With X-Plane 11.00 out the door, we have a few immediate things we are working on:
X-Plane 11.01: I’m hoping to have it beta early this coming week. We’ll roll the Linux DVD bug fixes into it, as well as rendering bug fixes that didn’t make 11.00, and a little bit of cleanup of the aircraft SDK.
Almost everything for the aircraft SDK is harmless cleanup, but there is one change in 11.01 that really should have made 11.00: the gamma curve on prop discs is still not correct in X-Plane 11.00. I am going to fix that ASAP for 11.01 so that third party developers can have stability.
Like most gamma corrections, your old prop disc might be too bright (because the old alpha blending tended to lose energy). With energy conserved, you might want to tone it down a little bit. I think this is the only gamma change that “got away” but I’m still investigating various cracks and crevices.
(The 2-d panel and panel texture will continue to have its traditional gamma-incorrect blending, matching X-Plane 10, 9, 8, etc.)
Documentation: we have a lot to update; I’ll try to get on FMOD docs as soon as possible. The X-Plane plugin SDK website needs a serious overhaul and may be in “temporary” mode for a week or two.
Developer Support: Philipp and I have been flooded with emails and requests from third parties involving their add-ons. I can’t speak for Philipp, but I’m probably back logged an entire month. If you’ve emailed us with some kind of issue, please be patient – there are a lot of you and not a lot of us.
I’ll post more details on 11.01 when we get closer to a beta.
Don’t fix minor things, please focus of the fact that xp11 set world records about the pc game with the lowest amount of fps ever seen in history ! A gtx 1070 performs better than a 1080 Ti or xp, shame on you !
I’m running an RX480 and am getting upsets of 60 fps on a reasonably large screen. And am able to play on an HTC vive with no issues!
That is absolutely not true, I hope you’re not trolling. It runs terrible unless you turn settings way down.
It is not optimised, CPU is the main bottle neck. I’m not alone in changing GPU to a GTX 1080 and having ZERO improvement in FPS.
I remember AI road traffic being a big hit on FPS in X-Plane 10. But in XP11, we are forced to have AI road traffic, theres no setting to switch it off.
Also, we need the ability to change the amount of roads too. Right now, unless you max out autogen, you will have roads with empty spaces (no buildings,) killing immersion. At least in XP10 we could subsequently reduce the amount of roads to mitigate this.
Theres one major problem with the lighting, at sunset or sunrise; the cockpit gets lit up in unrealistic bright yellow light.
Also, if the sun or moon is BEHIND you it still lights up your cockpit, despite the cockpit door and cabin being behind you! You can even see the sun or moon reflection on instruments.
And lets not get started on atmospheric haze. It’s crazy. Setting sky colours to “hiat” adresses the foggy haze, and also fixes the bright yellow cockpit at sunset/rise to a more subtle colour transition. But still lit up.
Then we have the autogen night lighting shining THROUGH the clouds.
I know LR is dedicated with a passionate team, and we are almost there! All of my friends have also switched to XP10 & 11.
There is my vide with GTX1080 which is absolutelly bottomneck with 0.110 frame time when CPU sits at something like 0.015. Everytime depends on scenario. I can set up scenario where XPL11 runs smooth 60FPS with just VSync as limiter same as I cant go over 9FPS becouse my GPU is overloaded and same as there is less than 20 becouse CPU is bottomneck and GPU sits at 30% load.
link for video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gujkIHDCiw
What is your argument? Fly over KLAX, KSNA, or KLGA with broken clouds and then tell me about your frames.
Your video shows that anyone can tax the GPU simply by cranking up AA and resolution. It doesn’t show how bad performance is over autogen (probably because we can’t turn off AI) and in certain views above the clouds.
BTW there is a mod on the ORG site that fixes the lit up cockpit at dusk/dawn AND gives you shadows in the cockpit in dusk/dawn! 🙂
Please Ben, could you do implement this at some point (the shadow and lighting in VC). The darker cockpit and reverse shadows at dusk and dawn are STUNNING:
http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/36188-lua-environment-booster-xp11/
I’m also getting autogen lights through clouds.
Josh: the bright light at dusk is going to be fixed in 11.01, but NOT the way this mod does it. I’ll post on this later.
Shame on you for shaming on XP developers Mark, as Ben said, they are not many and their workload is over the top. So when you cast blame just because your hardware do not keep up, it is not their fault but yours.
I am getting close to 50 FPS steady on XP11 with default airplanes running an old 3770K cpu at default speeds and a 1080 card with 16gb ram. Whilst GPU in my mind does not have a shit to say in XP11 (more or less) it is very CPU bound. Well so it seems anyway, I did an GPU upgrade from GTX770 to 1080 and did not notice any difference at all in XP11, could not even slide the sliders more up than before. So I beg to differ your blame in this case Mark, the FPS has never been higher in X-Plane 11 as is.
Mark, I think this interview with Austin should address your concerns regarding performance.
https://www.facebook.com/XPlaneOfficial/videos/10154294667361283/
No issues for me with a GTX 1060, frames above 30.
Wow, what an offensive post. After doing such an amazing job, this is not what the LR team deserves!
Maybe there is a big misunderstanding here but X-Plane is NOT a GAME.It has a completely different architecture from what most games have. Most games showing aircraft have no system simulation, weather physics and aerodynamic calculations etc. which are calculated by the CPU. They just show a graphic representation which mostly all is done by the GPU. For games flight GAMES, the CPU most of the time only has to feed the graphics card. Therefore even a weaker CPU combined with a monster graphics card will look nice. The game limitation usually shows off at the GPUs fill rate – something that has never been an issue for X-Plane. Therefore SLI or X-Fire are useless at all here (aside from not being supported due to this).
Before a simulation like X-Plane (same applies for P3D, FSX, etc.) can do the graphics job, all other calculation needs to be done (and there is way more to calculate than in games). The bottle neck therefore usually is the CPU, memory bandwidth etc. Without changing the rest of the system, it is very likely that a GTX 1080TI is no faster than a GTX1080.
And if the CPU is very powerful, you’ll easily see a GTX 1070 with higher FPS than a weak CPU with a GTX 1080TI – no surprise at all.
I know, this was a very simplified explanation with more than enough inaccuracies. But finally you can’t look at a complex simulation like at a game.
