X-Plane 11.50 Public Beta 1: Vulkan and Metal Are Here

418 comments on “X-Plane 11.50 Public Beta 1: Vulkan and Metal Are Here”

1. Thank you Ben & team. Going to give it a whirl by the weekend & install a 2nd x-plane copy.

   2 questions:
   1) what benefits should be very easily noticed? fps, stutters ( to a degree), graphics settings capability? I am on Mac

   2) are any new art assets like LA or St Louis included? If not when?

   thanks

   1. If you’re on a Mac, you should see better FPS if you are not GPU limited and less stutters all around.

      No new art – new art will be in a separate release so it isn’t over-shadowed by Vulkan/Metal. We _will_ push new airports in the next few weeks during the 11.50 run.

      1. Ok, thanks for the info Ben. Stay well to the team & family.

         1. Since the beta update. My game wont start with the minimum settings and before I was running hdr with everything set to High.

      2. Game won’t run minimal settings on my iMac since beta update

      3. Ben, can confirm. Immediately noticeable for me, I know you’re managing expectations, but this is like an entirely different game on the same exact hardware, at least for my context (imac pro/vega). So happy to see the GPU actually drawing wattage!

      4. When I got the beta it was first saying I needed at least the 440.26 version of nvidia. Which I did have. Then it went back to opengl thing. So I said fine and loaded up a plane. When it was done loading my second monitor was fine, but on my primary monitor was messed up. First problem was the normal view was only taking up part of the screen and the rest of the screen was a shady black with no scenery. All of the normal view settings were only taking up a portion of the screen. Secondly everything was very dark. The instruments were hard to see sometimes not even being there. And before yall say anything, yes I did go into the settings and graphics and tried to adjust the field of view and the screen dimension and it didn’t work. This was all going on while my second left monitor was doing fine. And, I’ve never got the vulkan to work at all once. I think it’s just a bug and I was just reporting it. My pc specs are
         32 gigs of ddr4 ram
         Rtx2060 (not super)
         Intel i7 8core processor
         And my main screen is a 24 watt hp
         So if any body reads this thanks for reading my long bug report and let me know if there is anything I can do to fix the problem. I’m back to running 11.41. I really want to try it. And if anyone has these same problems let me know because I want to know if I’m the only one with these problems.

         1. I got the same problem with Vulkan running it on two monitors the second monitor would only show 1/4 in size of the flight simulator, i’m running it with a 2080TI, believe it or not I think I’m running out of video memory? went back to 11.4 0.
            i7 9700, 32gig ddr, 2080ti

      5. Just tried the 10.50b1 via Steam, switched to Vulkan and I am getting 1fps on full detail and 20fps on max detail in VR with Vive 1. In the menu it seems to be locked to 45fps.

         This is a Quaddro P6000 GPU.

         What to do?

   2. sir just now i have upgrade xplane i just tick vulkan box then i got indication while loading opengl problem so again i started xplane its looking only black screen cant load more

      1. everyone goto your output folder and remove your preferences folder..
         this will reset your settings and fix any stuck loading problems

         1. tengo el mismo problema , hice lo que tu dijes pero el problema continua
            mi notebook es un dell intel core 7 gen

   3. OK so this is just funny… my system is OLD!
      I7 2600 3.4Ghz overclocked to 3.6
      16GB 1300MHZ ram
      GForce GTX1080ti

      I just did a Flight with Vulkan in VR..
      Stansted to Germany in Vatsim in the Zibo uk2000scenery with Max texture, Med Scenery and HRD On..

      Smoooooooth as silk hitting 55-60fps solid with no stutters….
      before I could only fly the defult 737 and 25fps.. What a RESULT good job guys!.

      I did notice a bottleneck in one of the CPU cores after 1 hr of flying… something leaking?

      Russ

      1. Hey, which vatsim client are you using? I’m hearing a lot of reports about model matching not working with vulkan turned on.

         Thanks

   4. Whenever I run vulkan it keeps telling me I’m out of vram. Appears to be associated with loading vr with the valve index. Runs fine without vr. I’m running a 2080ti / 9900k with a stripped fresh install of xplane.

      1. OH I don’t know about Valve, my game isn’t steam.

         what I did do tho was format the C drive and reinstall windows with updates OFF!!…. yup Off so the system is as basic as it can be.. then install Xplane and all drivers.. so far been flying 4 hr flights steady but with a slight increase on 1 core over time.. h1 plus

         1. This isn’t a Windows related problem, it’s an X-Plane issue. I’ve seen quite a few posts from people who run higher spec’d machine having more issues than people running low to mid level hardware. This seem to be especially true of computers running TI versions of Nvidia cards with more vram built in. Appears Laminar may be adjusting lower spec’d machines to run smoother and it’s causing issues with better hardware.

      2. I have a 2080 super, and my valve index work great in VR, so not a valve issue from my perspective. I7 7700k. My game is also not the steam version, it is the stand alone version.

2. I would like to express my frustration for the beta release to happen ONE DAY after April 1st. You`ve just missed a huge oportunity to mess with a lot of people.

   Never forget.

   🙂

   1. I feel you…we had multiple discussions about this, including whether to either ship on 4/1 or announce on 4/1 that we were shipping on 4/2, which would have been fantastic.

      As it turns out, we sort of dodged a bullet. On 4/1 while prepping the beta, I discovered that the latest Catalina update (out about a week) that we hadn’t tried yet actually destabilized the Metal version, and we jammed a work-around in at the 11th hour. If we had shipped on 4/1, we would have shipped with “crashes on AMD + metal + latest Catalina 100% of the time”, which isn’t great.

      1. You missed the chance to annonce: “For the first time in the life of X-Plane we manged to release an absolutely bug-free Beta release of X-Plane. Even loading times so exceptionally fast that we even dropped the built-in tetis you could play while shaders did compile in the background” 😉

3. Very disappointing that Win7 and 8.1 are not supported by LR although they and Nvidia are supporting Vulkan.
   Win7 is still getting updates (ESU).

   1. ESU for Win 7? Didn’t that end in January?

      It probably does work on 8.1? The main thing is we _know_ Vulkan does not work on Win7, and I can’t sanely tell my devs to delay real work to go build a win 7 dev machine from scratch to go look at it.

      1. The normal updates for home users ended in January. Until January 2023 there will be also ESU updates (for paying customers, but there are alternatives for home users). Win8.1 gets regulary support until January 2023.

         11.50b1 with Vulkan is crashing on Win7 , but Win7 and Nvidia drivers support Vulkan (e.g. the new DOOM Eternal only supports Vulkan but also runs officially on Win7).
         LOG says (driver is 442.50 with Vulkan 1.1.119):
         0:00:00.000 E/GFX/VK: Failed to allocate from memory index. Requirements: { 8847360, 1024, 82 }
         0:00:00.000 E/GFX/VK: Used memory type index: 7 (DEVICE_LOCAL_BIT (1))
         0:00:00.000 E/GFX/VK: Memory heap Usage: 33579008. Budget: 8470331392
         0:00:00.000 E/GFX/VK: Encountered error: VK_ERROR_OUT_OF_DEVICE_MEMORY
         …
         0:00:00.000 E/SYS: | Failed to allocate a GPU buffer
         …
         0:00:00.000 E/SYS: | (gfx_vk_memory_controller.cpp:354)

         It would be ok if support for 7 and 8.1 comes later (maybe with 11.51 or so). Can be also unofficially, but it should work. Anything else would be disappointing for me since I’m very curious about the new texture management. As you know X-Plane can’t get enough VRAM. 😉

         BTW: Win7 has still 26% market share.

         P.S.: could you contact me per mail? I’ve a question about LODs. I tried to contact the support on the XP11 homepage in January and made a bug report in February, but never got an answer.

         1. I’ll look for your help-scout ticket re: LOD…we’re really backed up in dev support tickets right now but I’ll try to get to it.

         2. For what it’s worth, Windows 7 is sitting at about 4.8% of X-Plane Windows users… compared to 93.0% Windows 10.

            1. Seriously? You wait until not to drop this little gem? If you knew that Windows 7 would not be supported, or even run, don’t you think it would have been nice to inform people in the months BEFORE the long awaited release?!

            2. To be honest with you, we didn’t know Windows 7 was broken until about a week ago when a tester reported it. We don’t test on Windows 7, it’s out of the update cycle from Microsoft and it’s highly recommended to upgrade. I understand that many people believe that Windows 7 was the last good OS, and I completely understand privacy concerns with regards to Windows 10. That being said though, it’s an outdated OS with no security updates unless you pay for them and the user base is vanishing fast. The fact is, yes, Vulkan the standard supports Windows 7. However, Windows 7 comes with an old WDDM version and different GPU memory management behaviour. And unfortunately that different behaviour is not compatible with how we wrote our Vulkan implementation, and without a test system on a dev machine we can’t even begin to figure out what’s going wrong.

            3. And, to be clear, Windows 7 is still supported in OpenGL mode.

            4. @Tyler Young
               I think you have your data from the optional telemetry data sent in XP11. I can only speak for me, I deactivated it and I think the chance that a Win7 user deactivates it is higher than a Win10 user. 😉
               And what about Linux users? They are a very small group since years but you support them.

               The worldwide marketshare of Win7 is constant since several months. As of April 2020 it’s 26%. In October 2019 it were 27%. So the vanishing is much slower than many expected.
               There are several possibilities for home users to get security updates. So for security reasons there is no need to switch to Win10 if you use this possibilites. And of course you can use Win7 and XP11 offline (my notebook is most of the time offline).

            5. We are not going to support Vulkan on Windows 7. That is not a good use of our dev time.

            6. @xp-flieger If Laminar’s own stats don’t convince you, feel free to look at Steam’s monthly survey and the recorded changes. Win7 adoption is dropping massively:
               https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

            7. @marius
               Of course I trust LR stats that Tyler said but I doubt it represents the real user base. Same for Steam. I mentioned the point why.

         3. Well, it’s disappointing that it seems that you won’t even take a look at it. 🙁
            Since you only seem to have Win10 dev machines, I fear that one of the next updates won’t work on Win7/8.1 and XP11 can’t be used anymore.
            I also fear that OpenGL performance may drop because everything could be optimized for Vulkan now.

            The first time you wrote about Vulkan was in 2016 (https:/2016/03/what-vulkan-means-to-developers/). At this time XP11 wasn’t announced yet. But when XP11 was released it was clear that it will get Vulkan. I think everyone (maybe including you developers) expected it much earlier.

            All in all not satisfying. If I can help with testing, I will of course. If it wouldn’t be possible to get it working for understandable reasons, it would be ok. But not even trying it (also later after the final release and first bug fixes of 11.50) is no solution. 🙁

            Regarding WDDM: Win8.1 also uses an old version (1.3; Win7 uses 1.1, Win10 currently 2.7). If it runs there, maybe 1.1 could be also possible. I’m not an expert but most changes in WDDM seem to be for DX12.

            1. Really if you choose to stay with an OS of the past you can hardly complain when future versions of the sim are released and you cannot use them. All these complaints from Windows 7 users are pointless. Either stick with 11.41 or bite the bullet and invest in a new machine and Windows 10 like the rest of us have if you want to keep up to date with the latest version.

            2. You don’t need to stick with 11.41 if you have win 7. You just can’t run Vulkan. It’s the same as if you have a GeForce 580 or Radeon HD 6900, or OS X 10.12.x. We expect all of these configs to keep running with OpenGL, and if they don’t, you can totally file a bug for that.

            3. @Alan
               Win7 is no OS of the past. Everything works still fine and it also gets security updates, drivers and programs. Why using Win10 and getting a lot of problems?
               Staying at 11.41 means always getting the annoying update messages. Turning off the internet means always getting annoying messages that there is no internet connection.
               And BTW: XP11 is still promoted to run under 7 and 8.1.

               @Ben
               Would you fix problems with Win7 and 8.1? And how? I think you don’t have any machines and dual boot or something like this costs too much time.

            4. X-Plane 11 does run on Windows 7, including 11.50. What doesn’t run is Vulkan, but the OpenGL renderer is still there. For what it’s worth, I have heard from multiple users that Vulkan does indeed run on Windows 8, like we had suspected.

   2. I can’t think of a reason not to update to Win10, honestly…

      1. I was at the RSA Conference iN San Fran a few weeks back and Microsoft were unnerved by people asking why they are “giving up” Win 7. Because even they don’t have enough developers to cover every iteration they have in the field.

         Move to Win 10, smile more and be happy its a supported OS 🙂

         1. Actually Windows 10 is the slowest Windows ever, according to Bill’s law: “Windows will always take the same time to boot, independently how fast your hardware became; we can keep up with it.” (this law is just my personal invention, BTW)
            And Windows collects all your local data and sends it to Microsoft. That’s why they gave out that botnet client for free…
            I always had compared software industry with drug dealers: Once you rely on it, you can’t live without, whatever the costs are…

      2. The first which comes to my mind: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-remove-advertising-windows-10

         but I’m sure there are plenty more.

         1. Interesting I never even noticed I had ads on my start menu. Why did you have to mention them? Now I’ll notice them just because you said they were there *doh*!!

4. Thanks for the beta – I expected update to be a long and slow process but took only a minute or so 😀

   Anyway just a quick initial feedback – just tried two identical runs – first without vulcan and second one with vulcan render enabled.

   My initial experience is – to my surprise – that I had much less stutter with vulcan disabled. Strangely the framerate counter indicated 60-90 fps all the time but screen seemed like low framerate in the 20th fps region. Will experiment more and report back.

   Rig is: I7-8700@5Ghz on all cores, 32GB Ram, GTX1080 8GB, WIN 10.

   All the best 🙂

   1. Did you try with Vsync on too?

      1. Hi – yes that made little to no difference.

         I have tested a bit more and the strange comon thing between VULKAN / NO VILKAN with all other parameters the same shows a much higher frame rate with VULCAN enabled (53 to 85 in air with NO cockpit) and (24 to 30 on ground with cockpit enabled) so definately a huge improvement there!!
         But its visually MUCH more stuttering in a very “fine grained” way (dont know how to express this in another way) with VULKAN enabled. So even though the framerate are significatly improved the actual experience is much more stuttering and far from the normal fluid experience!

         btw running in 2560×1440 resolution fullscreen

   2. I have somewhat similar experience (3950x/2020Ti/64GB Linux). Lowest and average frame rates are much higher with vulkan, but every few seconds it stops for a second (fps = zero) then goes back up to 30. GL is much slower on average, but doesn’t have those large hiccups.
      Also there’s an annoying 1-second lag between mouse input and action on screen (menu and flight), but that’s probably linux-specific.

   3. Disable the FlyWhithLua plugin, if you have it.

   4. Update – i now tried an area (Boulder) where scenery and autogen is generic and not ortho / Europe 2 where I usually fly – and woow just woooow – HUGE increase in FPS and general fluidity with absolute minimal stutter with Vulkan.

      Thanks for the effort – amazing what difference it has done in general !! I am sure we will get the quirks ironed out as we go along.

5. Fantastic work guys, just updated and tried it, I had a huge amount of stutters when Vulkan was activated, but don’t see this as a complain, I didn’t had any time for debugging so far, it might have something to do with one on my plugins..
   I’ll work on disabling some of them tonight and trying to tune it and let you know.

   But again, Thank you very much for this…

   1. Ok Guys, found the stuttering problem here. FlyWithLua plugin.
      when I disabled it, everything started working a lot better, very little and granular stutter and it just happens when you fly really low and fast and pretty close to scenery buildings.
      Also, I’m running it with pretty high settings, on VR with SS of 150%
      So, again, congrats…. you did it…
      But one thing did catch my attention, when flying from EGCC to EGCB (Orbx Scenery) from time to time I can see some peeks on frame time on the GPU, and for about 1.5 Secs I get some heavy stutters, than everything is smooth again for the next 3 or 4 minutes, and it happens again.

      Is there a way that I could capture some data to send to you?

      1. There is a way to capture this but we’re not ready yet. Sidney’s working on a fix for stuttering in (sigh) the Windows Kernel – we should ship that first in a new beta and then see.

         The FWL issue isn’t super surprising – there are some art controls that, when hit, cause us to _reload_ some of the work we did during preload.

