the earlier release candidates I noticed the issue.

          Maybe it got fixed? Or perhaps some edge case in the system isn’t so edgy anymore? Dunno. Hard to tell with multitasking, multiprocessor and multithreaded OSes.

          1. Hi Guys,

            X-Plane can and sometimes will stutter. A stutter happens any time the video frame is “late” to show up, e.g. it’s a very short instance of very low framerate (a long frame).

            1. We can’t guarantee that all of our code is stutter free. 1050 is better than 1045, in that one or two known causes of stuttering is fixed. But until we fix everything, performance is “best we can.”
            2. We really can’t guarantee that the underlying driver is stutter-free. GL makes no promises about perf, so until we move to Vulkan & Metal we’re going to see all sorts of configuration-specific weirdness.
            3. Plugins run synchronously and we know nothing about them. If a plugin takes too long, we stutter.

            So…once we are on Vulkan with out code clean, we can consider a stutter a bug on a clean system. We are not there yet. 1050, just like 1045, does the best it can, and you will get the performance you get based on your hardware, drivers, rendering settings, and add-ons.

            Lots of users have gotten smooth perf with default scenery, but others have made it stutter – the rendering settings are flexible enough to do either!

    3. I got the same but only in fullscreen mode. In windowed mode it’s as smooth as butter, even when the window is maximised.

      In the frame rate monitor it seems to be hunting for 30fps, repeatedly dropping into the 20’s then almost instantly recovering to over 30.

      I was going to do some experiments with my nvidia settings before filing a bug report but thanks to travel and work I haven’t had time.

      One solution might be to run X-Plane in a borderless window, but again I haven’t had time to find a utility to do that (but I think it’s quite a common thing to do especially when running on multiple monitors).

      1. Further to the above, I found an nVidia setting that contradicts a lot of common knowledge.

        Vertical Sync – the advice generally is that X-Plane works better when this is set to “Adaptive (half refresh rate”. I changed this back to “Global (use the application setting)” and the severe micro-stutters in fullscreen mode disappeared.

        However, while this has massively reduced the problem, it has not eliminated it altogether as I am still getting some slight interruptions in fullscreen mode that don’t seem to happen in windowed mode.

        Still it just goes to show, what might have been good advice with yesterday’s nVidia drivers and yesterday’s version of X-Plane might not still be good advice today. Always worth revisiting your settings when you have a performance issue.

        1. More on this – sorry for so many posts but this one contradicts what I said earlier.

          Actually the windowed/fullscreen anomaly might be because of Windows 10 forcing triple-buffering when any game runs in a window (I found out about this on gaming forums this morning – something to do with Windows 10’s “Desktop Window Manager” which, according to some angry PC gamers, can’t be turned off and this the worst thing that has ever happened, ever).

          Turning *on* triple-buffering for X-Plane.exe seemed to make fullscreen perform similar to windowed.

          The NVidia vsync thing doesn’t actually seem to make a difference to the performance any more, in fact it doesn’t work in fullscreen mode at all which suggests something is not right with NVidia’s driver software. Windowed mode – fps locks to 30fps, as expected. Fullscreen mode – fps uncontrolled. Neither condition is noticably better or worse overall so I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.

          If I discover more I’ll start a thread on one of the forums because this blog is maybe not the best place for such a deep discussion. Anyway, I hope these comments help anyone who has had the same issue as me.

    4. I had erratic FPS initially, then (per recommendations) deleted my preferences and rebuilt them. Performance is solid now.

  8. Very nice! X-Plane is getting beter and beter.
    However the “load Aircraft” function is broken for me. When I load a other Aircraft X-Plane crashs immediately ( send crash Report please is opening) I still sent it.
    The Quickflight setup is still working.
    Can you confirm this bug? I also tryed without plugins and fresh preferences.

      1. Iam so mad!

        I forgot to remove a reshade file.
        Reshade 2.0 is making this kind oft crash.
        Sorry for wasting your time^^

  9. My 10.50 experience thus far has been excellent, and as long as it took, it was worth the wait. Hope that some other things can be tweaked before the real end of run arrives, but I’ll handle that through bug reports.

    The only adverse comment I would make is changing the default aircraft to the 747. First of all, that’s a big jet for a default aircraft, and it also takes longer to load. A default aircraft should be an Everyman airplane – good for beginners. And the Cessna 172 cockpit is quite nice looking, something I can’t say for the 747.

    Looking forward to the Big Announcement that I understand is right around the corner! 😉

  10. Ben Supnik,

    The flow time rule is a bit confusing. In the tutorial found in xplane’s youtube channel the guy says that you should type the time in hour (eg. 14:00 is 1400) which itself is weird but even more when you consider that datarefs says that the time is in secs.
    Could you clarify this? I believe that we should time the zulu time in secs but just in case….

    Thanks in advance

    1. There are -no- datarefs involved in airport flow rules at all.

      The times should be in zulu hours-minutes, e.g. 1430 for 2:30 pm zulu. If anything says otherwise, please provide an EXACT URL so we can inspect the docs.

  12. The water reflection fix makes a big difference when flying between islands. Very nice! I think having water rendering would hide the remaining alignment issues pretty effectively. Is an update for that planned somewhere?

  13. The only stuttering I see is after the sim loads. At that point, or even a few seconds or minutes later, if one looks in other directions for the first time, there’s a stutter as if the sim is loading the visuals. As soon as one has scanned 360˚ and everything has “loaded”, that’s it for stutters. It doesn’t apply to flying around or arriving at a different destination but only on the initial scenery load. If that’s a fancy way of not loading unseen scenery, I’d rather a big stutter as the sim processes potential views at the beginning than the micro-stutters happening seconds or minutes later when looking at a previously unscanned direction. Overall though 10.50 is very smooth and fps friendly.

    1. I had exactly this using ZL18 photoscenery on my 3gb graphics / 16gb pc. Not so much ‘microstutters’ that can be hard to detect for many, but I was seeing huge unplayable pauses (under 5fps for seconds at a time)

      Moving to a less demanding zoom level worked a treat (ZL15 with W2XP’s GBpro scenery performs well and looks amazing a couple of hundred feet off the ground).

      If this is your issue, it’s not classed as a ‘microstutter’ – microstutters are more akin to a good consistent frame rate with a frequent frame (or more) drop.

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