This being said, I think it is weird to blame the X-Plane developers for doing what X-Plane stands for: A complex and realistic simulation! At no time X-Plane was promised to be a game… – and I’m glad it isn’t – otherwise I would not have bought it (again).
One more thing: When FSX was released nearly a decade ago, users blamed Microsoft for developing a software that was nearly impossible to run on latest hardware at the time. A few years later no one issued this problem as hardware specs increased over the time.
X-Plane 11 made a giant leap in graphics quality while still doing all the other real time calculations. This – for sure – is more hardware demanding. But unlike FSX on date of release, hardware running X-Plane 11 at convenient FPS rates is available since quite some time. And the situation will get better and better over the time. I hate to say this, but it’s true: Serious simulation is not cheap – and X-Plane as a software platform forms the lower end of all costs.
Also I recommend to read former dev news posted here that clearly underline that Ben is planning to port X-Plane to low level APIs (Vulkan/Metal) and to make better use of multi core CPUs. But this will be a very complex job and cannot be done in one step – or even over night.
Meanwhile X-Plane 11 already runs very smooth when setup correctly. Constant FPS rates higher than 20 allow a usable simulation, more than 30 make it smooth. This can be achieved easily with current hardware – even when flying complex third party aircraft over HD scenery.
Most important is to have a clever setup of X-Plane matching your hardware specs – and as said before, it is not only the grahics card you have to look at. Moving all sliders to the right – for sure – is not a clever setup, even when using the most advanced hardware available on market today.
Ben, NO shame on you but my deepest appreciation for what you and the whole team do! Carry-on the outstanding work. I’m thrilled to see what 11.01 will do.
Regards,
Marc
Insulting people usually doesn’t get the desired results, don’t you think?
Sadly, X-Plane is often CPU-bound if you force it to draw large numbers of objects, so be careful with those object detail sliders! We’d all love to see this limitation go away, but I’m not holding my breath for this to happen mid-life for 11. So in the mean time, load up orthophotos, knock the object number settings down a peg or two and overclock your CPU to high heavens.
I think X-plane has the potential to be GPU bound within the v11 run, assuming you want to overload the GPU.
So if you have a 1024 x 768 monitor, a GF-1080, and you don’t like clouds, you may NEVER be GPU bound no matter how much we change things.
On the other hand, if you have a 4K monitor, think 16x anti-aliasing is the minimum, etc. then moderate CPU perf changes will make you GPU bound.
Hell, you can be GPU bound _now_ if you turn down the object settings, turn up the clouds, and go stair into a rain storm with an old card. 🙂
There’s a lot of posts on this blog about how awful it is that we are CPU bound. I’m NOT saying being CPU bound is a good thing, but I do want to make the following prediction: once we become GPU bound we’ll get a ton of rants about how awful it is that we are GPU bound!
I didn’t mean to imply that X-Plane is always CPU-bound, hence why I phrased it as a condition of lots of objects being drawn. It’s just in my experience I more often see my GPU being 60-70% loaded and a single CPU thread sitting near maximum and the rest being mostly idle. I won’t go on suggesting ideas to you on what to do better, as I’m sure you’ve already thought of everything I could come up it. I’m just a little kernel dev, so I don’t know about all that 3D graphics gobbledygook there 🙂
You are right that pushing the ‘amount of stuff’ loads up the rendering thread. It’s a single core, and the work submission is amplified by higher reflection settings, higher shadow settings, etc. The autogen without “Extra times” can run maxed out, but once you add full AG to full shadows and reflections, you’re toast.
No one on this blog wants to hear this, but what I need to do is get rid of the max reflection settings. They require too much of the top-end PCs and therefore pretty much NO ONE can run with them.
And yet clearly we’re going to have an endless parade of gamers opening the sim, dragging every setting all the way to the right, and then ranting on the blog about how awful we are when they don’t get 60 fps, because they spent $3000 on their gamer rig.
We took away all of the sharp tools in the kitchen except that one (reflection settings), and I suspect it’s now involved in most of the cutting accidents.
I know I said I wasn’t going to suggest ways to improve your code, but I thought I might just suggest an optimization tool that I use pretty extensively at my job. You may have heard of DTrace and an addon facility called FlameGraph (both are free). They are perfect for discovering and squashing lock contention (among other things). Let me know if I should elaborate.
Thanks – I’m aware of DTrace! But the lock that kills us most is in the OpenGL driver…we get rid of that by moving to Vulkan.
(In our own code we mostly use message passing to avoid lock contention.)
We also use vtune’s instrumentation API sometimes, which can sometimes show lock contention, both spinning and sleeping.
have you considered making more use of SSE3 and 4 now that your 64bit as EVERY 64bit cpu has these now and dumping any lingering x87 code?
bottom line is game or sim <60fps is unacceptable in 2017 on top end hardware at 1080p
SSE3/4: no. It’s not that useful to us – when you look at where ACTUAL CPU time is being spent, and then you isolate that for time in _our_ code (where we can do things like use SSE3/4) and then you intersect that with code that could use vectorization…there’s just not much left that we haven’t done.
Here are a few examples:
– car headlight light volumes are currently transformed on the CPU. We already use SSE, and it’s a win. But moving this to the GPU would be better, and will make one less SSE site for us.
– most of the rendering engine is stuck in L2 cache misses, logic, etc. The actual math isn’t the problem, it’s memory.
– the FFT we use might not be SSE – it’s a lib and I have a note to look at a faster lib. But the actual FFT is taking, like, 2 ms of multi-core time, of which we have lots available. So the win here might be ‘nicer’ water, not ‘faster’. And even then, producing 4x the FFT output means more time transfering texture data – which could LOWER fps. So … not an obvious win.
I’ll comment in another post on 60 fps, but if you consider a sim at less than 60 fps to be unacceptable in 2017, then you need to stop using X-Plane for now. You will be able to use it in the future, but right now if you can’t target 30 fps because it makes you sad, you’re hosed.
this HAS NOTHING to do with reflections and frankly your “max” setting looks awful i run at low reflections most of the time do to this
on a over clocked 4790K at 4.8 Ghz and 1070 i can get over 60fps in some place mostly where there is there limited autogen objects and no clouds
something is WRONG with your engine but you wont admit it do to what ever
again 60fps at 1080p is not asking a lot of hardware in 2017 you should be able to do this on a mid range CPU with a 1050ti
plenty of games out now are as big as a world as xplane DCS which is also A SIM runs fine do you cant hide behind that
Indeed, performance is far too low in the current state. In combination with the downgraded graphic options (I really don’t want to talk about that again as others have done this discussion already), I can’t use XP11 for more than testing. The thing is, I tend to suffer from motion sickness if FPS are below 60 on a regular basis and there is no way of getting 60 fps out of my cpu (2600k, 4200MHz, 2133 MHz RAM) with the default C172 and low autogen. If I use my Carenado C152 I lose 10 more fps…
In X-Plane 10 I get all that and have better visuals too – because of the autogen. Setting ‘low’ in XP11 schows many streets, some trees and almost no buildings.