         1. Thanks, I’m already enjoying this version very much.

6. If I am running 2 pc’s networked together, (1 for visuals and 1 for instruments) do both pc’s have to be running 11.50 or can I just run the visuals pc in 11.50 and not the other in 11.4?

   1. Both have to run 11.50 – we don’t support mixing versions, ever.

      1. Ok thanks.

7. Thanks for the FREE update guy’s, look very good to me at this point.

   Now BREATH……

   Stay safe

8. Sadly I just get a black screen when it loads with the Vulkan settings box ticked. Left it for half and hour and still black screen (I realise it would take a few minutes anyway).

   Log txt stops at: 0:00:00.308 I/GFX: Loaded archive Resources/shaders/bin/spv/light.xsa with hash: d9a21cdc3e8c958a8744231f26bef321

   I have a GTX 770. Works fine with OpenGL setting. Latest Nvidia drivers downloaded and no additional plugins. A Vanilla version of XP. Can’t think what has going wrong. Anyone else had this problem? Will file a bug unless someone points out I am missing something obvious

   Many thanks

   Upkeep

   1. Had this problem twice as well. Now after updating my driver, XP is just about to load – we’ll see. I’m using a GTX 1060.

      1. My Nvidia driver is up to date. Trying yet again (now 25 minutes after start – black screen) and still sticks in the same place. Tried redownloading all shaders. Made no difference. Perhaps Ben might have an idea what is going wrong. Will be interesting to see if you can get it to load at all. Perhaps the GTX 770 is not good enough. Not sure if this is a bug or my spec?

         Regards Upkeep

         1. Can load it now, yes. Perhaps your VRAM is too low?

         2. I am also getting it, and i have a GTX 760.

            1. There are also some reports on the org forums of others having the same problem with nvidia cards. I have checked and Vulkan supports the GTX 770 so it should have been ok. Laminar have not responded yet to this post so I will need to file a bug I think.

         3. Also having this problem. Seems like I can click on things in the menu but I can’t see them. I’ve got a GeForce GTX 960 w/ the latest drivers.

            1. GTX 960M here as well, same black screen issue. Weird.

            2. Got a GTX 860 and I guess we are all in the same boat, screen is blank.

            3. Same here: GTX 780Ti

            4. Same here with GeForce GTX 750TI

            5. Same here: GTX 950M

            6. Same here GTX 690

            7. Same here with 940mx, 2GB VRAM.
               OpenGL loads just fine.

         4. Same issue here… Black screen on startup with some flickering blue sticks once in a while… It’s a common bug now, guess we’re the unlucky ones who experience this bug… Having all my drivers etc updated, so it aint our computer’s fault, but xp11.

            1. Same here. Black screen with flickering blue streaks that last about a 10th of a second. Log.txt stops at the same place as Upkeep. All Nvidia drivers up to date. OpenGL works perfectly.

            2. Same here GTX960M, open GL crashes as well on start up without using Vulkan.

         5. Same , black screen asus gtx 650 2gb vram

         6. hello guys, I`m having the same issue.
            any uptade?

   2. I have the same error, in OpenGL everything without problems, my graphics are a little older, GTX660TI. Black screen and nothing else happens.

      Driver: 440.65
      OS: Linux

      1. Did you update your graphic drivers to the latest ones maybe the issue

   3. Yep same issue here, I have a GTX 770 and same as above – works fine with OpenGL but I get a black screen when using Vulkan. I can still click on buttons but no display and every now and then a random flicker appears.

   4. I’m also getting a black screen with a GTX 680 2GB running Nvidia 445.75 drivers. This bug was already listed under the known bugs for 11.50b1 so I’m confident that LR will be able to fix it.
      XPD-10629 Black screen on Nvidia.

9. Pure love for you folks.
   Already gave it a nice testrun and as an AMD fanboy this is super awesome. Literally doubled my framerate in most places and way less stutter.
   Now I jumped from being GPU limited to CPU limited 😀

   System is R5-3600 and a 5700XT on Win10

   1. Wait, do you mean you went frmo being CPU limited to GPU limited? Either way it should be faster. 🙂

      1. CPU time per frame dropped from 0.03 to .04 to steady 0.03 and even below that on the outside view.
         GPU time per frame dropped from 0.026 to .028 ish to 0.009 to .01 ish
         So GPU improved nearly by factor 3 !!!!11eleven. I knew AMDs OpenGL stack on Win was not the best, but not that it was THAT bad. 😀
         CPU may very well be limited by slow RAM. The new one is on its way as I write.
         CPU load seems to be a bit higher on 4/6 cores (same for the HT ones so 8/12 w/HT)
         GPU load is less then 50% and I don’t have the exact numbers but if I recall that correctly its actually less then with OpenGL. So whatever you do in Vulcan is seems to be more efficient then what OpenGL did in the driver 🙂

         And yes. Way faster. And smoother.
         Thanks so much keeping up the platform and hardware agnostic approach and supporting open APIs.

      2. Oh, Vulkan is *much* faster for us AMD users, pretty much a doubling of the frame rates throughout … https://imgur.com/9OcpREE

      3. I had the same experience. The performances of both my CPU and GPU went up, both AMD. The difference was that the GPU performance just skyrocketed with Vulkan.

         I’m still limited by my CPU BUT at a higher framerate.

         Unfortunately, I didn’t run into any bug yet to report, sorry 🙂

10. I have a three monitor setup with the monitors normally running 4k. When I then try to start up X-plane, it looks fine for about one second until the screen resolution is changed, as I have X-plane setup to run at 1080p. Then my center screen goes black and my side monitors shows the windows desktop.

    What seems to happen is that when the screen resolution, all three windows started by X-plane gets placed on top of each other on the center screen, because I can see three windows when I click on X-plane in the taskbar. Two black and one with the menu thumbnail. However, when I try to select the one with the menu thumbnail, x-plane is often killed by Windows for not responding.

    I have to try starting X-plane, often up to 10 times, before I finally get to play.

    I assume I am not the only one with this problem. Has this been fixed with Vulcan?

    1. I have a somewhat similar experience with 3 monitors: with OGL, the interior of the C172 is black, except for the yoke), as well as a band at the top of the screen, on center and left monitors, while the right monitor renders correctly (I filed a bug report, but mistakenly stating that the left monitor also rendered correctly). I then switched to Vulkan and saw the same thing and was about to file a second bug report when I decided to relaunch to check something first and the problem was not there. I have since gone back and forth between OGL and Vulkan with the same results: no problem with Vulkan but black interior on 2/3 screens in OGL.

11. AHH help me! i cant start xplane 11.50 im getting an error code :0xc0000142
    what have i done wrong?

    1. I also got that. If you haven’t already, try installing a second compy, but only install a small amount of scenery.

       1. i have just deleted all .dll files in xplane and then it worked

       2. Yes. A clean install is probably the best way to make sure (for the most part) you know xp 11.50 likes your hardware *and OS. And ofc this obviously avoids messing up your main sim setup.

          Just run 11.50 as vanilla as possible (do your first flight in a stock airplane) then add add-ons one by one.

12. Error loading the file:
    0:00:00.000 E/SYS: | Resources/shaders/bin/terrain_mapping.xsv
    0:00:00.000 E/SYS: | X-Plane cannot run without this file!
    0:00:00.000 E/SYS: | See the Log.txt file for detailed error information.
    0:00:00.000 E/SYS: | (gfx_shader_module.cpp:119)

    Got this message in the Log.txt after the update failed. Can someone help me?

    1. Same here!

13. Vast improvement and good timing. Well done guys!

14. Will Vulkan change how different components are utilized (aka. X-Plane doesn’t handle more CPU cores very good. Does Vulkan change that?

    1. Vulkan does require more multicore time to do background paging, and uses less single core time cuz it’s faster. But we don’t do a multi-core frame render yet.

       1. Is the multi-core frame render a feature for the near future?

          1. No. Future, yes. Not super near. We’ll take incremental steps to get there – in some ways, 11.50 is a first step in that a ton of things that used to be stutters are now multi-core. All new code is multi-core aware at this point.

             1. Cool, understand.
                Overall FPS is up and a lot more smooth so awesome work 🙂

                Secretly or not so secretly hoping the particle system gets upgraded at some point as it looks like it’s the biggest bottleneck for a plugin I’ve made.

          2. Ok thank you, I guess I shoulda installed a second copy and used that one not immediately install it. Anyways got the 0xc00004 error anyways reinstalled it and it works fine 🙂

             1. (besides some crashing)

15. Any guidance on what NVIDIA settings to use in the NVIDIA control panel? Low latency mode, Threaded optimization, etc.?

    1. We do not have guidance on this – threaded optimization should not matter or affect Vulkan so it’s no longer a big deal.

16. Are there any new “rules” for finding the optimum graphics settings now? What is the best strategy nowadays?

    1. The big differences are:
       – Reflections slider is recalibrated – it’s less expensive. You can get some without killing fps.
       – The sim can manage texture memory to some extent – you might get away with a higher setting but if you get out of VRAM messages, turn it down.
       – Shadows cost less on Mac (now compares to Windows) scenery shadows should be fine on modern high-end Macs.

17. Holy CRAP. This is screaming on my iMac, 40-60 fps with shadows, objects maxed, graphics pulled back just one (no SSAO, though I’ll try with that). Oh whoops, lying SSAO is on?!?!?! — all with a 90 degree field of view at 2560×1440. Most importantly, f-sim of omgwtf, with 16 planes and 4 flight models per frame… WHAT

    I do have a couple “bugs” to note.

    1. Clouds are no longer entirely transparent during night, making it easier for me to crash into things.
    2. The sun knows where the horizon is now, and changes color appropriately. This is weird.
    3. The sun looks like a star now, not a yellow light in the sky. I am stuck inside avoiding coronavirus so I can’t verify.

    (Thanks! You guys rock!)

    1. Same here on my iMac, almost pulled my face off with the huge leap in FPS! I had to blow the dust off the shadow checkbox and visual settings sliders (thought they may have been rusted in place after all these years) and lo and behold it’s still screaming at 50+.

       Thanks guys 🙂

18. If I install this in a separate program directory (to keep a non-beta X-Plane ready), would I be able to use the shortcut method to use my main install’s scenery and plugins? It’d be handy to be able to A/B test the two installs apples-to-apples, without duplicate copies of all my resources.

    1. We don’t promise you can link everything – depends on the kind of link you use. Aliases work for custom scenery.

       1. Ideally X-Plane should have an option “Share scenery” that does all the magic needed for the platform being used 😉

    2. I was able to use Windows mklink /D to make a directly link from my beta install “Customer Scenery” to my non beta “Custom Scenery” and all my ortho and other custom stuff showed up in the beta just fine.

19. Astonishing framerate improvement! I was expecting a significant bump in framerate but wow! I’ve only had a chance for a 15 min flight around my area in the stock C172 but in OpenGL I would see 45-60 fps. Under Vulkan I’m seeing 100-120 fps sustained. Buttery smooth, too. I’ll put it through a more rigorous test this evening to see where there might be problems but the first impression is very favorable in my system. Well done LR!

    My system: Arch Linux, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, 32 Gb RAM, Vega 56 8 Gb, Open Source drivers (yes I know, not officially supported but XP11 runs perfectly), everything updated to latest stable versions.

20. Thank you Laminar and Ben !
    No stutters at all!! but many blurred ground textures..?
    Graphic settings same as prior the update
    Can I do something to fix that?

    1. Moreover to add something…on the texture slider it says it only uses 350-400 mb when usually it was around 3gb

       1. This has also been my experience. My system specs are i7-4790, 16G Ram, and GTX970. Have experienced far more stutters with Vulkan, and seriously blurry textures even though my texture slider is set to max (have tried all the settings in this regard). I too have the system registering only about 500-700 mb of texture data. Went back to Open GL and have a much much better experience.

    2. File it please.

       1. Thanks. Already filed it and got back to 11.41. Vulcan is not for me.

          1. Live long and prosper. Oh you mean _vulKan_?

21. Hey!

    I have my textures on max in settings but I am getting some very low texture quality in game. On the aircraft and scenery. I also have Vysnc on but it makes my frames go above 100fps. I uninstalled every plugin and I am only using custom scenery with everything else in XPlane as default.

    My specs are i7-8700k, RTX 2080 (NOT ti), and 32GB Ram. What should I do?

    Also, there was a couple times where I would open up Xplane and even load into a location with just ocean. The frames would say like 150 but It was acting like I had 0.5 FPS, not just a normal stutter. Thanks!

    1. I wonder: If non-standard plugins may cause poblems, shouldn’t X-Plane have a “safe startup” mode that disables all those extra plugins? It seems to be an easier solution than having to uninstall all the stuff just to find out whether it makes any difference.

22. Can someone give me a brief overview of what’s new in this update? I’m excited but I don’t know what’s coming. Thanks.

    1. What about reading the Release Notes? I mean: If people invest time to write them, why to read them? 😉

23. Should we expect a performance loss when going back to OpenGL?
    I’m finding the frames for my test scenario drop down to very low levels, noticeable when facing dense autogen.
    In my copy of 11.41 i’m getting double the frames in OpenGL
    If this isnt expected i’ll send in a bug report.

    1. There could be a small loss with GL in some cases, but it should be like 1-5%, not big enough to hit “very low levels”.

24. Did a quick comparison, about 10% gain in FPS on the same settings I used before in 1 scenario only (inc ortho xp). Less shutters but hard to put a statistic on this.
    Sometime it does not load but it is a beta1 release so taking that into account with further improvements to follow, we should definitely see a benefit of this!
    Keep it up LR!
    System:
    AMD 3700x
    2080Super
    32GB RAM

25. Overall this is running great (~30fps gain) on Manjaro+Nvidia 2060super+Ryzen3600X but I do have an issue that I am not sure is a bug.

    I have two monitors, a primary 1440p monitor and a secondary 1080p monitor. Whenever the secondary monitor is turned on, even with nothing displayed on it and nothing running but x-plane itself, there is severe input lag from controls and mouse and occasional crashes. There does not seem to be an FPS penalty for having it on.

    This could be a system configuration issue and I am working on finding what the issue may be, but if you believe this may be a bug I will be glad to gather as much information as possible and file it as such.

26. The steam update is taking too long.

27. “proprietary NVidia or AMD drivers.”

    What a joke, I won’t touch the proprietary drivers with a 10 foot pole… step up your game. There is no reason you can’t make this work with the open source drivers as they are superior it the proprietary ones in most respects at this point with very few exceptions. If anything the open source driver developers have bent over backwards to work with companies like yourself.

    1. Agree, I use open source AMD drivers with almost latest kernel and Debian, Vulkan works flawlessly for other games but XPlane 11.50b1 crashes with unspecific Vulkan error in the log. Is this because I’m using the standard kernel AMD driver?

       1. Let me be clear about what I mean by proprietary drivers here, because the sands have shifted. What I mean is “the driver from the IHV themselves.” That meant full proprietary a while ago, but now AMD is I think half open half proprietary? Anyway, I can’t say why it’s not working for AMD, my Linux install is pretty borked and I can’t re-install because it has the tool chain to compile the SDK.

          1. Is error “/home/user/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/libVkLayer_steam_fossilize.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32” related to the open source driver? Seems kinda strange, if it wants the 64bit version then it should go to ubuntu12_64 folder?

             1. Same issue on my 64-bit Fedora install with Steam. It fails to detect my 64-bit environment and tries to use 32-bit elf libraries.

          2. X-Plane has no driver requirement for Linux Vulkan (on Windows we check the driver version to make sure users aren’t running with known bad drivers). If you have a Vulkan 1.1 capable driver on your system that can talk to your GPU, you can run X-Plane, although I have no idea how good it will be or if there are bugs. That being said, the open source Mesa drivers that came with Ubuntu 19.04 (+updates) did not provide any Vulkan support for my RX5700.

          3. My vulkaninfo says:
             Vulkan Instance Version: 1.2.126

             And other Vulkan games are working.

             So this should work, right?
             (I’ve also filed a bug from the crash dialog.)