(Please, don’t tell me I should buy a new CPU. The much newer 6700k is, in best case, about 30% faster than mine (overclocked with fastest compatible RAM) – in theory. My comparisons with others having one of the recommenden 6600k/6700k show me that those CPUs deliver almost the same performance in XP11 as my older one does.)
Right. If you _need_ 60 fps, you are just totally screwed. If you want to run at 30 fps you can get a _lot_ of detail. But as you ‘unload’ the sim to try to get higher fps, you’re just going to hit a wall.
I’ve been meaning to write a complete blog post about this, it’s a big topic for the comments section.
Please note that losing 10 fps with a third party 152 is _not_ something that I can actually do anything about. We can make the core engine as fast as possible, and we provide our art team with a lot of guidance about how to make the default planes fast relative to the amount of content they contain.
We have no way of stopping third parties from making “heavy” planes without totally locking down the sim, and we are pretty committed to making X-Plane “open” as a platform.
I don’t blame you for the Carenado’s performance. It’s just an example for my problems with XP11 because I really like those planes I got and they are performing great in XP10. And, THIS is my problem: I don’t see why XP11 is so much slower and I am still suspecting it could do much better if I just could turn off the now default ‘extended DSF’ setting. This setting brought my fps down in XP10 to a level where I am in XP11 now. I don’t think this single option would mess up your new concept for graphics adjustment. And, of course, if a new CPU would help me out, I would buy one. But, I don’t expect very large steps in the near future of CPU development because in the last 6 years there was almost no increase regarding single thread performance (I need about 100% more fps in XP11). So, if your further engine optimization does not help me out, I can most like start to really enjoy XP11 in five years.
So, as I am stuck with XP10 for a while… will it still get updated global airports?
the issue is the auto gen and clouds that is what kills frame rate and that just isn’t acceptable in 2017
also texture loads choke the cpu out …
xplane is a 3d application no different from any other hiding behind “its a sim” only makes you look bad
plenty of modern games have massive open worlds
bottom line your engine is old and your hanging on to programming ideas from 20 years ago
and vulkan won’t save you
GTX 970 and I get 60 in congested areas like KMIA (clear weather). As heavy weather takes a toll on my system. There is a crazy amount of autogen, and it never ran like this in xp10. The jump is almost from night to day. Mark F there is obviously problem with your hardware setup or it may be you are running a TP plugin that inhibits your performance. All I can say is that with that arrogant attitude you might as well go back to using FSX and go pound sand when you need support. Ben has always been helpful and really cares about resolving performance issues. Shame on you
I believe there are serious configuration factors affecting the sim…what users like you who have good perf can do is share your detailed configs, e.g. on the x-plane forums or something, and then users with fps problems can try them verbatim.
When I get the FPS test working, y’all can also compare an Apples-to-Apples test to check for machine-specific issues.
My ‘old’ iMac with a 780M graphics card gives me better performance (by-and-large) using X-Plane 11 than on X-Plane 10. I am personally amazed by the performance of X-Plane 11, FPS-wise :). There are still annoying bugs that shouldn’t be in a ‘shipping’ product, but hey, I’ll live! I think XP11 is a great achievement and LR should be proud – now go fix my bug reports 🙂
Anyone with FPS issues should give a try to XP11Settings, which restores a lot of missing features and user settings.
http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/36925-rendering-options-for-xp11/
Anyone GRUMPY that I took your settings away should try it, too! The settings.txt file was specifically left in a reasonable form and art controls were specifically NOT nailed down when possible so that “you settings nerds” could have a way to do what you want (which is apparently 75% settings tweaking, 25% flight ;-).
And…no one should ever tell me about problems with X-plane while using it. My fingers are in my ears, I can’t hear you, al la la!
Not sure who is that rant directed at. I was just pointing to a brand new popular mod, which has made many people happy again with XP11.
And if I wanted to be mean with you, I would have said that we wouldn’t have to spend 75% of our time tweaking if the default settings were actually usable. Instead you alone decided what you thought was best for us and our (not so) high-end configurations.
Hi Patrice,
I think you mis-interpreted my tone a bit here. I am _glad_ that the mod exists and that people are using it and enjoying it. I am in favor of it, and anyone who is happy when using it and not happy when not using it should use it and enjoy X-Plane.
My goal has never been to make x-plane “untweakable” – if that was the goal, the art controls would all be gone and settings.txt would be encrypted.
My goal has been to make tweaking something that people opt into when they want to do it, not something they stumble into when setting up the basic sim, which is pretty much what the entire v10 run was.
And you would be _absolutely right_ to say “we wouldn’t have to spend 75% of our time tweaking if the default settings were actually usable” – I consider “needs to spend 75% tweaking the sim to make it usable” to be a huge problem with X-Plane, one that it’s my responsibility to fix.
Will I be able to download the 11.01 beta if I check the “beta box” when checking for updates? I’m running a second install for testing new updates anyways. As XP11 progresses I’m looking forward to learning more about using plane maker and WED. Just waiting for things to settle down over the upcoming months. Keep up the awesome work!
Favorite line – “It’s not a game! its a physics simulator”
Yes, once 11.01 beta 1 is out, the “beta” checkbox in the installer will be mandatory to get betas.
Hello Ben,
Will 11.01 fix rendering bugs like clouds flashing (mostly with broken and overcast sky) and clouds transparency of grounds lights at night, or you listed them for future updates?
Best Regards
Thanks guys, great work. Any more default airports planned for 11.01?
11.01 or 11.02 – I need to coordinate w Julian. We want to get a WED 1.6b2 out that is enabled for gateway upload and ‘collect’ stuff people have waiting in the wings that use the new ground trucks. Ted fixed some major WED b1 bugs last week, so we’re close to b2. I told Julian if 11.01 was done and we didn’t have the airports ready, I’d do an 11.02 for the gateway.