          4. Sidney, in your case you would also need the packages “mesa-vulkan-drivers” and “vulkan-tools” to get a working Vulkan installation.

          5. For AMD I think we expect to run on this:
             https://gpuopen.com/gaming-product/amd-open-source-driver-for-vulkan/
             To be clear: the thing we care about is _not_ proprietary vs _open source_. We don’t care about that at all. We have no ideological axe to grind.

             What we do care about is:
             1. Is this code coming from, supervised, or approved by NV and AMD, e.g. the makers of the hardware who are the origins of all the info about the hardware and have deep expertise building 3-d drivers and
             2. How different is this code from the Windows driver?

             In the past both NV and AMD provided a proprietary port of their Windows GL stack to Linux, and this was the only driver we wanted to deal with because it had exactly the same bugs/lack of bugs as Windows, and therefore there was pretty much _no_ cost to running on them.

             As best I can tell, NV is still doing this strategy and it just works; AMD has switched from their port of their Windows driver (which, for GL, worked for us) to this open stack of stuff. I have no idea if this new stack works, but I can say:
             – It’s good that it is AMD’s official thing – what we want to avoid is the purely third party attempts to re-engineer a driver from scratch for licensing reasons – we never saw these projects get anywhere close to the perf we needed.
             – If this is a different infrastructure from Windows, I don’t know how well it will work – it could have its own set of bugs and problems that will have to be separately addressed.

             If you have a Vulkan card that can run the AMD open source Vulkan driver, the most useful thing you can do to help is run it and see if it works, and if it doesn’t, try some other Vulkan sw to see if anything works, then send logs. If you have an NV card, please just go get the NV driver, it’s what everyone does and it will just work.

28. Looking forward to the new SDK. Not getting the 3D callbacks is potentially a problem – the reason I’m using those in Traffic Global is because the the datarefs for MVP matrices are only valid during 3D callbacks because they vary per monitor. I need these to detect what’s on-screen rather than to draw on it.

    I trust there’s a way of getting MVP matrices per window via datarefs now?

    1. YES! You can get the 3-d matrix from 2-d for ‘coach marks’. This is addressed in 11.50 – we should have docs “real soon now” ™.

       1. Are there general changes to datarefs? Cause AFAIK thats how xPilot, etc. place other planes.
          Just noticed that this is not working anymore. Also not in OpenGL mode.

29. i7-3770 with RX590…jumped from low 20s fps at MEH settings to around 40fps with WOOHOO settings on 1080p. And yes, those are the technical terms I’m going with. I did have the application crash on me after starting a 3rd flight without restarting the application, I’ll see if I can reproduce that one before filing anything.

30. Windows Mixed Reality, HP reverb, Latest WMR+Steamvr. Win10 pro build1909.
    Hardware: i7 7700, Gtx1080TI, 32GB DDR4, Xplane on m2 SSD

    Settings: All graphics to Minimal (but I tried medium/various combinations all with the same result). Steam Rendering resolution at 50% (1500×1500)

    Game loads and runs fine in menu. Hovering around 1.5-2.5ms/11ms in main menu per steamvr developer overlay.

    Load up LGA flight. Steamvr overlay shows 3ms/11ms frametime but in game itself is incredibly stuttery. Its like its rendering at 10-20fps despite steamvr reporting it should be butter smooth. Doesn’t matter if I’m in Vulkan or Opengl mode.

    No issues with 99% of other VR games I’ve run.

    1. I am seeing more or less the same problems with the reverb, Gtx2080Super and an i9

       1. I also dusted off my old Samsung Odyssey just in case it was reverb-specific and get the same result.

          1. My testing. Rig is 8700K@5.1Ghz/1080Ti/32GB on a Rift S.

             I did a fresh install, with my settings as they usually are set for my day to day flying (quite high). Tested in Beech Baron sitting on Tacoma’s 34R:
             11.05 – Flat: 55 fps
             11.41 – Flat: 50 fps VR: 40 fps (locked to half refresh)
             11.50 – Flat OpenGL: 55 Flat Vulkan: 68 VR OpenGL: 29 VR Vulkan: 40
             So no difference from VR perspective but I do think I perceive a loss in image quality, but I can’t put my finger on it. There is definitely some weird stuff going on – looks like z-fighting which you can only see in one eye.

             1. Yeah.. you’re on rift S which is through a totally different runtime, so that isn’t particularly enlightening, but I guess it does confirm its a WMR/Steamvr issue at least.

    2. I can echo similar challenge. HP Reverb 8700K, 2080 and Vulkan is running under 15fps if I boost my antialiasing anything over what I’ve been running (anything over FXAA).

       Non VR and I can peg the sliders… 🙂

       1. Solved my issue by dropping my Application Resolution in Steam VR. For some crazy reason it was at 330%… dropped it down to 132% and boom… Xplane is buttery smooth. Good job guys 🙂

31. Just tried the FPS tests and difference between 11.41, 10.50 opengl and 10.50 vulkan.
    X-plane Loves AMD now.

    11.41 4k 72.49 63.82 53.27 26.47 17.39 21.27
    10.50b1 4k 73.37 68.11 55.34 38.46 26.27 35.07
    10.50b1 4k vulkan 139.49 123.64 92.08 64.13 46.66 60.93
    increase 4k 1.20% 6.30% 3.74% 31.18% 33.80% 39.35%
    increase 4k vulkan 73.14% 72.66% 54.23% 72.34% 70.68% 80.94%

32. I have an 8 yr old iMac with 2GB video that can run with Metal. So far it is worse than OpenGL. I know it is an old computer but I was expecting a little better FPS, It also crashed when I slid the texture slider from the lowest to one notch up. Missing shader. just filed a bug report.

33. Thank you all and congratulations on a truly outstanding job.

34. Well done guys, you delivered.

    Xplane is running smooth as silk for me now and I’ve got a nice boost in frames as well. It was unplayable for me before so thank you all for your hard work.

    Keep safe and have a beer or two, you deserve it.

35. No Win 7 support, I guess that is the end of XPLANE for me,. I did hope but never even thought. Best of luck. I have no confidence in MS sorry.

    1. Wait, it’s only Vulkan that doesn’t support Windows 7. X-Plane OpenGL still supports Windows 7 and we don’t intend to change that one bit.

       1. Cools so I have some hope

    2. Have you considered Upgrading to linux?
       (This applies to windows 10 users to.)

       If you refuse to take updates you can’t really complain you didn’t receive the updates that were offered.

       I actually think it might be a reasonable idea to make windows the minimum required OS and linux/mac the “recommended” OS’s.

       1. No VR in the *nix based OS’s otherwise I’d totally agree with you.

          1. VR works, though it’s not officially supported on Linux. I haven’t tested with the Vulcan update yet, but hopefully it helps VR frames.

             https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/157332-xplane-vr-on-linux/

             I’m using a Valve Index. Hopefully with the release of HL Alex on Linux sometime in the future, Valve will improve SteamVR Linux support.

    3. Why not install a dual-boot with Linux, just for X-Plane? If you don’t have very exotic hardware, It should “just work”.

36. WOW, X-plane is loading much quicker now!

    Since I use a lot of orthophoto scenery, loading used to take a good 15-20 minutes, now it loaded in just 30-40 seconds.

    Still difficult to find configurations that achieve over 18 FPS with Orthofoto and X-Europe scenery on a machine with an 2080 TI and Ryzen 3950x CPU, however…

    When changing the graphics settings back and forth a few times mid flight, X-plane suddenly stopped rendering correctly. Just producing something that could look like a very fine mesh of black and brown lines. I am sure many others have reported it already..

    Anyway, great work!

    1. Could be a coincidence – orthophotos are often heavily influenced by the disk cache – if you go from 15-20 mins to 30-40 seconds, the one case I’ve seen is second load of an ortho on a non-SSD….

       1. Hmm, I have all of X-plane and the scenery are stored on a pair of Corsair Force MP600 M.2 NVMe SSD PCIe 4.0 disks, so I don’t think the read from the disks have ever been the bottleneck.

          1. That’s weird – I’d never expect that kind of slow load then….

    2. Ortho scenery is not the problem for sure.
       I use the Ryzen 3950X too, 1080TI, X-Eu, Orthos(17), 7 iteration per frame, most slider at the right (reflections pos 2 from left) and the complex KingAir 350 from Airfoillabs, and in EDDS I have FPS at about 45.
       Very smooth flying, only impact of the orthos, loading new ortho file results in a stutter of about 1-2 seconds, with 11.41 the timespan was more than 20 seconds.

       So – I like that beta1 much more than 11.41.
       Thank you for that free update to Vulkan!!

37. This is crazy! Feels like a new game.
    Smooth as butter. Never bevor have I reached a frame rate of 60-70 fps.
    You deserve all our loyalty!

38. Getting a lot of CTD’s now. Removing one plugin after the after. I think it might be helpful if people would report plugins which do not work with Vulcan. Also, any preference for the Nvidia driver?

    1. You might want to start with a CLEAN install and add things in….

    2. Latest is always greatest! We have an outstanding bug report with them that can negatively affect Ryzen performance in some cases. I expect a fix for this to land in one of the next drivers given that it landed in the developer beta driver today. The driver guys constantly tweak the drivers and improve their performance, so I would definitely recommend to stay as current as possible.

39. Reading that the librain plugin is not compatible with Vulcan. Does that mean that it negatively affects the sim even if an airplane without librain is loaded?

    1. I can’t say with any certainty whether a _particular_ plugin is hurting FPS if it’s around and not compatible…I can say in general that plugins that are incompatible with Vulkan because they depend on the old 3-d callbacks have no negative impact on perf because the old callbacks are ignored. But a plugin could, in that unexpected situation, go off the rails so anything is possible.

       1. So cool to get an individual response. You guys are really great. That’s what I call a community.

       2. Ben, I’ve just filed a bug report about rain effects in Vulkan. During my “stormy” test both Zibo and Sp-30 addon aircrafts crash with VRAM, presumably both use librain? The SP-30 used 80+MB of VRAM per rain drop! Could this be worked around?

40. Hi,

    I’m not sure if it is a bug or something else but I can’t see any usage of GPU. No matter what I change It shows 0.00. When I maximize the graphic setting it also stays 0.00 but frame rate drops.
    My computer is iMac 2019, i5, 40GB Ram, pro580x.

    1. This is a work-around – GPU counters are broken in a number of places in Metal so they had to be turned off.

41. Thank you. Have I said thank you? Thank you. X-plane 11.50 makes my triple screen setup look incredible. No more side screen warping, I can run each monitor separately now and it just looks great. Thank you……have I said thank you?…….Thank you.

42. Wow, the performance increase was larger than I expected for an Intel CPU + Nvidia GPU rig especially at higher settings of graphics details.

    Here are results from running –fps_test. The values are “,”.

    Alienware Aurora R8 i9600k, 16GB RAM, RTX 2070,1920×1080:

    v11.41r1 2020-03-23T15:14:03, 1,101.34, 2, 93.09, 3, 80.26, 4,47.18, 5,36.50, 54,42.64

    v11.50b1 2020-04-02T16:55:24, 1,132.10, 2,122.23, 3,102.43, 4,77.41, 5,62.25, 54,73.51

    11.50b1 has achieved parity between AMD and Nvidia GPUs.

    Read this for directions about how to contribute your results.

    https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/71725-x-plane-benchmark-charts-fps-tests/

    Results are at the bottom of this spreadsheet.

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15rNa7_naUM8a4YzzrzwrxvWSl4X8SHesshZGm7H54AI/pubhtml

43. The executable won’t start, neither by double-clicking on the .app nor by launching it directly from terminal (Killed: 9). 10.14.6 on a 2017 Retina iMac 5k

    1. If you are on Mojave or Catalina try a reboot. Our installer doesn’t tickle the system security and code-signing gunk in just the right way, so it gets killed as malware until you reboot and purge the caches. A future installer will work around this.

       1. Rebooting solved the problem, thanks! But the results are disappointing, I don’t see any FPS improvement at all! Do I need Catalina?

          macOS: Version 10.14.6 (Build 18G4032)
          CPU type: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7600 CPU @ 3.50GHz CPU speed (mhz): 3500 Bus speed (mhz): 100 RAM (MB): 16384
          0:00:00.000 I/GFX/MTL: Discovered Metal device: AMD Radeon Pro 575, Metal. Score: 20

          Also the save my name,email thingy never worked, I have to type in everything everytime.

          1. 2560×1440:
             OpenGL: 89 65 54 30 19 31
             Metal: 82 75 64 44 31 41

             1. That’s weird. Please run the same tests at 1280 x 720, then file all the numbers in one bug.

          2. You are probably GPU bound.

44. Not for 7 ?
    Well that’s a bummer.
    AMD Linux wont work as well.

    Kinda defeats the purpose for me.
    Honestly didn’t expect LR of all people to push me towards W10.

    1. We’re pushing you toward “not windows 7”.

       1. Only one way forward it is then.
          It ought to come one day i guess.
          So can we hope for support for various Linux distributions ?

          And as a brave pioneers will you help us with installation of head tracking software like opentrack in linux systems ?
          Because that is a mess without proper documentation. X-D

          1. Never mind, i just read:
             “we are telling AMD linux users to pound sand and figure out how to get it to run themselves”
             One of those chicken and egg problems it seems.

             1. Kind of yeah! The reason we supported Mesa Intel drivers was _not_ because it made sense to do so – the use case was really really tiny.

                It was because one user debugged the situation himself, brought the bugs to the Mesa guys for us, and showed us a conformance problems in our shaders. If someone is going to go to that level of kicking ass, I’m gonna take his patch!

          2. Uh, no. Linux is a DIY experience. LR cannot provide support for the various crazy things that happen on Linux. One of the reasons why we support Linux is because so many Linux users support each other and mostly take care of themselves. But the OS is complete chaos – many different distributions, each with their own issues, things just aren’t the level of plug n play we see with win10 and Mac.

             I am absolutely NOT saying that Linux is a good replacement for Win7, and Linux users who do say that do not understand how much stuff they must already know to make Linux work. Linux is great if you already have those expertise, because you get a fast kernel, a fast file system, and a nice shell environment. I like it! But it’s not ready to be the OS for everyone.

             1. Haha, Im definitely one of those linux users…

                I completely disagree that you need to know less to get it working on windows or even mac when it isnt working.

                quite the opposite. most of the time its just needing to know the xxx’s in
                yum install xxxx
                Windows has no such option, is prone to awful, untraceable performance problems and the pool of tech people who can inform people about the steps required for complex risky windows downloads and fixes is shrinking fast, meaning Laminars burden of supporting windows users “on your own” must be growing fast.

                win10 has massively accelerated this, basically removing any option for even technical users to fix problems with their systems short of rolling back updates or filing bugs with microsoft.

             2. Hi Mark,

                I don’t know what to tell you…this really doesn’t reflect our experience with supporting Windows and Linux at all.

             3. Would you guys accept contributions/fixes/new features for the linux port from outsiders? I don’t mean shaders in particular like in the example you mentioned elsewhere here, but e.g. additions to the windowing system (better X11, Wayland, …) or if you lose interest in it, code updates keep it functioning for the 10 other Linux users you have?

             4. Possibly – in fact, some of the Linux code is contributions. The screensaver disable code for Windows and Mac is like 5 lines each – the Linux version is about 1000 lines, but a very patient Linux developer built it, tested it, and contributed it, so we included it.

                We have tried to structure the code so that platform code tends to be by itself. We could look at pulling some of it into a lib that people can play with.

                Right now I don’t think there are HoF Linux issues though – the most useful thing people can do is help other Linux users, help maintain HOW-TOs (we don’t touch this) and push udev rule fixes upstream.

             5. Well, if you ever do consider “outsourcing” the Linux port, I’ll gladly help (with Code; I’m unfortunately one of those Linux users who never had to touch any config files or udev rules to get random hardware and software working).

    2. OpenGL version still works on Win 7.

       If you want to enjoy new tech features, your OS must be up to date. It`s basics.

       1. But according to specs vulcan does run on win 7 its even installed on my machine, it might even work if we can get past the memory allocation bug. As for latest tech, I work in the broadacst industry, and the latest tech is the most difficult to maintain and repair, and never lasts as long, we have transmitters that are 30 years old, replacing them with units we be lucky to get 10 years out of. But I digress, opengl will do at least i can fly til ltha tgets broken.