Good news for WED ! (And very good work for the team, never mind if framerate is down or up 🙂 Beta is beta . But the last update (yesterday X plane 11.00, wed can’t load in custom scenery LFMN because is saying “no orthophoto” and i haven’t orthophoto in my scenery. i have only all my own textures files .pol (DDS) and .lin in a directory (Poly). So i’m waiting the WED b2.
Ben – Any idea what the timetable from WED update release to Gateway/X-Plane release? Trying to gauge how hard I need to work on some airports I have partially finished.
Thanks!
“Real Soon Now™”. Ted’s looking at an export bug that has to get fixed for 160b2, but I could cut 160b2 tomorrow. And 160b2 _could_ be “live for the gateway” if nothing hosed happens. We’ve been pretty disciplined about not dumping 10 tons of gunk into beta 2, so I’m hoping it will be stable.
You should maybe trash your perfs, be sure to get the latest nVidia drivers and start again with “medium” settings and go up while watching your average FPS.
By the way, the Titan XP is not even on the shelves, or is it ? 90% of simers provably don’t care as we don’t have that kind of money to spend on such an expensive card…
And I say kudos to Ben and his few coworkers for the hard work. You should know coding complex things is… Complex. And they will start performance improvments soon enough.
You can also complain to the boss, Mr. Meyer, about the need for more devs on the project and his business model as he is running things.
Sorry Ben for the desguised rant…
I can’t complain to Austin – we hired two new devs – one started already (and is KICKING ASS) and the other starts in June.
This sounds great to me… as I am starting scenery creating, I’m currently hampering around with the problems of manual autogen editing. If WED could handle streets, railways, autogen strings creating great scenery other than airports would be much easier. And… as your team grows, I hope this can be implemented some day.
I recently spotted that my laptop with 860M performs 6-10% better that my desktop with GTX980 on the same settings in the same spot using the same plane (and the same system, win7). Does XP11 automatically make changes in the settings based on the hardware? If so it does that badly.
Not with that hardware it does not. If you have really bottom-end hardware, there are options you can’t get.
Beware of “Apples to Apples” comparison – a LOT of variables in the sim are randomized – e.g. if the birds randomly show up, you’re not showing the same frame! (Nvidia complained to us about this because their auto-testing of x-plane in their test system was showing random results since the birds were, um, photo-bird-bombing the fps test).
I’ll get the FPS test packed up so people can run _controlled_ experiments. (The fps test de-randomizes the weather, kills the birds, and takes other actions to get REPEATABLE results. Getting repeatability is hard enough that I would not expect anyone to be able to do it without the command line.)
Of all things I could have thought of to hurt performance, I would not have expected birds.
Is there a tuneable to turn them off (like in XP10)?
Turn off random failures and they won’t show up randomly.
But even so gtx980 is 3 times more powerful than 860m, also my desktop CPU is 3930k vs 4710HQ on the laptop. Birds and deers shouldn’t make the desktop slower than the laptop (and I tested it with no clouds as well). BTW, on both machines Threaded Optimization is off in the NV control panel.
I have a 1070 and I get 30+ fps in the most dense scenery like NYC with all paywarr addons.. Don’t be so dramatic.. Check ur system first..
Gamma of prop discs? The whole sim is dark, as if surfaces aren’t reflecting bounced light. Simple freeware releases show cockpits as dark pits. I’m still trying to understand how spill lights differ between 10 and 11 — it’s like they need a 10X’s boost in power.
Anyway, the performance cleanup for the RC was pretty amazing.
Spill lights have not changed.
I’ve found that the only proper way to make instruments lighting is to use LIGHT_PARAM lights for each Plane Maker instrument. But even so this method will work only in HDR mode.
Or you can just bake your lighting. Everything in 3-d gets a _LIT channel, including the panel. Use generic instrumetns in mode glass to put baked lighting in, NOT the legacy x-plane 6 “night” lighting.
I’m sorry Ben, maybe I’m too stupid. But how can I make for instance default horizon_90_pitch instrument lit? The moving part of it is always dark, even in Additive mode
If it’s a default instrument and it doesn’t light up you can’t do it. You can build an artificial horizon out of generics. If you’re seeing the generics have a pitch limit, ping me by email and I’ll investigate.
Waiting, meanwhile this satisfied with X-Plane 11, used purely, no third-party modifications.
I have sent some bug reports about adjustments in aircraft, some more serious found mainly in 747-400, I hope they are repaired.
On Windows Creators, X-Plane thanks Game Mode, in Windows 10 version 1703 build 15063.14, substantial gain in fps ( I game for red team, hardware AMD).
I do not understand what happens with users who cry all the time, complaining about poor performance,
What is the expected frequency for updates now that is out of beta?
_Major_ patches every 6 months, small ones more frequently.
Everyone confirms that a 1070 is like a 1080 or 1080 ti and you are satisfied ? Oh Jesus, zibo did a much better job in 1 month than LR in 2 years and he his only a modder.
Give Zibo the code keys and in 2 months we will have 156 fps and decent 2017 clouds.
Wow! Really? What else can “Zibo” do? Ensure world peace or resurrect Elvis Presley?
I always knew that we all are suffering from the great Laminar Research Conspiracy. LR just hired two more agents supporting the team to intentionally slow down our PCs. I know that Zibo just invented Star Trek’s Holodeck. Thank god that Ben was able to counter this – one second before the end of the count down!
156 regards per second,
Marc
I appreciate the polite tone of your answer but those 2 new hires should have come waaaaay before the final release which btw has been priced 60 bucks to have a game which is like 10 years ago fsx, cpu only.
Then, when you are famous and rich you have to take critics on board above all if a game is 90% cpu based in 2017, just like Fsx was 11 years ago
I think you should complain to Zibo apparently he is the fixit man… Lol
PC 12 Autopilot after enable hard turn left and crashed. Worked perfect last days !!!
It sucks really. Why you ship these rubbish????
Finall i could say nothing is working proper after release. All aircraft today have big bugs. Biggest problem is the autopilot. So for me XP11 is not longer useable. I dont’t know what you have done. Really you ship that ??? I want fly and not get bugs bugs bugs !!! Copy ??? I want come home after work and want a solid IFR flight…and…bug bugs bugs….
But hey…no XP10 plane is compatible to XP11. Well done !!!
I am out !!!
So we will see if the users will pay that pill ! I not ! For me it seemed that the biggest plan was to get a new system for new planes to generate more money from the users ??? Yes ok but…where i get a plane with no bugs ?
Hi John,
I need you to limit yourself to one post and not multiple consecutive posts. Going forward I am not going to approve “3 in a row” like this – please compose all of your thoughts into a single comment.
cheers
Ben
Yes, Give Zibo the code keys and in 2 months we will have 156 fps and decent 2017 clouds.
There is a huge difference between modding an aircraft (what Zibo seems to have done very well) and programming a simulator with endless terrain, millions of objects, viewed from very high and very low altitudes, very variable light and weather conditions, that runs not only on lots of different hardware but also on 3 different OS.
Do you think Ben and his collegues are lazy? Or stupid? Or maybe they hate their users and want to annoy them with low fps?
Or is it -maybe- not as easy as some people think?!?
Sorry, don’t want to offend you, but let us make the performance discussion objective and realistic again…
Isn’t it about time everyone realises that X-Plane11 is a step change up from X-Plane10? So you have to reset your computer (a good cleanout really helps and with a new clean set of preferences) or at least look at your computer’s specifications and actually adjust your sliders before expecting X-Plane11 to behave like X-Plane10?
Some of these comments are just getting simply ridiculous and certainly separates the pros from the illiterates and is no reflection on the current situation of X-Plane11 at the moment. X-PlaneReviews
As far as fps goes, 11.0 is a huge improvement over xp10 on my system. 30fps min…and looking gorgeous…All the haters need to tone down the negativity! Ben and his team have knocked it out of the park. Sure, there are bugs; but it will all get worked out…sad to see any ill words towards the laminar team when the sim is, clearly, the most cohesive and advanced modern sim thus far….keep up the good work!! Looking forward to seeing it all ironed out over the next beta run! Stay positive, folks! 🙂
I agree. I fly on 3×27″ with 5760×1080 resolution on almost max details on GTX1070 with vsync locked to 30 Hz and I am able to get smooth 30fps in almost every situation. For me XP11 is definitely a step up from XP10, not just in visuals but in overall performance as well. I would recommend to everyone to look for issues on their individual systems (and think about what you’re doing and setting!) instead of ranting on the devs.
@devs: Thank you for your hard work, we all appreciate it very much! Can’t wait to see what more is XP11 going to bring! So far is great!
Hi,
As I don’t play games, I have a fairly powerful machine but with a low-end graphics card. Although XP11 is playable with my current rig, I would like to ramp up my graphics a bit. Any suggestions for a mid-priced graphics card? I don’t want something expensive but good value for money which is adapted to XP11’s needs and will give me something better than what I have now.
I currently have an Asus V8-P8H67E barebone with a i7-3770 CPU, 16GB ram and a NVIDIA 640 GT with 1 GB (blush). Also my PSU is only 350w.
Thanks,
Alex.
Get a GTX 1060 6GB (or at least a used GTX 970 – about half the price but just a bit less powerfull) and a PSU with about 550W to 600W – that should be fine. My GTX 970 is not a bottleneck and could manage fps around 60 regarding the gpu frametimes but some more VRAM like the 1060 6GB provides it, could be helpfull in the future (my measurements show that more than 3 GB are used regularly with high graphics quality and texture settings).
Thanks for the info
Just to let you know I just won an e-bay auction for the Gigabyte GTX-970! Cheers.
Good work, Ben! Going through all the comments, I just think that it is really a good idea for those simmers with good fps to share your rendering configurations and computer specs. I too upgraded my computer just hoping to enjoy the most out of X Plane in terms graphics. Now running Ryzen 1800x (I know, the most suitable is 7700K, but I overclocked to 4.0 GHz, about the same single core capability as 4.3 Ghz 7700k) and GTX 1080, but I only get 20fps with default Cessna and no plugins, with reflection maxed out and all other one level before max.
Anyway, knowing that there is a team constantly working on improving X Plane, I’m more than satisfied and willing to hold my breath for any further updates!
It seems the reflection detail is what’s really killing most people. Most folks have it turned all the way off, or rather low. Try that. Also, get GPU-Z and monitor your GPU’s usage and play around with the settings until you find graphics configuration that balances CPU/GPU load. X-Plane is definitely one of those titles where you can’t just put everything to max and expect it to be smooth as butter in every situation.
Reflection detail off vs low makes a HUGE difference. When it’s all the way down, the environment reflections are nearly static; when they are at any higher setting, _one_ face is recalculated per frame, for an update at 1/6th the framerate.
For any machine that is bound on the CPU cost of drawing “stuff”, this can be what pushes someone over the edge…hence my buyers remorse at leaving that setting for people to go nuts with. (As you crank it up the WATER reflection starts to gain ‘stuff’, again charging you more objects.)
In the long term I expect this to get a LOT better:
– There are ways to draw the entire reflection in a single pass – this isn’t any faster than one frame at a time but it’s a huge jump in the quality.
– There are ways to lower the cost per draw call quite a bit more.
– There are ways to draw the entire set of shadow maps in one shot.
My hope is that with all of these, shadows and reflections won’t be out of reach on max autogen.
Indeed, off vs any higher settings makes a huge difference (about 6-10 fps gain). Glad to hear better shadows and reflections strategies are on the list, and looking forward to that patch coming (in the long run or not)!
Some of these comments really have me wondering..
i was initialyl put of XP11 by expecting it to bee too hard on my hardware, but when XP11 came out of beta installed it to have a look see.
it`s running on my Laptop with a NTX 970M surprisingly well!
I set the sliders to something i thought be quite high settings:
Visaul Effects = MAX
Texture Qual = MAX
Antialiasing = FXAA (was saving here)
World Objects = High
Reflection Detail = Minimal
Draw Parked Aircrat = On
and get stable 30+FPS even in highly populated areas. For me number of objects adds much more reaslism than max antialiasing, reflections would be nice but are just too heavy for this box but oh well got to make some trade-offs.