          1. I want to be clear here: the issue is _not_ whether X-Plane VK on XP7 is _possible_. It probably is with enough elbow greese.

             The question is whether I should divert Sidney from fixing Vulkan/Metal bugs for everyone and working on the things that come after Vulkan to go set up a new Win7 machine so that we can debug Vulkan on an OS that almost no one is using, fewer people will use in the future, and that has no future.

             cheers
             Ben

       2. “OpenGL version still works on Win 7.”
          Lets face it, that wont be for long.
          What would you choose?
          Supporting new API like Vulkan that is system independent.
          Or support obsolete API like OpneGl. That objectively runs worse, then said new API.

          Be real man opengl will be dumped in very near future as well.

          1. OpenGL will be supported for the life of the V11 version run – same with win7 (with GL). We are _not_ dropping supported specs here.

       3. Vulkan is fully supported by Win7 and Nvidia, even WinXP could support it (theoretically, but no drivers exist).
          Brand new games like Doom Ethernal are Vulkan only and support Win7.

          @ben
          You and Sidney could take a look at it later after the final release of 11.50 or 11.51.
          I ask you why you support Linux although the user base is and was small and with different kernels, distributions and so on it’s probably also not so easy to support them all.
          The global Win7 market share is constant since a half year (currently 26%). Yes, it will be less in future, but XP11 probably won’t be supported for the next years because XP12 will come (and be Win10 only, which is ok).

          1. FWIW we are telling AMD linux users to pound sand and figure out how to get it to run themselves. I’d need to install and set up and maintain an old OS to test AMD linux properly, just like I’d have to setup and maintain a Windows 7 install. On the other hand, Nvidia linux was running on my existing install (And practically out of the box with the Vulkan code that was written for Windows)

          2. We’ve beaten this to death. First, we care about the actual X-Plane users of Win7, so 25% of the universe matters less than ~3% of total X-Plane users.

             Here’s the difference between win7 and Linux – the Linux guys basically fix their own bugs and is massively over-represented by third party developers. It’s < 2% of our total users, but was almost half of the third party dev program is Linux. So Linux us surviving on a mix of we already did the port (or rather a high school kid did it as a volunteer), the devs are using it, and they're fixing their own bugs. That's a different situation from win7, where almost the entire user base has migrated and we expect that trend to continue.

             1. I have to just say it, I don’t understand why so many people won’t let up on the Windows 7 deal. Microsoft ended support for it in January, why would Laminar continue to put their resources toward what is now considered an old, obsolete OS? It’s a matter of time before all the hardware vendors drop driver support, browsers start dropping support, etc etc. In all reality it makes no fiscal sense for any company to put resources and development time into a dated OS. The same has happened with every version of Windows in the history of Windows, it happened with DOS too. It’s the way it works and Windows 7 users need to realize, in my opinion, that Windows 7 doesn’t make them special and it isn’t going to be any different. ALL OS’s have support dropped and fact of the matter is Microsoft gives support for longer than any other OS. Linux is about 5 years at max and Mac is about 3 roughly and Microsoft typically goes for about 10 years. All the complaining in the world isn’t going to change how this works. They all lose support and they all become a target for hackers and the “bad guys” out there for viruses and everything else. It’s getting more and more insecure as the days go on because Microsoft isn’t maintaining it. Get off your high horse people and cut Laminar some slack. It’s not just Laminar, Microsoft dropped support for it and think about how expensive it would be if they supported every Windows OS for all time? Dated code and all, standards that become outdated? To be a little extreme, try getting Windows 98SE to modern standards… Windows 7 will become just as dated and unable to do things as 98SE eventually… You can still use the sim on 7, you can’t use Vulkan. They’ve explained why, just because it theoretically works doesn’t mean it’s worth the resources for Laminar or any company to implement it when Ben of all people has stated numerous times, the user base for Windows 7 is dropping, fast. So right there, it makes zero sense for them to pursue this. All the complainers here who have to keep going on and on about this are just being selfish and unrealistic, just my two sense. Thanks Ben and Laminar team for all your hard work at bringing us a fantastic product. You all are doing a stellar job!

             2. Win7 support is not endet. You can still get updates until 2023.
                And I doubt that XP11 will run on 7 in the future since LR isn’t able to test it and solve problems.
                The worldwide market share of 7 is constant since a half year (about 25%).

45. I’m getting higher frame rates, but with the same settings as OpenGL I keep running out of VRAM.

    Specs are:
    i7-7700HQ, 2.8GHz
    16Gb RAM
    NVidia 1050Ti 2Gb (important)

    I usually run with texture quality set to Medium and have zero issues with the Toliss A319 and the Rotate MD-80 in OpenGL mode.

    At LOWI, with Vulkan, I reached 42fps in cockpit, 59fps outside it… but then when I started looking around the cockpit it just bombed out and gave me an “Out of VRAM” message.

    Disappointing to be honest, as it’s unpredictable – the sim was only showing 837Mb textures loaded, and it was butter smooth – then… bam.

    3 times now, at different airports.

    Hopefully those of us with lower VRAM cards will get a better experience soon 🙂

    1. Forgot to mention – this is with both the Rotate MD80 and the FFA350

    2. The sim’s texture use does in the UI _not_ show the whole picture – there’s other stuff using VRAM and the _add-ons_ use VRAM too, which really makes things complex.

       1. Absolutely.

          I know that 2Gb VRAM is a small amount – but I feel like it’s worth pointing out that I never have problems with OpenGL with the exact same settings.

          Additionally, before the crashes, Vulkan is running brilliantly. Frame rate increase, the image quality seems nicer (smoother aliasing?) and zero stuttering.

          But yes – then the VRAM error appears all of a sudden.

          1. In case it helps, here is my Log output of the relevant bits:

             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: ——————————————
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Information for generic allocations:
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Info for heap: 0
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Block count: 22, allocation count: 2963
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Used bytes: 941813760, unused bytes: 379350016
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Info for heap: 1
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Block count: 12, allocation count: 7174
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Used bytes: 899918080, unused bytes: 945575680
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: ——————————————
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Information for custom dedicated allocations:
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Info for heap: 0
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Block count: 8, allocated bytes: 147961856
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Info for heap: 1
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Block count: 0, allocated bytes: 0
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: ——————————————
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Cached budget:
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Info for heap: 0
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Budget: 1764133683, usage: 2167373824
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Info for heap: 1
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Budget: 7693114982, usage: 1500106752
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: ——————————————
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Budget information:
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Info for heap: 0
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Budget: 1764133683, usage: 2167373824
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Info for heap: 1
             0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Budget: 7693114982, usage: 1500106752
             0:09:40.584 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: X-Plane has failed to allocate sufficent GPU memory.
             0:09:40.584 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: There is not enough VRAM available on your system to run with the current settings.
             0:09:40.584 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: We can not finish loading and will quit.
             0:09:40.584 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: Try running X-Plane with lower rendering settings.
             0:09:40.584 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: C:/jenkins/design-triggered/source_code/app/X-Plane-f/../../core/gfx/gfx_memory_controller_backend.cpp:228
             0:09:40.863 I/MEM: Entered regular memory pressure state
             0:09:58.211 E/SYS: +——————————————————————————-
             0:09:58.211 E/SYS: | X-Plane has failed to allocate sufficent GPU memory.
             0:09:58.211 E/SYS: | There is not enough VRAM available on your system to run with the current settings.
             0:09:58.211 E/SYS: | We can not finish loading and will quit.
             0:09:58.211 E/SYS: | Try running X-Plane with lower rendering settings.
             0:09:58.211 E/SYS: | (gfx_memory_controller_backend.cpp:228)
             0:09:58.211 E/SYS: +——————————————————————————-
             0:09:58.211 D/STM: Transitioning from state state_Normal to state_ShuttingDown

46. Massive improvement on my AMD 3600X, 5600XT. Quick trip around the patch shows nearly double the framerate I was getting. Silky smooth too.

    The GUI looks a little different (fuzzy?) as do the text labels on the aircraft switches. Maybe I need to bump my sliders up one more notch to max.

    The most exciting fix for me personally is… I can finally “Alt-Tab” back to items open on my desktop. Haven’t been able to do it on my AMD GPU no matter how hard I tried.

    Thanks guys! Great work!

47. Can’t thank you guys enough for all the work you’ve invested in X-Plane to get here, good *lord* the sim is zippy now. Can confirm the new beta works with Metal on a Hackintosh in High Sierra. With maxed out settings in Seattle demo area and the MD-80 loaded up I’m at 48 fps with 2560×1440 resolution. Quick snippet of the log.txt below:

    macOS: Version 10.13.6 (Build 17G8037)
    CPU type: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9700K CPU @ 3.60GHz CPU speed (mhz): 3600 Bus speed (mhz): 100 RAM (MB): 32768

    X-System folder:’/Simulator/X-Plane 11/’, case sensitive=0

    0:00:00.000 I/GFX/MTL: Discovered Metal device: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, Metal. Score: 20
    Selected device:
    Metal Device : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

    1. If a future update _braeks_ your hackintosh, please _do_ file a bug. We don’t have this hardware in the company, so if we accidentally break something that used to work it’d be useful to know.

       1. I love it that you guys recognise the Hackintoshes. They’re a product that fills a massive gap for a lot of us.

          1. Lemme be clear – they’re very much in the “yellow light” category. Like, if they work, great, we’re not going to do anything to brick them. But if they have weirdo issues we’re not going to go do specific “fix the hackintoshes” stuff.

             1. Yeah that’s totally expected, but you actually _acknowledge_ that they exist, and that’s medal deserving service in my book.

       2. Gladly! Already submitted one related to sky/cloud rendering at edge of atmosphere.

48. Congratulations Ben and the whole XP team. We love you guys and that is why even if MSFS2020 is fantastic there will be minimal or no drift away from XP. I for one feel a deep sense of appreciation and loyalty towards you guys and XP. Using business jargon, you have built up very considerable goodwill! Cheers.

49. Ben –
    I’m seeing miraculous improvement in FPS for a given configuration on my 3600X and 5700XT. Whereas I was previously a bit disappointed by having to reduce graphics settings to maintain a smooth FPS, I’m now getting 60+ FPS with higher-detail settings and (3 screens, vs. 1), even with some orthophotos and HD mesh in the terrain-y Sedona AZ. Simply amazing work.

    I do have one bug that I’m curious about: my 3-monitor setup has dissimilar sizes and resolutions: I run 24″ 1080p monitors on either side of a 27″ 4K monitor that I usually fly at 1440p.

    The issue is that, with my center monitor configured for 1440p, I only get a 1080p display area in the bottom-left corner of that monitor. Other non-1080 resolutions have the same issue. I have to set the center-monitor’s resolution to also be 1080p in order to fill the whole display.

50. Good lord ben, I went from 24/25 fps at DDs KLGA on a hackintosh with vega64 to 55/60. This will open up some doors X-Plane fur sure.. Thanks to all for the hard work

51. (edited for language)

    1. Tim, sorry man, you can’t post language like that here.

52. Hi I have a very GPU limited MacBook Pro (1536 MB VRAM), will upgrading to 11.50 improve or worsen my fps? thanks!

53. Hi again Ben,

    I’m not “that guy” , but before I waste your time with a potential “fake” bug, can you confirm, in the context of stutters, if changing a livery in flight (which causes a pause) was supposed to be benefited by 11.50? If yes, then that has not improved & I will file a bug. But if that function is what it is, then I won’t waste the teams time.
    thanks

    1. Changing a livery in flight might stutter – it’s a loading operation, like changing your aircraft. We have made no attempt to make livery changes stutter-free. In real life, changing the paint on your airplane takes a very long time!

       1. haha, fair enough. It would take a long time indeed. Especially with United & American changing their scheme all the time.

54. After I update Beta on Steam, I have that problem “The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000142). Click OK to close the application.” How can I fix it? Or I have to remove reshader plugin ??

    1. You can use Steam to go back to _not_ a beta and you’ll have 11.41 again.

55. I’m running Linux Ubuntu 16.04.
    I tried to install “nvidia-440” from “ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa”
    It doesn’t seem to be available. Neither is “nvidia-driver-440”.

    The latest version in the ppa has for 16.04 is “nvidia-430”, which I have installed. Unfortunately, X-Plane 11.50b1 balks at this version and won’t support it.

    So is “nvidia-440” suppose to be in “ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa” for Ubuntu 16.04?

    Or maybe you guys only tested with Ubuntu 17.04 and I’d have to upgrade to that to get “nvidia-440”?

    1. I have done the tests on Ubuntu 19.04. It’s possible that newer Vulkan drivers require a more recent version of Ubuntu, so I’d say now is a good a time as any to update! Ubuntu 16.04 support is ending in a year, so 20.04 might a good new LTS release to update to when it comes out.

       1. Upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04 made the correct driver available.

          I have noticed there is a visible lag in handling mouse/joystick events in 11.50b1 with Vulkan and Vsync enabled in Ubuntu 18.04 (i.e. mouse drag, hat-switch to slew the view). If I turn off Vsync, the lag goes away but screen tearing is visible. I will file a bug report.

56. Thanks for the update ! Great jump in performance in my system. Ryzen 5 1600 @3.8 – RX480 8GB. Almost total elimination of stutters. Average FPS gain is about 70% with my previous settings (HDR, 2XSSAA+FFAA, texture maximum, w. objects high, reflection detail minumum, no shadows on scenery). Absolutely no crashes or issues.
    A lot of room to improve visuals, I’ll test later. Great work !!

57. Seems like even though the gtx 650 supports vulkan and has 1gb of ram xplane gives an error message then loads the openGL version.

    i already know that someone is going to reply this comment with something about upgrading my pc, let me stop you here buddy.
    I’m not thinking about upgrading 😉

    LOG:
    ——————————————–
    Windows 10.0 (build 18363/2)
    This is a 64-bit version of Windows.
    CPU type: 8664
    Physical Memory (total for computer): 8454348800
    Maximum Virtual Memory (for X-Plane only): 140737488224256
    CPU 0: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2120 CPU @ 3.30GHz Speed (mhz): 3293
    CPU 0: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2120 CPU @ 3.30GHz Speed (mhz): 3293
    CPU 0: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2120 CPU @ 3.30GHz Speed (mhz): 3293
    CPU 0: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2120 CPU @ 3.30GHz Speed (mhz): 3293

    X-System folder:’G:\SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/X-Plane 11/’, case sensitive=0

    0:00:00.000 I/GFX/VK: Discovered Vulkan device: GeForce GTX 650, Vulkan: 1.1.126, driver: 445.75.0. Score: 16794104
    0:00:00.000 I/GFX/VK: Heap info (2 heaps)
    0:00:00.000 I/GFX/VK: Heap 0 – Flags: DEVICE_LOCAL_BIT (1), Size: 1032323072
    0:00:00.000 I/GFX/VK: Heap 1 – Flags: (0), Size: 4227174400
    0:00:00.000 I/GFX/VK: Memory type info (11 types)
    0:00:00.000 I/GFX/VK: Heap: 1, Flags: (0)
    0:00:00.000 I/GFX/VK: Heap: 1, Flags: (0)
    0:00:00.000 I/GFX/VK: Heap: 1, Flags: (0)
    0:00:00.000 I/GFX/VK: Heap: 1, Flags: (0)
    0:00:00.000 I/GFX/VK: Heap: 1, Flags: (0)
    0:00:00.000 I/GFX/VK: Heap: 1, Flags: (0)
    0:00:00.000 I/GFX/VK: Heap: 1, Flags: (0)
    0:00:00.000 I/GFX/VK: Heap: 0, Flags: DEVICE_LOCAL_BIT (1)
    0:00:00.000 I/GFX/VK: Heap: 0, Flags: DEVICE_LOCAL_BIT (1)
    0:00:00.000 I/GFX/VK: Heap: 1, Flags: HOST_VISIBLE_BIT | HOST_COHERENT_BIT (6)
    0:00:00.000 I/GFX/VK: Heap: 1, Flags: HOST_VISIBLE_BIT | HOST_COHERENT_BIT | HOST_CACHED_BIT (e)
    0:00:00.000 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: Yoru graphics card has not enough VRAM.
    0:00:00.000 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: X-Plane needs a graphics card with at least 1Gb of VRAM.
    0:00:00.000 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert:
    0:00:00.000 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert:
    0:00:00.000 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: C:/jenkins/design-triggered/source_code/app/X-Plane-f/../../core/gfx/gfx_memory_controller_backend.cpp:238

    1. Please file a bug with your log file from when Vulkan fails. I do not know if Vulkan will work on your machine, as it is the lowest spec machine in the X-Plane universe, pretty much, but since we don’t have 1 GB GPUs in this company, I’d like Sidney to see the log-out with a 1 GB card’s memory stats.