I was especially surprised that Clouds and rain really didn`t drop my FPS as much as the XP10 clouds did which fozed a move to SMP there…
Now this is only the Laptop, i doubt i could yet run the 3 Beamer 210FOV setup we use in our cockpit sim on XP11, but i`m looking forward to upgrading once i can pry loose the budget from my boss 😀
I’m going to chime in here and say a big thankyou to the LR team for X-Plane 11. I endured a 36 hour download for the full download, but was well worth it. While waiting for the download, I read the online user manual and was very impressed with the information in there that was clear, easily understandable and I learnt a lot about setting radios, autopilot etc and filled in a few knowledge gaps. Once finally getting to fire up the sim, I noticed the new UI is very slick, a massive improvement. Setting up the controllers was straight forward, and in no time I was dialling in rendering settings. The improvement in graphics quality, particularly lighting and fog was very impressive and in no time was up in the air and flying. 9 hours later and im still very impressed! A huge improvement overall over XP10. Again, thank you. Keep up the great work!
I tell you one…for me i don’t care now about FPS i will fire it up next week with an OctaCore 4,4 GHZ.
The main problem is that we have a final version with so many elementar system bugs!
Example load departure procedure in the FMS or GPS. After airborne engage AP. After that the plane make a full hard bank wide over 90 Degrees into the ground. Another point it’s overshoting waypoints and fly somewhere else. That is totally not ok !!!
Stock aircraft 737/747 etc. !
Thats whats absolutly killing my fun to fly.
Animals cross highspeed the runway and airfield.
And other points read above.
I write many weeks ago: First of all build is… get a working nav system.
Sorry for no mercy… but beta is done. And i hate IFR flights with much paperwork before and then get crash due to these bugs bugs bugs. IFR is difficult enough…so don’t mess with these systems.
I also watched some YouToube XP11 Review Videos…i heard every time speaking in flight…ähm that is not working… thats not working…
Release 2 months to early…
If only PMDG were in… we would have working fmcs within xplane…
we already have – it seems you’re not knowing what your talking about – have wonderful simulation of complex aircrafts here with working CDU/FMC
LR is doing a great job
John, John, John my man! This is a developers forum, some of us follow this blog for news that supports code development and punctuating the blog with rants is annoying, so for trivial issues such as IFR difficulty, try FSFLYING School from the org store.
You’re better served by filling bug reports and also check out the X-Plane.org community forums for problems that others have found and solved, plus folks there have a great track record for assistance.
Keep up the amazing work guys!
You bring so much hope and inspiration to enthusiasts all over the world 🙂
It is possible to either run in a CPU limited configuration or in a GPU limited one.
But there is room for improvement as long as the configuration is CPU limited, but half of the CPU cores are idle.
Yep – this is why we care most about improving efficiency overall, as opposed to trying to support SLI, for example. Our first steps are always to improve efficiency with what we have and improve utilization.
I have a quad core potato, X-plane runs, I am happy 🙂
Ben,
I apologize if this has been asked someplace else but I could not seem to find it. Do you have plans to upgrade / improve the C SDK. I have not thought of all the things that it might need but clearly the UI controls could use a rework to support the X-Plane 11 look and feel. Can you share any plans?
Mark
We’re thinking sort of short term long term, e.g.
Short term: make it possible to have floating plugin windows and multi-monitor “at all”.
Long term: allow plugins to leverage our UI framework.
That second one is long term because it’s a longer UI and we don’t want to hold back pop-out plugins for a long time.
–Road traffic density. 0 (off) to 5 (very dense)
set( “sim/private/controls/reno/draw_cars_05”, 0.00)
— Draw fft water
set( “sim/private/controls/reno/draw_fft_water”, 0.00)
Maybe this could help a little.
I use this two datarefs in XP11 and notice that with them set to zero I have gained 20FPS, the first one sets cars to 0, not that big of an issue only 5FPS, so cars are not a FPS hog, but the second one, oh my GOD 15FPS just for waves in the water, this is to much. I can leave without waves for 15FPS.
Ben maybe you can look at waves animation and see why it hurts FPS so much, I know this is CPU bound.
My sistem:
– I7 4790K @4.6ghz
-16Gb Ram 1866Mhz
-GTX 1080 8Gb
-Samsung SSD 256gb for XP11
-Win 10 x64
Great work with the new XP, and maybe you can add this 2 option int the UI for people to turn ON or OFF!
Hi Albert,
RE: the water…
1. Do you have the threaded NV driver _off_?
2. From what fps to what fps did you go by killing the water?
The water is dirt cheap, but if your cores get over-subscribed by a food-fight between the NV driver and us, then everything becomes stupidly expensive.
The FPS baseline matters – 15 fps is a HUGE improvement if you used to have 15 fps (you’ve cut 33 ms from the frame time – whoa!) 15 fps if you were at 85 fps is 1.7 ms…I’d never ignore it but it’s clearly not the same jaw-dropping change.
Yes, I have turned off thread optimization!
My test:
-Clear skyes
-Time 12PM
Sitting at default EGLL on RWY 27R in the default 738 with engines running, from 37 FPS to 52FPS with Draw fft water OFF
Visual Effects = High(HDR)
Texture Quality = Maximum
Antialiasing = 4 xSSAA+FXAA
Number of world objects = HIGH
Reflection Details = Minimal
Draw parked Aircraft = OFF
Shadow on Scenery = OFF
Allow windshield effect = ON
Use Vsync = ON
Lateral field of View = 75.0
AI Traffic = 0
I can confirm this, disabling “draw_fft_water” gives huge FPS boost for me, from 40fps to 67 at KBDN with default 737, in windowed mode. I7 3930k, 32GB, GTX980 4gb, win7
And what’s more, on my laptop same setting same conditions I got almost no FPS boost, from 50 to just 52FPS with “draw_fft_water” off! It does seem that this thing is the culprit of my FPS problems. Laptop has I7 4710HQ, 12GB, GTX860M 2GB (+ Intel HD4600), win7
Hi Denis,
We found this internally. On NVidia drivers with the threaded driver off, the glTexSubImage2D that pushes the new FFT ot the GPU has to do an expensive format conversion, and it’s taking 5 ms of frame time(!).
Weirdly this operation is lightning fast on OS X and AMD drivers. My guess is that NVidia figured that apps would run the threaded driver and the actual format conversion would be on their worker thread. Since AMD doesn’t use a parallel driver thread and Apple’s is almost never used, they probably either schedule a worker to just do the format conversion or use the GPU to do it. (On OS X it’s definitely on the CPU on a worker – dunno what AMD really does).
So…this is pretty easy for us to fix. We can change format convert on our worker thread, or change to a format that doesn’t require conversion, or even do all of the above and use a PBO to make everything async. Sidney found the problem and he’s going to see how much better he can make it.
Thanks for pointing this out! Unfortunately it’s only going to help NV Windows users. That’s a big win – that’s over a third of our paying users on one driver stack, and the biggest single segment, but AMD users need a perf win on the CPU more, and on AMD this isn’t costing us anything.
So this means I helped finding a bug?? This make me happy! 🙂
I would _not_ call it a bug, but I would call it a good chance for performance optimization, so it was absolutely useful.
This might not be clear from my (sometimes ranty) tone in the discussions about settings, but if someone decides to “go tweak” x-plane via the art controls or settings.txt and finds that a certain tweak makes a huge difference, that _is_ interesting to us and we do take interest and pay attention to that feedback.
Sometimes these are things we would have found ourselves, sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes we can make the same tweak, sometimes we can’t because it has a side effect we can’t live with in the “general case” of the whole sim, and sometimes the tweak gives us ideas for changes in the engine.
Hi Ben,
Thanks for xp11, I think it looks great, the new fog/ atmosphere gives great feeling of depth, especially during sunset/sunrise & the PBR really adds to the aircraft.
2 questions
1. Has the option disappeared for lock frame rate to refresh rate of monitor in xp11?
I used to find that my sim would run nicely at either 1/2 the refrsh rate at 30fps or 60fps when I ticked that setting in xplane 10 to lock the refresh rate.
2. I also changed from a nvidia 750ti 2gb to an amd rx480 8gb, i find since changing the card that even in xplane 10 with the same settings the sim isn’t as smooth, almost like it’s skipping a frame every 10 frames or so, even though I’m getting between 25-35 on the ground in most planes, 50+ above 10k feet.
Is that something to do with the AMD opengl driver performance vs Nvidia?
I’m guessing the amd card will perform much better after the vulkan port anyway but was just curious on these two questions.
Cheers.
1. v-sync is still there – look at rendering settings — it might be called “v-sync” instead of “lock refresh rate”.
2. The NV and AMD drivers certainly have different performance characteristics. On my (older i5 2500) machine NV cards regularly outperform AMD ones (around 30 fps AMD, 40 fps NV) when the sim isn’t massively overloaded and fill rate is not a factor (e.g. in a window).
My hope is that as we modernize our code and move to Vulcan both driver stacks will be both faster and smoother.
OpenGL makes _no_ guarantees about framerate smoothness – and we do a bunch of things that are pretty bad stutter-wise. So as we start to clean this up things should get incrementally better.
Will X-plane 11 support multi-threade processors? the fact that x-plane is a single-threaded game that affect performance a lot
As I have said many times before: it’s not single threaded – it’s already multi-threaded.
The issue is that the _evenness_ of those cores isn’t very good – only some computing tasks can use all of the cores. So we are working to spread more work over ALL of the cores.
Ohhhh. I didn’t know that. Thanks guys, the game is already awesome now, if you do that it would be the best thing ever. Keep going, you are doing great.
Yes go ahead…it’s terrible to see what happend to an OctaCore. Uses 1 core with 50%. So finally it doesn’t matter how many cores we have ?
Please describe XPlane11 workflow with the cores ?
And why Xplane11 don’t use all resourches of the CPUs (50%)?
I am running Linux … all power available.
Cheers
I don’t know what’s going on if you see that. You should see more than one core fully used. X-Plane uses one full core (plus any driver threads) for the main scene render. It uses additional cores for all resource loading, any AI planes, and per-frame preparation (E.g. managing the scenery, car driving, water, etc).
Look, based on the complaining you’ve put up here, my current conclusion is: your system is totally screwed up. The performance you see is massively worse than most other users have reported – that should be obvious from the comments. So if you see really low mult-core use, tat’s NOT us using too few cores (a real problem, but not YOUR problem) – it’s a symptom of whatever is going wrong on your system.
This is apples to penguins, but it might clarify.
On my 2010 8 core Mac Pro, x-plane will use all cores+hyperthreading for initial load then during use 100-200% distributed randomly across the cores w/o hyperthreading (with 2 air planes), occasionally spiking for scenery loads.
My guess is there isn’t much for the other cores to do while the waiting for the next iteration of the main render loop/everything to be shoved to the GPU.
On a sufficiently fast i7 that can get through the loop fast, you are more likely to peg the other cores.
Our octocores can run a blender render in the background and a few vms while running x-plane… but unless Austin/Ben figure out a way to make the loop embarrassingly parallel (you know, make a huge breakthrough in computer science) we are limited by our low single core performance.
I would say right now it is embarrassingly serial!
Hey Ben,
First I usually post as John, but that’s taken. You can look at my email and see that I’m usually even keeled.
Second, thank you for several years of blog posts. It’s helped me understand x-plane, my hardware and a lot more about how conputers work.
I picked up an EVGA GTX 1060 for my Mac Pro (2010) yesterday using the beta nvidia drivers. I am very obviously CPU and Bus speed limited here. Only picked it over the 1050ti for extra vram. I understand that I am running a surprise configuration that you couldn’t have anticipated.
Does have nividia /something/ in the box already turn on instancing or tesselation or is that something you’d have to adapt to the pascal driver?
Does Mac x-plane support turning off driver threading? I can futz with that if it does.
I get that reflections incur more CPU drawing, I’ll crank that down. Also, I see that there are utilities to manage the config file… I’ll test with that.
Can you remind me though, are shadows shader based or do they incur cpu penalty too?
My findings with the new card vs the 5870 are thus;
1. I can’t cause a 1fps slideshow. With everything cranked it gets to 10-20, but the UI is responsive instead of stuck
2. Moderate fps increase if I lower the resolution.
I take it then my bottlenecks are Bus then CPU, then GPU?
I am amazed this runs at all btw so none of this is criticism.
What I gather from this is that if I were to buy a new system I’d be looking for:
Newest i7 (not necessarily fastest) with most L2/L3
Overclocked but without slowing the Bus and raising the multiplier
SSD nice to have
As much money left over to throw at nvidia as I can, but don’t bother with a 1080ti unless I am pushing 3 displays or 4K.
If that’s true, the perf problems are not your fault their Moore’s law at this point.
If a 10 Ghz system (with fast enough Bus) fell out of the sky tomorrow, x-plane would run great on it. Not because of any particular flaws of x-plane, but that’s the factor you need to catch up with our visual system.