       1. What is the lowest amount of vram on the machines you are using (at LR) for testing. Just curious. (Well… that and my gpu is 2gb)

          1. My lowest card has 4Gb of physical VRAM. However, we have tested lower VRAM settings by artificially consuming VRAM in such a way that it leaves us with a card that behaves like a much smaller one. And I have tested that down to our supported minimum of 1Gb. Mind you, a 1Gb card definitely has issues with very heavy scenery and sliders pegged to the right, but it does run with settings turned down.

58. My X-plane 11 is now crashing constantly since I updated to Beta 11.50. I’m running the latest drivers on my RTX 2080 and I have an i9-9900K with Orbx Scenery and a few add-on planes. I’m not able to load any flights….I’ve tried everything and the sim crashes every single time. I spent months building this sim and not it will not even load a flight without crashing. Very disappointed. Is there any solution? I wish i never saw the email about the beta version being available as now my X-Planed is dead.

    1. It is a optional beta, the first public one no less. Of course we don’t want the sim to crash and you should totally file a bug report for it. But our general recommendation has always been not to update your main install but to get a second one for betas. Especially when it’s this early in the beta cycle.

       If 11.50 doesn’t work out for you, you can also always downgrade to 11.41 and then retry it later or wait for the official release. Please do file the crash first though 🙂

    2. This is ridiculous, the article even says that you should keep your main installation separately. You have only yourself to blame.

       1. It’s obviously smarter to use a separate installation for an early beta but I also used my main installation. X-Plane is easy to downgrade and so I usually do it that way. So far, I found that running out of VRAM is the only proven reason for a crash. When my 8 GB are full it’s game over. Dialing back the texture setting one notch has helped so far.

          1. But the difference is that you are not complaining that you spent months building your sim and the beta has rendered it useless because you overwrote your main installation of 11.41.

59. Congratulations on this really good Beta1.

60. Hi Ben
    i ran VRAM Monitor and GPUZ in parallel. Nevertheless with medium settings to GPU was barely running at 700MHZ and VRAM usage was only 9GB.FPS was around 40, I upped the graphics a bit as my expectation is that the GPU is being fully utilized.
    So GPU jumped to 1600MHZ out of 2000MHZ and VRAM to 13GB. However FPS also dropped down to 21.

    Is this a matter of finding the right settings or is there no way to fully utilize the GPU power on medium settings in favor of higher FPS?

61. will 11.50 improve fps on my very gpu limited MacBook pro? it has 1536 MB vram.

    1. Absolutely not. If you are GPU limited you will still be GPU limited.

62. Thank you, with the HP Reverb glasses, flying is much more fluid!

    i5 9600KF
    rtx 2080Ti
    32Gb ram

63. Hp Reverb very nice FPS

    http://shrani.si/f/1k/A9/3lsHk1Yz/panthera-2020-04-03-0940.png

64. Congratulations! As no one mentioned VR here: On my Oculus Rift the red eye only gets a black screen. Any hint or should I file a bug?

    1. XPD-10569 VR Right eye not working with AMD + Vulkan.

       Are you using an AMD card?

    2. Hello, Impressive frame rate improvement using 11.50 ! Thank a lot.
       Unfortunately, like Markus said I’am using Oculus Rift-S with Black screen in the right eye. Nvidia (GTX 1080 Ti windows 10) with Latest Driver without Steam.
       However, My Rift-S is operating without any issue in Oculus Home if X-plane is stopped.
       What can we do ? Does any one else experience the same issue ?

       1. Yes, unfortunately i have the same issue with oculus rift and RTX 2080 Ti, Black screen in the right eye.
          of curse on other game or apps both eyes work fine.
          what can i do? any fix?

       2. I have the same problem. The first few flights were fine, then last night this problem started for me aswell

       3. Same problem with Pimax 5K+ and RTX 2080, black screen in the right eye. If I turn off Vulkan drivers, both screens work.

       4. Same here, valve index, 2080 Ti

    3. Same issue here with X-Plane 11.50b1 and Oculus Rift CV1. Right eye is black screen only.

       1. Same issue here 11.50b1 with the Reverb, the right eye is black. The first few flight were good btw.

       2. Exactly the same problem with my right eye for Rift CV1 when running Vulkan. Running a 1080ti on Nvidia 445.75 drivers (the latest). Thanks for the hard work on this. Hope a fix is forthcoming soon as I think a lot of us play exclusively in VR!

65. Hello,

    Mac os Catalina. 2GB VRAM. Metal is about 20% slower than OpenGL.
    Any hope of improvement?

    Chipset Model: AMD Radeon R9 M290X
    Type: GPU
    Bus: PCIe
    PCIe Lane Width: x16
    VRAM (Total): 2 GB
    Vendor: AMD (0x1002)
    Device ID: 0x6810
    Revision ID: 0x0000
    ROM Revision: 113-C408A0-730
    VBIOS Version: 113-C408A0-017
    EFI Driver Version: 01.00.730
    Metal: Supported, feature set macOS GPUFamily2 v1
    Model Name: iMac
    Model Identifier: iMac15,1
    Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Core i5
    Processor Speed: 3.5 GHz
    Number of Processors: 1
    Total Number of Cores: 4
    L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
    L3 Cache: 6 MB
    Memory: 24 GB

    Thanks, Dan

    1. File a bug please. That’s weird. I _have_ your iMac and Metal is consistently faster.

       1. Thank you

66. Thanks for the X-Plane team for update.

    Vulkan Loves NVidia as well. I7-4770, GTX980 W10 and FPS is around 90-100. Even clouds do not change that – amazing!!! Remark that I do not have any add-ons installed.

    Although when I pan around I sense ever so slight jitter.

67. I notice that the known bug list shows no vr image in right eye on AMD cards. I have the same issue with my RTX card. I have tried dissabling plug-ins but no change. Curious if other Nvidia users are having the same issue?

    I have reported the bug.

    Appreciate all your efforts. Even a few extra frames wil be huge in VR

    1. Yes, I do! Black screen on right eye with Oculus Rift and NVIDIA GeForce GTX970

       1. Did you try to play around the gfx slider? Try and set it to HDR

    2. Same problem with GTX 1060 and Samsung Odyssey. Perfect at first, but changing the size of the textures I lost the image of the right eye. And I have not managed to recover it (reinstalling xplane, new drivers, etc). Perfect in OpenGL with a quicker load of ORBX sceneries.

68. I thought with that my PC with a 9700K @5Ghz and and accompanying Nvidia GTX 2070 Super driving a 3440×1440 UWQHD screen I will see some improvement, but my FPS jumps form 37 to 80. After adjusting some graphic parameters I am satisfied with a steady 60fps and buttersmooth flying experience. Flying with a TrackIR is so much more immersive.

    Thanks for this milestone and enjoy this moment.

69. OK.
    So thank you Ben from down here in NZ in my lockdown bubble.
    This is mint.

    I have a Xeon 24 core CPU and a 1080Ti hot rod and your 11.50b1 Vulkan is giving me silky smooth 100fps. Took off from Rome and head east to …..

    Thanks – life is good! LoL

    kiwi David

70. Hello X-plane Team

    I didn’t see somewhere if you mentioned that Carenado’s Planes could work on this Beta. My stock planes are using Xpreality. But if I just remove those plugins, would be enough to start the Beta Version ?

    Thank you for your work, a big evolution to have more FPS. A good news, because MFS2020 is near the corner. You can’t miss the step.

71. Updating my x-plane did not show the new public beta!

72. I still reflexively wince every time I do something that has historically triggered a micro-pause. Can’t uncheck that box now…

    I understand the texture-induced pauses in OGL but I don’t understand why OGL is guilty for the shader-induced blips. OGL can compile everything at startup just as the Vulkan version does now. How was this not a XP11 framework issue?

    1. It was PARTLY an X-Plane issue! We removed a TON of just-in-time X-Plane code that was causing stutters, and those are fixed even in GL in 11.50.

       But the driver itself does a lot of lazy evaluation. A lot of drivers will delay pushing textures to VRAM until the first draw call uses them, for example. Or consider this: a pipeline on most hardware includes the front-end vertex format for fetching and the back-end export format to the ROPs, which is dependent on the color attachments.

       OpenGL shaders -do not include- this info. So what does the driver do? It _mostly_ compiles your shaders, then when you _first_ draw with a given vertex format to a given texture format, it builds a complete pipeline from your shader, VBO bindings, and FBO. It has a cache to try not to do this every frame but it is part of the draw call. You can actually see the NV GL driver squawk about this if you turn on debug messages at the GL API level.

73. First of all congrats to the XPlane development team for implementing Vulcan.
    I enjoy very smooth framerates (+ 30%), no stutters anymore.
    Question (to Ben or Sydney):
    Now that Vulcan is implemented, is there a possibility that “raytracing” will be implemented in a next beta?
    Raytracing: lightning, reflection, shadowing- or a combination of them?
    Thanks for reply.
    Frank

    1. There is _no_ possibility that ray tracing is coming in beta 2.

       1. Thanks for the info, Ben.
          Is ray tracing foreseen in the X-Plane future? Do you think it is technically possible to implement ray tracing?

          Frank

          1. Maybe some day, maybe for part of the scene, but there are other things we can do that I think would lead to a much bigger visual impact and would be a better use of the hardware.

74. Spec

    Intel i9-9900K CPU @ 3.60 Ghz
    32 GB RAM
    MSI MAG Z390 TOMAHAWK
    NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080

    Configuration

    Resolution – 1920 x 1080
    Cessna 172 SP parked on runway ready for takeoff at Manchester International airport
    Orbx TrueEarth Great Britain Scenary
    Visual Effects – High (HDR)
    Antialiasing – 8x SSAA + FXAA (Highest Quality)
    Number of Real World objects – Maximum
    Reflection Details – Minimal
    Draw Parked Aircraft – Unchecked
    Draw Shadows on Scenery – Unchecked
    AI Aircraft – None

    11.41

    43 fps
    0.0215 – 0.0220 CPU
    0.0230 – 0.0235 GPU
    11.50b1 with Vulkan Enabled

    70 fps
    0.0145 – 0.0150 CPU
    0.0105 – 0.0110 GPU

    Conclusion

    Massive improvement in performance.

75. The new beta has transformed X-plane on my Mac Mini 2018! X-plane 10.41 used to run at 16-20fps on my eGPU (RX580), 10.50 beta runs at 50-70fps with the same settings with metal rendering turned on. No crashes or reliability issues yet. A massive improvement. Thanks.

76. Just my two cents.

    i3-8350K OC / 1080 GTX OC / 16GB RAM / WIN10

    Tested in 4 scenarios. Before had around 35-50 FPS, with Vulkan have around 50-80FPS. Fun fact that in Zibo737 cockpit on airport had 29-31FPS, now the same gate is around 45-55FPS. Huge improvement in terms of smoothness also. It allowed me to max my settings even further.

    Great job and didn’t expect so much improvement. Would like also to say that new plugin admin which states how much FPS plugin eats is top notch idea.

77. With Vulcan, is there any way of getting around the time-dilation problem?

    I normally find flying at 20fps perfectly playable, but I will then occasionally drop lower for some periods, which can cause problems with multiplayer. I have been thinking of maybe it being possible to use two computers to get around this problem.

    Would it be possible to have one computer (main computer) set up to run the flight model, and the two side monitors at lower resolution & graphical settings, and a separate computer run only the center monitor, but with higher resolution & graphical settings with Vulcan?

    Or even have one computer which runs the flight model and an unimportant screen (essentially headless), and a secondary computer running the three screens?

    1. You cannot fly in real time at < 20 fps in X-Plane, even with Vulkan. If you have two machines, you can run a master machine with low settings and run an ex-visual at high settings and low fps, but I do not know if the ex-visual will maintain fps below 20 fps - our customers for this want to run at 60 fps.

78. Hello. My textures are not sharp at all when vulcan is on.

79. Hello! Awesome update +50% frames with my RTX 2080TI.

    Quick question though, after switching back from Vulkan to OpenGL, I couldn’t make my addons to work anymore. Is it normal? Has someone else experienced the same issue?

    Regards,

    Guillermo

80. Well, firstly thank you all for your hard work.
    I tried beta and want to say, CPU is still bottleneck.
    My goal is 90fps for VR but it’s even not close (freshly installed x-plane without any plugin, with clean weather in default airport).
    https://i.imgur.com/uwazTEO.png
    https://i.imgur.com/wW8gp0w.png
    So even 4.2Ghz is not enough.

    1. If you’re using SteamVR, set the art control vr/use_interleave to 0 before you start VR – does it help?

       1. hm, where´s that?

       2. Hmm.. I started sim, changed this art, started VR and got buttery smooth experience! I was surprised, cause FPS readings was same as yesterday. This art can’t be kind of magic. So i restarted Sim, started VR without changing this art.. and nothing changed – still soft as silk! Without VR about 50-60fps and stable ~45 in VR. I could have sworn, yesterday i have terrible stuttering with same settings and location. I don’t understand what’s happened, but now VR works good so far. I’ll let you know in case anything goes wrong. Thank you very much! 🙂

          1. I can confirm this quite erratic experience. Sometimes all quite stable and around 45 frames, sometimes jitters and stutters even with the default cessna in more or less default scenery. As for now so unpredictable and surprising that root cause fully unclear..

             1. Stefan, can you tell me where I can find this setting?

                Thanks

             2. No idea Fabio, was looking for that setting as well

          2. Since yesterday, on Rift S i use this plugin for enable ASW at 27 FPS

             https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/50553-ovr-settings-oculus-rift-supersampling-asw/

             and it is perfect, even with ORBX in a big town !!!

       3. Where is art control vr/use_interleave setting?

       4. Ben, can you tell me where I can find this setting?

          Thanks

       5. is that a secret setting, something beyond the reach of ordinary people? something secured by the national security agencies? ? why can’t I find it anywhere, also why nobody answers this?

          1. It’s an art control. If you do not know what that is, please do not pursue this any further.

             1. Ok, thanks…

81. Congratulations to the new generation of x-plane.Thank u for your great work. Only one problem is why not add a check box to disable ground transportation which is fps killer?

82. After downloading 11.50 yesterday and playing with it for several hours, I learned 11.50 is not ready for prime time. My system is fast, very fast. I have a rtx-2080ti on an I-9 OC to 5ghtz, liquid cooled. M2 drives, 128 gig DDR4 ram 3200, on windows 10. My frame rate is 12. For same set up on 11.41 I am getting 25fps with beautiful ortho scenery. On 11.50, scenery is all blurred. Even runways are blurred. Frame rate terrible. And this is with all sliders to lowest settings. If I move sliders up at all. The sky part of screen is black. And this is during the day time. So many issue, too many to post. I will let you find them for yourself. aggravating. Will stay with 11.41. You guys have a lot of work. God speed. and good luck. will be patiently waiting. Sorry for posting bugs here, but readers need to know.

    1. Hey Paul,
       I’m so jealous of your system, that’s friggin’ rocking! Having done some programming in the past on small teams, I think it’s important to remember that the LR team agrees that 11.50b isn’t ready for prime time. They’ve been busting their butts to get this thing going and finally decided to share the status with us via a Beta release, which people have to opt into in order to use.

       On my (lame) setup it happens to work really well, so I’m not able to help much with any support tickets, but I encourage you to make some tickets if you’d like to see 11.50b get ready for prime time like you mentioned.

       Happy sim flying!

    2. Paul, I suggest there is something wrong in your setup.
       Even with 11.41 you should be in the 50’s
       I have a lesser computer with 50fps, this improves with Vulkan.
       Please seek help in Windows/avirus/ there must be something affecting performance outside X-Plane.

83. I only get 1/4 screen running 4k. 11.50b1 forces me to run 1080p if I want full screen.
    I hence reverted back to 11.41 because of lack of 4k full screen support

84. Has anybody found a work around for the missing right eye in oculus rift s? I know it’s a known bug and I know that it works in OpenGL, but I saw somebody say with Hdr on it worked for him but I haven’t found that to be true no matter what setting I use

    Great work btw, went from 20 to 40 FPS on an old i5 3570k with Vega64

85. windows 10 nvidia display card using Vulcan have gained a lot of fps but keep running out of memory and freezing, and I’ve not loaded half my scenery. Never happened in 11.41, always had enough fps and vram.

86. Hi, there is bug for multi monitors, the image in main monitor is compressed to left side of monitor. I had sent it to bug report.

87. By any chance, does 11.50 also make use of all CPU cores? Or does it just fix the overhead to the GPU?

88. Seriously impressed by the performance increase on my late 2016 MacBook pro 15″: 2.7ghz i7 quadcore, 16GB DD3, Blackmagic Radeon 580 eGPU via thunderbolt 3.

    On the production version, I was averaging 10-13 fps with low quality settings and had to drop everything to the minimum in order to hit 20+. I couldn’t bear the low quality so I set the demo aside, disappointed that the eGPU I just bought couldn’t make it work.

    The beta is running smoothly at 23-25fps with medium graphic settings and low world object settings. With medium world object settings, I’m ranging from 11-18 fps.

    All of these tests were conducted in xplane demo and default KSEA. Now that it’s useable on my current system, I am going to purchase the full version, connect my Saitek Cessna yoke/rudder/throttle quad/trim wheel and download the beta!

    Huge thank you and congrats to all of the developers who worked on this patch.

89. Cloud shadows seems to be flickering a lot more than previous versions with opengl.
    Is there any technical reason for that? Tech limitation?

    1. The camera setup in Vulkan has changed – I need to look into it more. There are other shadow bugs filed too.

       1. First off…Really impressed with 11.50b1.

          I did notice the borked shadows and flashing with clouds present. I filed a bug report with video on a brand new stock copy of XP. A number of reports on the .Org too, but some say it’s been present prior to 11.50b1.

       2. Is it possible to make “fbo/shadow_cam_size=2048.000000” editable again? The jagged in cockpit shadows are a real immersion killer. PS the beta is amazing.

          1. Shadow cam size is _not_ editable via art controls. You _can_ mod settings.txt to control this – you’ll find a table of UI settings -> art controls.

             If you find shadows jaggie compared to 11.41 and/or if you have a settings hack to “fix” it, please file a bug. I’ve seen some jaggies, and I suspect it’s a different art control causing the problem.

             1. Thank you, Ben. That works well. Is there also a way to modify “clouds/shadow_size”? The cloud shadows on the ground are painfully flickery.

             2. You can probably add it to settings to control it with the UI.

             3. For those experiencing flickering clouds and cloud shadows, I had really good luck modifying these with a .lua script or in DataRefEditor:

                clouds/limit_far=0.15
                cloud_shadow_lighten_ratio=0.85
                clouds/shad_radius=1.00

90. My 5700XT is finally faster than the nVidia card it replaced. I no longer have to drop settings to get 25fps stable. Not only did my frame rate literally double but I can now also max out textures, scenery density, and increase AA by a notch. So far no crashes, just waiting for devs to update things (notably xPilot). Thanks for all the effort!

91. At first, I was super impressed. I went on a very simple scenery. My frame rate was a constant 60 fps even on max rendering settings. The stutters were very minor. But then I decided to load a very complex and large scenery. Crash. I could usually use this scenery with about 30 fps. I opened a less demanding scenery. 30-35 fps. I could usually run this scenery with about 50 fps. The update seems to improve the frames on lesser demanding scenery, but it also seems to handle any other scenery much worse. Is there anything I can do?

    1. I’m sure you’re aware but just wanted to make sure you didn’t forget to check “vulkan” again in X Plane’s graphic settings after a crash – X Plane unchecks Vulkan in case of a crash. On my end of the net, complex scenery takes a hit but is still better rendered (+20% FPS) than in openGL. Now if you find a case where there are problems with a scenery between openGL and Vulkan, especially if you are able to test in parallel, you should definitely file a report.

92. Austin, is there anything on custom scenery that could break Vulkan?
    My XP is working fine with all orbx scenery, but when I try to open SPJD (freeware downloaded from x-plane.org), XP crashes and asks me for an email and a short description, and probably sends the data to you..
    I’m gonna try some different scenery today that I have in Brazil area, but I was just wondering about what could exists in this scenery that allows it to work on opengl, but crashes on Vulkan..

    1. Guys, I fixed the scenery crash problem by disabling REGIONAL BR AUTOGEN v1.0.0 library/whatever this is.
       Thanks to the log.txt

       But after flying for about 30 minutes, I decided to go to the fligh menu, ans select another airport and when it finished loading the stuttering was huge, unable to user it in VR.
       I quited, and went to check the logs, and please let me know if this means a problem:

       0:38:33.746 D/ATC: Validating altitude for p=4 (N201YB): filed: 36000 usable_rte_dist: 2102.017578 maxDescent: 525000 maxAlt: 525000 minAlt: 36000 chosen_alt: 36000
       0:38:33.746 D/ATC: p=4 (N201YB): Cleared IFR @ 10973FT
       0:38:33.746 I/FLT: Init dat_p4 type:loc_specify_lle lat:-24.191799 lon:-45.876041 ele(ft):35999.999634 psi:315.659698 spd(kts):299.250011
       0:38:33.746 I/FM: Experimental flight model is active.
       0:38:33.746 D/ATC: p=4 (N201YB): Fly Heading: 349
       0:38:33.746 D/ATC: p=4 (N201YB): Maintain FL35997
       0:38:33.746 I/ATC: Aircraft p=4 (N201YB) started airborne as an overflight at -24.191799, -45.876041, 10972.799805
       0:38:34.777 W/MEM: Entered heavy memory pressure state
       0:38:34.880 W/MEM: Entered heavy memory pressure state
       0:38:35.274 E/TEX: Target scale moved to 2.000000
       0:38:35.600 W/MEM: Entered heavy memory pressure state
       0:38:36.111 W/MEM: Entered heavy memory pressure state
       0:38:36.140 W/MEM: Entered heavy memory pressure state
       0:38:36.179 E/GFX/VK: Notifying user that heap 0 has overstepped its budget
       0:38:36.179 E/GFX/VK: Heap usage is 10656194560, heap budget is 9574671155
       0:38:36.342 W/MEM: Entered heavy memory pressure state
       0:38:39.086 D/ATC: p=2 (N172SP): Fly Heading: 172
       0:38:39.086 D/ATC: p=2 (N172SP): Maintain 2998ft
       0:38:39.086 I/ATC: 172 2SP, Fly heading 1 9 0, vectors for the visual approach runway 17, descend and maintain 3 thousand.
       0:38:40.616 I/MEM: Entered regular memory pressure state
       0:38:43.854 I/MEM: Entered regular memory pressure state
       PNG warning! iCCP: CRC error, Custom Scenery/SBJD – A – Jundiai/Objetos/Luzes/Light14m.png
       0:38:48.528 I/ATC: Heading 1 9 0, vectors for the visual runway 17, down to 3 thousand, 172 2SP.
       0:38:59.655 D/ATC: p=2 (N172SP): Fly Heading: 328
       0:38:59.655 D/ATC: p=2 (N172SP): Maintain 1998ft
       0:38:59.655 I/ATC: 172 2SP, Fly heading 3 5 0, descend and maintain 2 thousand.
       0:39:02.628 I/WIN: Showing subscreen Freeflight
       0:39:02.628 I/OVR: User is entering the holodeck.
       0:39:02.628 I/WIN: Opened window Primary V11 UI

93. Ben, and team… Absolutely the direction LR needed to be going. awesome results.
    Ben how much help could be given to developers of xEnviro to fast track the development curve into graphics api using Vulcan? they are about to bring their latest v1.14 which is unbelievable to your sim… wishing you all the very best and safest days ahead.

    1. They do not need to be porting their add-on to Vulkan; we do not provide an API that allows add-ons to run native Vulkan code inside X-Plane. We evaluated this during dev and concluded there were way too many issues to safely do this.

       What they (and any other add-on that needs to draw in 3-d) need to do is adopt the new 3-d drawing callback using the 3.02 XPLM. They were in the private beta, so they’ve had access to it, but how much time this port will take will vary hugely by add-on. In some cases it’s trivial, in some cases there may be major rewriting.

       1. Ben, thank you for being honest… We all don’t know how hard the devs have it… but at least this gives us an idea going forward.

          Was the Clouds PUFF and Lights.txt updated in Vulcan? I replaced my custom ones thinking so during install?

94. With reference to recently published great video posted by Michael and presented by Austin about Vulkan (https://youtu.be/_D9YZLapnCw?t=1019),,,

    Whereby Austin outlined three goals for move to Vulkan summarized as:

    Short Term
    ——————
    1) Better VR
    2) Better Professional Simulator Platform

    Medium to Long Term:
    ————————————
    3) Next-Gen Scenery (Hmm…. A Very rare and Interesting Hint about what is to come…)

    And given that majority of users having graphics cards of 8gb or less .. this would always pressurize the VRAM resource that is yet to be shared with 3rd Party Addons….

    So I could deduce most of the problems/issues arise around shortage of VRAM .. (and again VRAM) .. the more VRAM we have, the better we can juice pure and flawless GPU Burst Performance , as the data needs to be close as possible, and any serious simmer should think wisely about the vital specs of his rig. (VRAM comes top going forward).
    NVIDIA’s TITAN RTX has 24 GB GDDR6 —- OMG ..
    ——–
    So Best Definition of Stutter Causes so far:
    “Data transfers often consume more power than the actual computation itself”

    The case of X-Plane and Memory Mgmt. to selectively use data on the GPU due to its limited memory capacity, has been almost perfectly ironed out, and will be subjected further refinements on the go…

    The circus of memory management, can be relieved by two factors :::

    1) More VRAM –> less shuffling overhead –> More headroom for Performance.
    2) Higher Speed for Memory Copy Operations –> smoother memory shuffling.

    ————————————-

    VRAM is much faster than RAM, they are usually a one to two generational leap advanced, and thus more expensive to pack and produce commercially.(Or Modern Desktops have DDR4 – while new Graphics cards have DD6) … yet many computers out there still have DDR3 – or 2 !!

    With passage of time, we might reach one day to a Dream Come True Genuine Unified Memory Architecture for Video and System … (Hypothetically within a decade), although the new APU from AMD has merged the CPU and GPU on same die, still they both have distinct memories … though can share some cache… (https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/microcontrollers/article/21796296/unified-cpugpu-memory-architecture-raises-the-performance-bar)

    —————————–

    Anyhow, Good news is… Memory Copy speed can leverage new hardware
    Thinks of this comparative hardware generations:

    1) DDR4 RAM 17 GB/s —> PCI GEN 3, 15 GB/s (x16) —> DDR5 VRAM 51 GB/s (NVIDIA)
    2) DDR4 RAM —> PCI GEN 3, ~15 GB/s (x16) —> DDR6 VRAM ~768 GB/s (NVIDIA)
    3) DDR4 RAM —> PCI GEN 4, ~31 GB/s (x16) —> DDR6 VRAM ~768 GB/s (AMD)
    4) DDR4 RAM —> PCI GEN 4, ~31 GB/s (x16) —> HBM2 VRAM ~307 GB/s (AMD)
    5) DDR5 RAM —> PCI GEN 5, ~63 GB/s (x16) —> HBM3 VRAM ~768 GB/s ( … 2021)
    6) DDR5 RAM —> PCI GEN 5, ~63 GB/s (x16) —> DDR6 VRAM ~768 GB/s ( … 2021)

    While higher PCI Bus Speed means better SLI Performance; still it is not close to GPU interconnect such as NVLINK (50 ~ 300 GB/s)

    As for AMD, more on:
    https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-infinity-fabric-cpu-to-gpu

    https://www.anandtech.com/show/15596/amd-moves-from-infinity-fabric-to-infinity-architecture-connecting-everything-to-everything
    ———————

    For the Gaming GeForce Nvidia Lineup, NVLINK is only available for Titan and 2080 but not for 2070 cards.
    https://hothardware.com/news/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2070-gpu-will-not-support-nvlink-sli-but-why

    As for AMD has officially ended its brand Crossfire for multi-GPU configurations. Now it will be called multi-GPU or mGPU and just like Nvidia, newer graphics cards from AMD will only support a 2-way multi-GPU setup. This is applicable from AMD’s latest Radeon RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56 graphics cards.

    Since we know today that SLI or Interconnect is not supported by X-plane and is out of scope of implementation – and since we know that the speed of VRAM memory shuffling is limited by the interconnect (PCIe or NVLink or Infinity Fabric) and it’s not possible to take advantage of data locality on CPU RAM. ….

    So I hereby want to ask about making at least a partial implementation that better leverages the access for VRAM on Card “B” from the GPU of Card “A” Hardware (such feature might benefit those having decent/professional configurations )

    In other words, is there a way to benefit from Extra VRAM available on a second Graphics card, suppose via NVLINK – in same manner other 3D Rendering Apps do?

    Ref:
    https://www.boxx.com/blog/boxxlabs/testing-v-ray-gpu-rendering-with-nvidia-nvlink

95. Having saved a second copy of my XP 11.41 version as a precaution, I simply updated my original copy to 11.50 beta1, switched on Vulkan and it seems to be working perfectly straight out of the box! This is with all of my existing plugins, custom scenery (including Orbx) and all third party aircraft.

    I’m convinced that frame rates have improved by between 25% -30% and more importantly, there appear to be absolutely no stutters where I would have seen them previously 🙂

    I tried a couple of flights with a Cessna 172 and a Zibo 737-800X. With the latter aircraft particularly, frame rates went from around 30 on average, to around 40 with views inside the cockpit and from 40 to 50 with external camera chase views.

    GPU utilisation is around 35% and CPU ranges from 35% to 100%, depending on what the PC in general and the sim is doing at the time.

    System used: Intel i7 8700K 3.7GHz over clocked to 4.5GHz, GTX1070 8MB GPU, 2 x 1TB Samsung SSD 970 EVO M.2, 64GB RAM.

    I will keep monitoring, but in the meantime, a big thanks to everyone at Laminar, well done 🙂

96. Is it possible to run Vulkan X-Plane on Windows 10 (Boot Camp) on a Mac? I have “Radeon Pro Software Version 19.30.01.33” installed, which is the latest available via the Boot Camp helper app called Apple Software Update and Vulkan X-Plane tells me “X-Plane requires at least AMD Adrenaline 19.12.3” (although this version number seems to be lower). Do I understand it correctly that “Adrenalin” (as AMD writes it) is a different driver branch that is not officially available on Windows 10 (Bootcamp) – only throught bootcampdrivers.com?
    PS: Thank you and congratulations for the major performance improvements!

    1. I don’t know…but also…why? The Metal drivers on Mac should be plenty fast.

       1. Why? Because I use Windows (Boot Camp) for gaming and macOS for everything else. Using macOS for X-Plane would mean that I would not only use Windows but also macOS for gaming and that I would have to install Steam on macOS, too (since I bought X-Plane 11 on Steam). The clear separation between the two operating systems and their purposes would be lost 😉 Therefore, I would be grateful if you could find it out and it would probably be helpful for other users, too, since I’m not the only one using Windows for gaming on a Mac.

    2. I needed to install the driver from bootcampdrivers.com and now it works on my 2016 MBP.

97. I downloaded the beta and I’m getting a failed GPU buffer error and won’t let me run it with Vulkan. Am I doing something wrong? Error message sent.