I guess the only wiggle room my system would have is if you could offload more geometry to the card or if OpenGL was less… bad.
Thanks!
To answer a few specific questions:
– Instancing should just be on – the hardware supports it (and has for a long time), the driver exposes it, and we use it (since x-plane 10!!). We do not (yet) use tessellation.
– On OS X, there’s no driver threading unless the _app_ turns it on, and we do not ever do this. So nothing for you to check.
– Shadows eat CPU more than GPU fill rate – GPUs fill shadows very quickly, and there can be some odd-ball ways you might get bound up on shadows, but the big cost is multiple passes over the scenery on the CPU, once for each shadow layer. Turning off scenery shadows “lightens” this by drawing only the user’s airplane those multiple times.
Thanks!
I did a comparison with x-plane 10 and it never gets past 35 fps with everything way turned down. My 5870 could get 50fps with truly minimal settings, so I am guess nvidia still has some driver work to do on the beta drivers!
I have an Octa Core 4.5 GHz times 8 = 36 GHz. So… 36 GHz are already fallen. And it’s not enough. 1050ti graphic card. 16GB Ram. So for me it’s clear that there are fundamental problems related to the code. It’s clearly! no user problem. Maybe it’s time to beware users to burn money into hardware for less improvements until there is no big performance update.
Cheers
Ok, someone lied to you. 4.5 Ghz * 8 = 4.5 Ghz.
There are some tasks in computing that are “embarrassingly parallel” see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel
In general, tasks that involve:
1. Single instruction, multiple data (ie, go multiple x by 2cos^x a billion times)
2. Lots of calculations that don’t depend on eachother’s results
3. Input/output that is not sensitive to ordering
4. Data that fits cleanly inside of caches
Can be broken up and spread across cores trivially. Ray tracing, video encoding, video card shaders, etc.
Sometimes you can take operations that are pretty fast and throw them on another core then use those results for a slow process. For instance, calculate where an ai plane is and the forces on it between 2 frames. Update its location and send that to the render loop. Or loading more scenery into ram.
The thing you are looking for is more frames per second. In essence, you want x-plane to do all of its calculations 60 times a second.
Ok let’s pretend you had a 60 core Xeon, you just delay each core 1/60th of a second. Right?
1. The loop might last longer than 1/60th of a second (right? Otherwise you’d do it on one core) introducing controller lag, even if the display was smooth.
2. But you can’t even do that. Each core would need to tell each successive core the full results of every calculation which would overwhelm the system Bus… or you’d have to write everything out to ram and read it back in, which is suuuuper slow.
Most of the possible parallelism possible is already being done on the graphics card. LR is adding it where it can, but due to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_slowdown you’ll never ever see something like “single 36 Ghz equivalent performance”
There are some gains to be had though, Vulcan offers some parallelism, and I’d kill for a 4.5 Ghz base clock instead of 2.4 GHz. You might have bad drivers or other system settings that are causing problems. It’s worth looking into.
Right – this gets to the heart of the “60 fps problem” – in the past, we have aimed at making sure that within a 30 ms window, a LOT of stuff gets done so you can see a lot of scenery. But turning down the settings doesn’t linearly cut down that work to fit into 15 ms. We need to focus on shortening the end-to-end frame time to hit 60 fps, not just improving “throughput”, which is where we have focused in the past.
For example, in v10 we implemented hardware instancing and our capacity for models-per-frame went up by about 10x. But if a given scene used to take 25 ms in the old code, it would not run in 2.5 ms with the new code – it would just run in 25 ms at 10x the objects. It was an optimization for capacity, not frame time. (It was a big win because you could max out the autogen slider without killing fps, but it didn’t cut total frame time.)
The big wins of Vulkan are:
– We do the locks. We know in our app that we don’t need a lock in a LOT of cases – we designed our engine so the main rendering thread runs lock free and the loading work waits, for high speed smooth fps. But in OpenGL the driver has to lock for us and might lock out the rendering thread. While this isn’t the biggest cause of hitching, it has to be fixed to hit a smooth locked 60 fps.
– Expensive operations are clearly labeled. With OpenGL, you never know what operation is slow unless you try it on all driver stacks.
– No hidden work. All of the loading work is done by API calls. OpenGL sometimes has to do extra work due to the consequences of API calls – this makes it hard to guarantee that work is done outside of the main frame loop.
– Parallel rendering – it is actually possible to encode GPU command buffers in parallel, so if a frame is limited by “it just takes 20 ms to encode the frame” you can hope to break it in half, do each half separately, and then send them both out consecutively when done.
While parallel command encode is exciting – it is not available in OpenGL – I think there are more fundamental engine changes we need to make first, e.g. I want to see how long that command encode takes after we get rid of locks, have all work out of the frame, etc.
Well this is nothing new. There are algorithms that can run in parallel, and other algorithms can´t. And there are many problems that will never be solved in parallel.
Thats the big problem with the bigger multi core machines. You must have the right kind of problems for these machines, otherwise they make no sense.
Right – this is why it’s not “free” performance the way faster clock is. In cases of games, the change to multi-core is pretty much a complete rewrite. That’s why it’s been a long term process for us and not “oh hi, in 10.40 we’re multi-core.”
Ben, I did a testflight across the Alps from EDDS to LSZL, half the way overcast, with the frame hungry Carenado B200 and with UHD global sceney installed.
Setting draw_fft_watre to 0.0 [set( “sim/private/controls/reno/draw_fft_water”, 0.00)] indeed let to an impressive fps increase.
It worked in EDDS also, without a lot of water objects around.
Maybe this result is some food for your thoughts.
When is 11.01 coming out?
Thank you brother Ben!
If you can do without cockpit shadows try this and you’ll see a good boost in FPS
sim/private/controls/caps/use_csm:0.000000
Yyyyyep – that turns off shadows completely. Faster, but I’m not a fan of the trade-off…at some point I don’t like to see X-Plane 11 look like X-Plane 9. We do have some ideas that will make shadows significantly faster, at least, we hope.
Isnt it a perfect time for another topic now Ben?
Im lying in my sunbed in spain and constantly refreshing this page hopping for next blog entry to appear with loads of comments to read 🙂
What about future G1000 (IFR approach ) support for the skyhawk? or is this something you leave for i.e carenado? Or what about how you in the team colaborate? i heard you all are working remote? .
Thanks for all the work you all contribute to in this sim!