    1. Does not support Windows 7 on Vulkan of X Plane 11.50. You have to buy windows 10 and buy new third-party scenarios and buy … Goodbye and until never Laminar Resarch

       1. Wait, why on earth would you need to re-purchase third party scenery after an OS update? I’m not aware of any third parties selling scenery licenses under such draconian rules…

          1. Tyler, am I doing something wrong? I check Vulkan in settings and restart X-Plane, but I get the “failed to allocate GPU buffer error” and X-Plane doesn’t load. I have to restart it then it opens but not in Vulkan.

98. The results have been very good (not as extreme as others, but really good nonetheless). Landing on KMIA, (HDR, 2XFXSS+SSA, textures to higg, no reflections, objects high, drawing parked airplanes) I used to get an AVG of 24FPS with a min of 16. Vulkan gives me AVG of 33 with min 26 (both results at 1080). That is good enough for me to make it enjoyable. I do not NEED 1350FPS to be happy, hehehe.

    However, I have run into various cases of “out of VRAM” crashes (which never happened on 11.41) when changing objects to the max setting. Also, on replays, I have seen the cockpit of ZIBO turn blurry, as well as the flaps (not to mention the scenery, which is also blurry). I do understand if the scenery might be blurry, but the cockpit, too? I have a 1660 Super with 6GB of VRAM. So, my question is, 6GB of VRAM is not enough?

    Or, is it because the SIM recognizes that the REAL position of the plane is in the airport gate (after landing), so if I replay it, even though I AM in the plane, since it is away from the actual real position of the plane, it is considered an object far from the real position of the plane in the SIM? Hope I did made sense with my questions.

    1. A few quick notes:
       1. If the cockpit of YOUR aircraft turns blurry and you have VRAM, that might be a bug – please file it. You are always at your aircraft so it should only get de-rezzed if everything has gone bad.
       2. When you replay, texture res is maximized near where the replayed aircraft is. So if you rewatch your flight you should see high res.
       3. If you go into replay and rewind your plane while in free camera and stay at the destination airport, you can see it go blurry.
       4. 6 GB is more than enough – this all sounds like bugginess.

       1. Thanks for the answer, filed the bug report.

          And thanks for this incredible update! Really happy with the results!!

99. Thanks for the beta and the chance to test it.

    Currently with Vulkan I’m only getting an image in the LHS of my VR headset. The RHS is black. Am running win10 64bit, AMD 1700, 32GB DDR4, Radeon VI, 20.4.1 GPU Drivers, latest SteamVR beta. Will report it through x-plane bug reporter.

    Keep up the good work as this is what beta’s are all about. Bugs, report, fix and go again 🙂

    1. I can concur with your findings, but I would like to stress that it only happened to me when I turned on Anti-Aliasing.
       Try to turn off Anti Aliasing and you should be fine (this is how I fly in OpenGL too using my Pimax HMD).

       I wonder which HMD you are using, do you have canted screens or only one screen.

       Last, LR, please also add support for canted HMDs, it can save some CPU work from the VR Compositor.

       Cheers

       1. Last I checked, there’s no support cor canted HMDs in SteamVR – have they updated this yet?

          1. I know that Index is canted screens too so they might do something from their end (for Index).
             Developer can implement support in his engine (there are games I know do not need Parallel Projection to fix this). The easiest way is probably if (for example, Pimax will contact you and send you an example. I can ask them to try and send you some staff to your e-mail (if it is OK by you), I think it would be nice to have the sim support such HMDs and thus decrease the CPU overhead needed by the VR Compositor.

             Thanks

             1. Non-parallel projection must exist in TWO places:
                1. At the VR API level so the VR API can tell the app “this is the position of the screens, please cant your render” and then in the app which reads that info and does the render.

                When I last looked, SteamVR didn’t have API support for canting, and we talk to the PiMax through SteamVR.

                So if there is a SteamVR update that addresses this, I can look at that and I do not need any help from the PiMax guys.

                If there is no SteamVR support for this but PiMax has their own SDK, that is not useful right now – we’re really tight on graphics dev resources and we don’t have time to pursue a 3rd, 4th, 5th native VR API.

          2. I do not know how SteamVR does it, but using my Index I do not see anything wrong in XP VR: no distortion, misalignment or warp.

             PS Ran at 90 refresh rate and 45fps in 11.41 and now in 11.50b1, I am able to set 120 refresh rate for 60 fps and sharper image.

             1. Last I checked, SteamVR did not have a non-parallel lens option for the apps, so it distorted the projected image in the compositor to handle non-parallel lenses.

       2. Hi saar, sorry forgot to mention the headset. It’s the original HTC Vive. Definitely only displaying the LHS side, no image on RHS.

          Will check and try AA off when I get back on there. Thanks for the tip.

       3. Turning off AA didn’t resolve. Thanks for the tip though. Hopefully B2 will have a fix 🙂

100. Hi.
     I have problems getting VSync to work in 11.50 Beta.
     In the last stable version I can Vsync the FPS to my 30 Hz monitor. That does not work in the 11.50 Beta.

101. After years of waiting I tried it today but it still a nightmare, Now I think this simulator will not be playble in anytime soon. I got 9 FPS near to cloud on my iMac with 8g VRam and 4G Ram. I don’t know how can I get better device to run this thing. I wail not waste anytime waiting for another release since I thing that this simulator is built from ground up in wrong structure and it will keep a nightmare no matter you moved to metal/vulkan or not.

     1. 4 GB of RAM is _way_ to small for X-Plane 11! Eve 8GB is probably not enough. 16 GB seem fine, however…

        1. 4 Gb is fine. 4 GB will be fine once we fix the bugs.

           1. I have 40G of ram 2X16 and 2X4 it was typo.

102. XPlane 11.50b1, AMD Ryzen5 1600, Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 6GB, Ubuntu 18.04, 16GB RAM

     Thanks much for the update!

     The overall impression is: “much smoother”. I can see the ‘gpu time’ now being around 0.02 while before (11.40) was around 0.03.
     Also was able to crank up reflection details without affecting gpu times.

     Issues:
     – noticeable lag between mouse and other control inputs (keyboard, joystick) and actual movements. The lag is ‘smooth’ as in ‘delay’, but affects game play big time. Also, lag seems to be unrelated to sceneries or other ‘loads’ or so it seems. At moments, lag disappears, but comes back.

     – running out of VRAM when resizing game from window to full screen, followed by crash. Note this does NOT happen when game is started (from beginning) in full screen

     Thanks again for great update!

103. Is there always gonna be an option to choose between opengl and Vulkan, especially for the people with low vram graphic cards? And are all the future eye candy gonna be bounded to Vulkan only?

     1. For the rest of the v11 version, there will be an option to choose.

        I do not expect OpenGL to be ‘the’ solution for low RAM cards – I think the out of RAM issues we’re seeing is entirely bugginess in the sim itself and _not_ some super power that OpenGL possesses.

104. All I can do is smile and look in disbelief. Iv’e never seen 50fps at the maximum and 23 at the minimum. Best of all this is the beta. Im using an 1080. Also still tweaking. Now i know what iv’e been missing.

105. Is there a way to change from Open GL to Vulkan without having to start the sim, change the setting and restart ? From the preferences file or something like that ? I’m amazed with the Vulkan performance gain, but can’t use it on Vatsim cause there’s no client working right now, so I’ll be using Vulkan for offline, and OpenGL for online. I’m a steam user, so I can’t have two copies installed.
     Thanks for the great update.

     1. Command line will accept –vulkan –metal and –opengl and override the pref.

        1. Thanks ! Hats off to the team.

106. Hi Ben, Sid and team! I am really excited about the arrival of this beta and eventhough I am on Win10 and NV have seen much more improvement than I had expected. Really, really great job!
     One question out of curiousity though: can you quickly explain the mechanism why a _graphics_ engine re-write breaks _sound_ player plugins?
     Cheers, Alex

     1. Ha ha ha sigh yes.

        Some plugins were using the 3-d drawing callbacks to do non-drawing work. This is considered not great — the drawing callbacks are for drawing only.

        Vulkan and Metal do not dispatch the drawing callbacks at all, so the code never runs. Given that the drawing callbacks will not work right, we figured it was less bad to not call them and have some add-ons not work right but have no perf problem than to call them and have some add-ons not work right AND have perf problems.

        Now there is a new Vulkan-but-not-metal “new 3-d callback”. This one is a _new_ callback – we did not opt existing plugins that used 3-d drawing callbacks into the new one automagically for several reasons:

        1. The drawing rules are really different – Y and Z axes are both inverted! 🙂
        2. Things that people used to do in drawing like XPLMDrawObject and XPLMDrawPlanes _do not work_ from the new callback.
        3. 3-d drawing CBs add overhead, so we didn’t want to opt in plugins that were using 3-d drawing for..not drawing.

        So the entire strategy is aimed around having the cleanest, highest performing plugins in the long term, at the expense of having some plugins limp along while others failed in different ways in the short term.

        The _good_ news is: if an add-on is broken because it’s using 3-d drawing for not drawing, the fix is very likely to be simple to code and not a massive rewrite.

        1. Thanks for the answer, Ben! Abuse of technical infrastructure… That is a good explanation and was the missing link to me!
           Here is another question, would’t it be nice to have a new splash screen in ever new 11.xx release. Would underline the “new version” spirit of the updates.
           Thanks for you all working so hard!

107. Hi Ben, first of all, thank you to all for this beta. I’ve noticed that there are many people experiencing crashes due to GlobalTraffic. I know it’s not compatible, and maybe it’s doing something silly once its calls get ignored by XP, at least with some configurations, as this not happens with all the sceneries that make use of it. Fact is, that it is one of the most common plugins used by custom sceneries, even many payware ones, and as it resides in the custom scenery folder, it often goes unnoticed by users, which is a problem; also, often we don’t even understand we are in the proximity of an airport making use of it. The developer is not actively developing its plugins since a lot of time. What I’m asking you is that, as it is open source, if you can take care of it. Sceneries making use of it are so many that it is not a viable solution to ask users to disable them. I know that it is not in your scope, but I believe this is the single most used plugin ever in the history of XP.

     1. Well, I’m definitely not signing up to go modernize GlobalTraffic in a blog post comment. 🙂

        But…please _do_ file this. In particular, while GT may be broken, it probably shouldn’t be crashing, and if it is, that may indicate something the sim is doing wrong as well as a possible coding issue in the plugin. We’re going to need a mini-dump from a brave user on this one.

        EDIT: do you mean “global traffic” or “ground traffic”?

        1. Sorry of course I mean GroundTraffic by Marginal, I believe it’s the single most used plugin in XP, even more than autogate!

        2. He is referring to the GroundTraffic plugin.

108. I maxed out my settings so I could trial-and-error downward to find my new happy spot. I have not yet gone back to the settings page. The wait was worth it!

109. My friend just installed the Vulkan beta on the X-Plane 11 Demo, he has drivers updated to 20.4 on his RX580. He loads into X-Plane and there is a message showing he cant use Vulkan. Any suggestions on what to do for him?

110. Well, I was afraid of it. You have “screwed up.” If I have to buy third-party products again, adapted to your stupid USA scamming philosophy, you have lost a client and all the virtual flight companions around me. “NO” I install Windows 10 because it sucks. You have not solved the reading of “dsf” that has stuck so much in this simulator, which until now was the best but … It is that Austin is a very “thing”, like the Trunp. Bye, bye

     1. I don’t understand? What do you have to buy? If you don’t want to upgrade to Windows 10 then just keep your sim on OpenGL instead of Vulcan. You haven’t lost anything

     2. You realise this is a first release of the beta right? Also what does this have to do with Trump??

111. Wow. Just WOW! Updated and just worked. I’m 100% VR and it simply maintained 45fps constantly, smooth even with the more complex payware airplanes I have with the important sliders 2nd position from the right. I was planning hardware upgrades and just don’t need them now. Gonna wait for better VR HMD’s and I’ll be set for a long time. Good job team! (I do NOT experience blank right eye with Oculus Rift + Nvidia 1080TI. I just made sure all the Windows 10, Nvidia and Oculus drivers were up to date before updating XP).

112. hi ben

     just wanted to know. if hit a bug, is sending the automated crash through enough or do we have to actually log another one on top of that?

     thanks

     1. If you get an automatic crash report, you do not need to send the log – the log is captured with the auto crash report. In fact, we’d rather you hit the send button more even if you don’t fill out email and description – the most useful thing is the data that is captured automatically.

113. After the update I just can not load any scenery. It says “Failed to initialize EDP network input. (legacy recieve) This is almost certainly because you are already running another copy of x-plane on the same computer. Another possibility is that you turned off IPv6 support in your operating system. X-plane requires at least link-local connectivity. Be sure that IPv6 support is on, and restart your computer to be sure that no other instrance of x-plane is running in the background. If it still fails please check the Log.txt file for entries of type E/net and W/net for details.

     I use win10 (up to date) , gtx 1060 max Q (driver up to date) , only connecting an external monitor to my laptop , I have no other copies of x plane haha

     What should I do? I have already spent 16 hours without sleeping to fix this.

114. Hi,
     I noted that 11.5b is really more power demanding to the cpu compare to 11.41!
     I have a i7-7700k with an rtx 2080 ti and due to temp issues i have to run the cpu with an undervoltage of -0.065 v that is totally fine for 11.41 in every situation included WIndows mix reality, but with this configuration, my pc is unable to run 11.5b and it’s switching off.
     Is this increased demand of cpu power normal and scheduled?
     Will it be improved with the other betas ?
     Thanks

     1. You could see this just from better system utilization.

        1. Sorry what do you mean exactly?

115. I’m running XP on Mac, there’s one aircraft not working and a couple of plugins with issues. I’ve not made any flights yet, but being on the ground stationary I’ve looked around inside and outside the aircraft and I’m not seeing a huge improvement in performance. I updated on a copy, which I’ve now deleted and I will try again a bit further down the road as it is early days.
     Huge congratulations to the team at Laminar on pushing this through in these trying times and giving us something positive to think about.

116. Have GTX 2080 TI, after update have black screen and after i unchecked the vulkan box but i have the same problem, what do i remove the whole plugin folder?
     Or tell me how do I go back. Thanks for help

117. Running a Z390 i9 Hackintosh on 10.15.4 with 64gb Ram and Radeon VII. Overall performance is fantastic! For public beta 1 this is excellent. Flying around the Chicago area, my frame rates went from 30-35 to 55-60. So, just to see what happens when I push it, I turned every slider to max. I still maintained 30fps even with AA maxed. Amazing! Noticed some considerable jaggies in the cockpit where sun light fell on panels. Another minor issue, 4K screen resolution would not go full screen. No crashes, it let me adjust to 1080@60hz without issue.
     Again, this is a tremendous beta 1. You guys run such a tight ship. Keep up the excellent work!

118. I can definitely see the possibilities in this next step. I am having issues with the beta and my multiple video cards in both of my computers. I have a full home cockpit. My main computer runs the sim and only uses one copy of XP running. It is a 4.9Ghz with a 1080ti and 1060. I run 5 other displays from that same computer with ZHSI and ZCDU. Even with only the single display and XP running (Non of the other 5 in use) and all the sliders turned down it was only 20-25fps and the data transmittal to the second computer very slow and buggy.
     My second computer has two video cards as well. Right now I have the main 2080ti running my 3 outside TVs. It too was having horrible frame rates on Vulkan until I disabled the currently unused second video card and the sim came to life! Great FPS now!

     1. Website or youtube channel for home cockpit? 🙂

        1. Still bumbling my way through the build, don’t have any of that just yet. I probably should it’s everyone else’s inspiration that has brought me this far.

119. I just wanted to confirm that Vulkan works perfectly on first inspection with Windows 8.1. Just needed to update my Nvidia drivers.

     1. Thanks for confirming!

120. I have WIN 10-64 bit, I7-7700K @ 4,2 GHz, 32 GB RAM and a 1080ti and I use Oculus Rift S + Orthos and freeware addons. Unfortunatelly I cannot see any fps increases 🙁

     1. I am in the same boat.

        i7 7700k water cooled 5ghz
        16GB 3866 speed ram
        1080 ti
        Win 10-64bit
        HP Reverb

        I have spent $160.00 after 11.50 came out. Dumped my steam copy and purchased new copy from LR website.

        Formatted one of my SSD and installed brand new copy of X Plane 11.50

        Then I thought my cpu is at 5Ghz maybe I need faster ram. So I dropped 115.00 at newegg and went from 2400 speed to 3866 speed.

        I do see a drop in cpu time it used to be 20ms per frame with new ram now down to 15ms and my CPU runs a few degrees hotter. This is not a bad thing because the ram is talking much quicker to the cpu. This is going to be great!!!!!

        Now I am ready to go…. Ya Right fired up x plane and I get the exact same performance I did in the non vulkan x plane. 17 fps

        not one frame extra when Vulkan is enabled. If I move AA 2 notches to the left I get around 32fps with vulkan enabled.

        I mean come on I know it is NOT my system it has plenty of muscle the only addon I am using is orbx true earth Florida Nothing else.

        Again I see NO performance gain AT ALL with Vulcan enabled.

        1. One other thing I am sitting at Tampa airport ramp in the LR Barron with terminal buildings in front of me

           now I have my reverb on with Vulcan enabled I release the parking brake and begin to turn the plane out to the taxi way. As I am turning the buildings go by just as they did in the open gl version stuttering as you make your 360 to hit taxi way.

           Something is very wrong with this. I see LR will be looking into this performance problem some are having. I just wonder if all the happy posts are from AMD people.

           How many 1080 ti users are having the same problems I am having
           We need to start an x plane 1080 ti users forums

           1. Something is _weird_ on your setup. Users with lesser systems are getting better results. When we get to perf, we have good tools to capture what’s going on.

121. Hi guys, i want to know if I can get this update on mi Pc.
     I 3 3.2hgz
     16gb ram ddr3
     Radeon rx550 4gb
     Win7.
     If I install w10 on mi pc, what are the possibilities to run xplane 11.5?
     Right now i have between 12 and 14fps.
     I really want to have at least 20fps.
     Could I?

122. The sim doesn’t pause when taking a screenshot anymore, nice touch!

     1. You noticed! :-). It’s just an inevitable result of the new design.
        – We had to rewrite capturing frames cuz new drivers.
        – We created a _single_ fully asynchronous non-pausing multi-core capture mechanism to drive video recording.
        – A screen shot uses the same thing, just for one frame at full res, so it’s async too.

     2. Honestly, it still trips me up after months with it… I always take two screenshots because I think the first screenshot failed. Worst feature ever

        1. I LOL’d!

           1. Well, seriously, a “screenshot taken” text would not be a bad idea.

123. Thanks for the update
     W10, Ryzen 7 2700X, AMD RX580, 16RAM
     I get 70% more FPS

124. bonjour,
     je viens d’installer la beta et quand je lance x-plane j’ai un message d’erreur
     0:00:00.000 I/GFX/VK: Discovered Vulkan device: GeForce GTX 1060 6GB, Vulkan: 1.2.136, driver: 442.88.0. Score: 16810528
     0:00:00.000 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: Vulkan error!
     0:00:00.000 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: general
     0:00:00.000 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: error
     0:00:00.000 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: Failed to open dynamic library “C:\ProgramData\ReShade\.\ReShade64.dll” with error 1114
     0:00:00.000 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: :0

     De quoi il s’agit?

     Merci

125. I find I need to restart the pc between sessions.
     If I close X-Plane 11.50b1 down I need to restart the pc before re-starting the sim .
     I am getting this error If I don’t do so….
     “More than 100 inflight command pools? Are we leaking command buffers?
     m_executing_containers.size() <= 100"

126. Yesterday I had that black screen too. But the log file didn’t show an error message, no crash occured, I was left without data for a bug report.
     But maybe my observation is somehow useful.

     Out of nothing, after lauching X-Plane and toggle between “Windowed and Full Screen” mode I got that black screen. After 2 or 3 times starting X-Plane again I got an blurry cockpit and an out of VRAM message (1080TI).

     Because before the black screen happened I had a lot of positive tests, I decided to clean (delete) some stuff that could have some history.
     First I deleted the shader cache, and — no black screens anymore.

     Maybe there is no relationship, maybe there is one.

127. Are there changes in UDP protocol communications?

     1. No. Should work the same as 11.41 – if you see differently, please file a bug. But 11.41 and 11.50 can’t be used together in LANs/ex-visual setups.

128. I am using it on windows 10, i7 4700 / 32G RAM, 1060 / 6G, oculus rift s. With the normal laminar airplanes it works well, and much smoother than opengl even on my old 1060, and no problems with my rift s. When I use the zibo 737, after playing for some time, it runs out of vram. It would be nice to have a better recovery from vram errors: now I get the error, which i can confirm, but then xplane freezes in full screen. I can not close xplane or reach other windows apps and I need to reboot. But apart from that, I am really impressed, VR is much smoother now, great work!

129. X-Plane was running well on 2012 / 2013 Mac w. 2gb Nvidia card (after early Catalina issues with add-on aircraft sorted) but Metal option is requesting resolution reduction to unacceptable level (haven’t actually managed to reduce graphic level to a point where I’m not just getting the request to reduce further, could investigate in more detail if of any help) – have two Feral programs updated for Metal and performing well, and was really looking forward to possible X-Plane improvement (was pushing the edge in the plane / ground detail area with some airports or scenery areas only running well with lower vRam aircraft, and hoping Metal might just give the extra boost in this area). Well aware hardware is verging on total redundancy, and have been very impressed with X-Plane performance to date, fingers crossed this issue can be resolved and Metal can maybe give the incremental improvement I’m hoping for…

130. Hi I would just like to thank you all for your hard work and dedication during these difficult times I have just flown in the 11.50 beta.and the differance is amazing keep up the great work

131. Hello!
     I have problems with vulkan
     I have a dell notebook with intel core 7gen and windows 10 but as soon as i restart the game tu use the vulkan opcion it says that vulkan failed to create an instance
     Any solution for this ??

132. Hello.
     It’s so sad for people whose graphic cards are old. My latest drivers are 425.31 nvidia and there are no new updates for my card on official site. So i won’t see any changes in my game 🙁

133. Hi Ben, Sid and team!
     First of all , Thanks much for the update!

     but i Have a problem with Vulkan in VR.
     Im use a Oculus Quest ( Link )
     X-plane 11 with Open GL run in VR 35 – 40fps , without VR run 55 – 65fps
     X-plane 11 with Vulkan without VR 70 – 90fps ( fantastic ), very smooth
     x-plane 11 with Vulkan in Vr have problems , the right side in my Oculus is black the left side is ok.
     I don’t find the problem
     Any solution for this ?

     My Specs: i7 4790K , RTX2070 , 32GB RAM, MSI Gaming5

     1. Hi guys,
        problem solved.
        everything works fine and smooth.
        with Vulkan in VR run 50 – 65 fps in high settings , absolutly fantastic ( ortho files and orbx ).
        With Vulkan without VR 75 – 105 fps, brilliant , constantly and smooth.
        thank so much for this Update.

134. Sounds cool but I’m always getting an CTD after acitivating Vulcan.

135. Hello, first off all thanks for the Vulkan DEV its fantastic, i got like +15FPS; the main reason for this post its because im having a CTD with this error “pipeline must not be null” it happens after i start any aircraft engine in the game, i tried all the XP default planes and 2 moded, ZIBO 737 and Super MD80, i can manipulate all cameras, start all the FMS or APU with no problem, the thing is when i start the engine the game CTD, i already sent to the team the crash report, im gonna try to make a fresh install of the game and try to test it cause i put a lot of scenary addons too…

     Thanks again for the new DEV, and good speed my friends!

136. hello. is it normal when i check the box for vulkan rendering and restart xplane11 the screen remains fully black ?
     my specs :

     i5 2300 Ghz
     nvidia GTX 750
     12gb ram

     thank you

137. Hi LR Team,

     I would really like to participate in the 11.50 beta through Steam. However, when I try to load X-Plane through Steam, after changing the Beta properties to accept the latest public beta, I get the following error –

     application load error 3:0000065432

     I’ve tried to move my X-Plane Output\properties folder out of the way, and have tried to disable reat time scanning of my anti-virus application. Has anybody else run into this, or has found a work around for this? BTW, as soon as I switch back to the released version all works as expected.

     Some websites are commenting solutions to this such as –

     1) Reinstall Steam (didn’t try yet)
     2) Disable anti-virus (tried – didn’t work)
     3) Move steam to it’s original folder (not-applicable for me)

     Any other thoughts?

     Thanks.

138. About X-Plane 11.50
     My hardware :
     Mac Pro late 2013
     Processor: 3 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon E5 processor
     Memory: 64 GB 1866 MHz DDR3
     Graphics: 2x AMD FirePro D700 6 GB
     Metal: Supported, macOS settings template GPUFamily2 version 1

     What is very surprising is that after the installation, in a first step, I also obtained a significant performance increase of about 50%!
     And it is only on the 2nd test that the performance dropped!

     My tests use a “naked from scratch” version of the Custom Scenery: just the data from Laminar, that is 13 files: the “Aerosoft” KSEA and LOWI Demo and the Global Airports. LSGL takeoff to Lake Geneva: I only climb at 19 FPS !!!! !
     Less than my full version (scenes from Switzerland, SimHeaven 4.3 and OrthoPhotos in zoom 17) of 11.41 (22 -25 FPS)

     … and the craziest :
     Always an “empty” Custom Scenery (just the official data ), preferences emptied, graphical parameters at “zero” everywhere ! No static aircraft represented, always the same LSGL takeoff and I insist : ALL GRAPHIC PARAMETERS at ZERO :

     in 11.50 : Without Vulkan/Metal : 60 to 70 FPS !
     in 11.50 : With Vulkan/Metal activated, I drop to 30 FPS !!!!!!

     1. I still specify that in the first test, in the version 11.41 the number of objects is pushed to the maximum, whereas in the 11.50, I cannot go to the maximum: X-Plane indicates me that the graphic card is saturated and asks me to leave! I have to set this parameter to the “up” position

139. 4790k 1080ti 32GB ram
     I am loving Vulcan.
     My biggest gripe right out of the gate was interior shadows. I fiddled with settings “I’m not supposed to” to fix it. Cockpit resolution is the most important thing to me and those shadows being blocky was a deal breaker until I found the band-aid.
     I am also noticing a reduced amount of clouds. All my VRAM is taken and I think clouds are getting tucked away and forgotten about. All in the while my RAM has very low usage. I’m not a computer guy so I’m just speculating, but if there was a way to make close clouds a priority and far clouds less a priority or just low resolution? Seems like VRAM is extra important here. I’ll likely be grabbing the 16GB RTX 30… chip when it comes out.

140. I first updated to 11.50, but could not enable vulkan because it was asking for a new nvidia driver. I installed the new driver and again could not enable vulkan because of windows 7…!?

     Are you kidding me? Why a software developer cannot maintain a (single) windows 7 machine? Are you working for microsoft now? Where was this information beeing hidden? I was following the vulkan development but i haven’t read somewhere that windows 7 is excluded. Laminar research is the last developer i was expecting to do this.

     Speaking of developers, this game is praised only because of the contributions of third party developers (free & paid) and individuals, which made it great (open street maps, ortho4xp, HD mesh, w2xp, weather enchanments, plugins, ATC addons, aircraft addons, world editor airport contributors e.t.c.).

     By default the colors of the distant scenery/mountains fading in the background is grey/red, not blue. The water is dark grey/green, not blue. Have you ever looked at the sea/water and the distant scenery from low and high altitude? Where is the blue?

     So essentially you charge a premium price of 60 euros for a platform and a flight model which is far more simpler than a drivind/racing simulator.
     The funny thing is that driving simulators today, besides the complexity, are using much better lighting systems and volumetric clouds…!

     This is the end of x-plane for me, i had to roll back to 11.41 because with 11.50 the FPS counter droped to half (52 from 100+). I could tolerate all of the existing flaws but this windows 7 fiasco was the icing on the cake.

     1. Well in the end even after my ranting, I bit the bullet and updated to win10, still can do it free. Still looks like win 7, boots faster. All the reason why not to update went out the window with mobile phones anyway. But I only did it for xplane. Could of gone to linux but i might have lost some addons. I wouldnt say i got much of an increse but much smoother.

141. Hey Ben,

     at first you have done a great Job about the 11.50 build.

     I had make any Tesflights but i have any results. The Loadingtime of my Orthos
     are very long never had this before. at Cruise on 330 the next Ortho will be load when iam Close to her so i see it as a Blue one a long time. The next thing is that it will not load the Arrival Airport Correctly a flight from LOWI to EDDB with 3 Party Airport Addons. EDDB the Buildings are all rendering but the Filed is not rendert so iam land on an Ortho Runway :-). Iam Start my flight with 40 FPS and inflight it will get Down to 25-40 and micro Stotters sometimes.
     Xplane Setting:
     HDR:High
     Textures: High
     Shadows: Off
     World Objects: High
     Reflections off:

     Also a Lua Script like this:
     -GRAPHICS–

     –Draw aircraft carriers and frigates. 0 (off) or 1 (on)
     set( “sim/private/controls/reno/draw_boats”, 0.00)

     –Draw birds and deer in nice weather. 0 (off) or 1 (on)
     set( “sim/private/controls/reno/draw_deer_birds”, 0.00)

     –Draw fires and baloons. 0 (off) or 1 (on)
     set( “sim/private/controls/reno/draw_fire_ball”, 0.00)

     –Distance at which road traffic is visible. Default is 20000 meters. Recommend 7500.
     set( “sim/private/controls/cars/lod_min”, 0.00)

     –Distance at which static plans are visible. Default is 9260 meters. Recommend 3000.
     set( “sim/private/controls/park/static_plane_build_dis”, 0.00)

     –Road traffic density. 0 (off) to 5 (very dense)
     set( “sim/private/controls/reno/draw_cars_05”, 0.00)

     –Static plane density. 1 (low) to 6 (high).
     set( “sim/private/controls/park/static_plane_density”, 0.00)

     –Compress textures to save VRAM. 0 (off) or 1 (on)
     set( “sim/private/controls/reno/comp_texes”, 1.00)

     All the Time in VR with newest Zibo 738
     Also Xambience as Plugin.

     I7: 7700K 4.6 Turbo 4.8 Watercooled
     GTX 1070 TI 8Gb
     32Gb G.Skill Ripjaws
     Xplane run on a Samsung Evo 970Evo Plus
     Orthos on two HDD

     Thats it thank you for the Great Work and the stay Safe

142. Thanks for all the hard work guys.

     Is it possible to add a dummy process to allow solid fps cap for VR users? This would hold up each frame until the fps value is reached as set by the user. Where each frame takes longer than the set fps to calculate then the dummy process wouldn’t interfere.

     1. Never mind, I found the command –lock_fr=XXX and where to insert it in Steam

143. I don’t know it that a bug? The external computer only for visual is stuttering if the AI planes are putted in master computer, even it is locked in 60 FPS and the CPU and GPU’a periodic time are less than 1/60 secs. There are three monitors, normally one of the monitor is stuttering.

144. Faultl on plane maker the message:
     « Pipeline must not be multiport pipeline » report a-t-il Laminar
     Jonathan

145. Hi Guys,

     with PB 1150b3 less FPS

     this with 1150b1
     X-plane 11 with Open GL run in VR 35 – 40fps , without VR run 55 – 65fps
     X-plane 11 with Vulkan without VR 70 – 90fps ( fantastic ), very smooth
     x-plane 11 with Vulkan in Vr 50 – 65fps

     this with 1150b3
     X-plane 11 with Open GL run in VR 35 – 40fps , without VR run 55 – 65fps
     X-plane 11 with Vulkan without VR 50 – 70fps ( less 20-25fps)
     x-plane 11 with Vulkan in Vr 30 – 35fps ( less 20-25fps)

     is 1150b3 a new test ?

     My Specs: i7 4790K , RTX2070 , 32GB RAM, MSI Gaming5

146. Hello! I have an error when running Xplane 11.50.b3 via steam.

     ###
     Encountered Vulkan validation layer error
     general
     error
     /home/xplane/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steamoverlayvulkanlayer.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32
     ###

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