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A week or two ago we had a very dead beta, and posed the question of how to incrementally test betas in the future. We got a variety of responses, ranging from “private test it first” to “roll it out in a wave” to “full speed ahead, we know betas are bumpy.”

Since then, we’ve been doing one of the easiest and probably most useful things we can: posting the betas early to third-party developers who are in our developer Slack channel.

Beta 7/8 had a ton of changes, and our third-party developers found multiple problems, some of which we wouldn’t see in our internal tests. So we held off on releasing betas 7 and 8 to the public while we fixed those issues. Until today.

There are a lot of changes in this one since it’s kind of 3-in-one. Please see the full release notes here.

Are We There Yet?

X-Plane 11.50 has been similar to X-Plane 11.20 (our VR) release and different from what we normally try to do, in that when we went beta (both private and public), the work for Vulkan wasn’t done yet. We had something that you could fly with, that was delightful for some users (and unstable for others), but we also had a big list of things we still needed to do.

So are we there yet?

Not quite, but we are getting close. Here’s some things that are done as of beta 9:

  • Icon preview generation works in Vulkan/Metal.
  • Dome warping for pro customers works in Vulkan/Metal.
  • Plugin map drawing works in Vulkan/Metal.
  • Plugins that create multiplayer aircraft can publish their aircraft to TCAS.
  • Background processing is now optimized so we can run comfortably on a four-core machine.
  • Texture paging has been tuned to avoid wasting VRAM in a number of places – this should hopefully help with blurry textures.

This list kills off most of the high profile scary things on our Trello board. Some of them are big topics, so I will dive into them in a separate post. Here are a few things that are still there:

  • Shadows look jagged and do other silly things.
  • Vulkan/Metal device picks the wrong device on multi-GPU setups.

We have code that is partly or fully done for both of those things.

So the good news is: when it comes to functionality we are almost there yet.

Crawl, Walk, Run

In a past post I set an order for fixing the trifecta of Vulkan pain:

  • First fix crashes and stability
  • Then fix VRAM use
  • Then fix performance

The bad news is: we thought b9 was going to make a huge difference in stability for Vulkan and from our auto-crash reports, it appears it did not. So we are back to the mines on that one.

The good news is: we have already put in some improvements for VRAM use. We have identified others, but as of b9 things should be better. We do still have known issues we have to fix. Details on this in a future post.

For performance, same situation: we have already fixed some performance issues, and others we still know about. So we have made progress but we are not done yet.

Third Party Add-Ons

If you develop a third party add-on and it does not just work with X-Plane 11.50 and you do not know why, you will need to look at the situation ASAP. At this point we are done with modifications to third party APIs for Vulkan compatibility, and we believe anything you need to make your add-on work is already available. So if your add-on has a problem and you don’t know why, please contact us ASAP.

(This doesn’t mean all of your favorite add-ons will work or just be updated, it just means the developers should have something in progress.)

About Ben Supnik

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

159 comments on “X-Plane 11.50 Beta 9 and a Development Roadmap Update”

    1. Agreed. SO happy with Vulkan, even from b1…so for me, it was worth it to the bazillionth degree, even with a few third party crashes, the performance increase made it soo much more fun to use and enjoy.

  2. Interested to see how this beta improves vram usage. Is 11.5b9 it available for steam users to test? thanks

    2. Bravo and congratulations for this migration and integration of metal./Vulcan

      I test in multiplayer band this version like the previous ones.

      I noticed a correction in the following line.

      Plugins that create multiplayer aircraft can publish their aircraft to TCAS.

      As the management of the purchased networkable aircraft is complicated and generates bugs due to incompatibilities of the devices, could we understand that a plug would be integrated in xplane to allow the creation of a multiplayer networkable aircraft from a purchased one for example.

      This would be a very good thing and would avoid bug reports from users.

      Can we know more about this plugin?

      Thank

      Ypsos multiplayer network administrator

      Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

  3. Thank you Ben, and the Laminar team.

    It’s exciting and engaging to participate in the Beta process, particularly when solid progress can be experienced as a result of everyone providing information that the dev team is able to turn into positive results.

  4. Enormous progress!
    The advantage of Corona is that Ben and everyone else can work undisturbed by Austin.

      2. That is such a lovely distraction to have. Until it isnt. When you get to be my age (59) you wish you had a little more of it. But yeah, also at my age, you gotta give em back.

        I am looking into writing some plugins for XPlane. Where is the plugin graphics going? Are you moving it too?

        Also wondering how to get on the slack channel. Or is that only for established coders? I have been writing image code for a long time for film.

        1. Plugin graphics is staying in OpenGL for multiple reasons. The slack channel is really for developers of heavily used add-ons. It sucks to have to draw a line but if the channel gets too noisy it becomes useless for everyone.

  5. I tested all available betas, congratulations for the excellent work !!!
    I am not concerned with the problems that we may encounter when we are using beta.
    Just a question, the A320 Flight Factor still doesn’t work, kkk !!!

  6. In my case I have to go back to the b6 OpenGl. I think the improvements are not enough for my GeForce GTX 760 – 4GB, I7 8Gb ram. VRAM errors again present.- Blurred textures were corrected with b9 vulkan.-

    1. 8GB of RAM definitely is not enough for X-Plane 11; at least not for Windows.

    2. How do you plan on going back to b6? I’d like to go back to b4 but,
      Ive been told that it’s all in or nothing.

  7. Getting random quits to desktop running Vulkan in VR, in orbx southern california at least. Ryzen 5 1600, RTX 2070, 20GB DDR4 3000

  8. textures seem to be down-rezzed more aggressively it seems, hadn’t seen that
    on the previous betas. Also, is there something special about the clouds? flying through them raises gpu times to almost 0.9, that seems a bit high, no?
    (nvidia 2080).

  10. After a few random crashes, B9 would not even load to the main menu with Steam. Having to opt out of beta, really annoying there’s no obvious way to revert to B6 for now which was running great

    Ryzen 5 1600, RTX 2070, 20GB DDR4 3000, Orbx trueearth packs

    1. Betas are ephemeral. They exist to improve the final product. Your happiness or annoyance has nothing to do with a beta. Please read the beta caveats before complaining. Next time, if you prefer, save the betas you like, they will not be around later. You were warned, you failed to read or heed the warning, so I can see how you might be annoyed with yourself. It will be ok, things will improve, and you will learn.

  12. Thanks guys for a great program. Have you corrected an issue where the Flight School instructor needs to be inside the VR Head Unit and not on an external screen.

  13. Generally beta 9 is stable for me.
    Since the release of beta 1 version XP11.50 I have a problem with two additions:

    1) Polish Airport vol3 v2 (Drzewiecki) – strange case —> the scenery does not work (an error occurs) when I am at an airport not covered by PA3v2 e.g. EPWA, EPBC, EPMO, EPMM etc – problem also reported to DD

    2) FlyTampa-Athens – the airport is loaded, but an error is displayed

  14. Ben have you and the team ever considered releasing the names of the developers involved in testing? Some of us may like to patronize them in gratitude.
    I remember having a particularly bad time in an X-Plane 10 Beta with a third-party dev that *did NOT* want to get involved in fixing a problem that came up in beta testing.

    1. No – we try to release _nothing_ that goes on in the third party dev channel, so that they have a private and confidential space to discuss the state of their add-ons with us. They are welcome to publicly state that they are in the dev channel or in contact with us, but we prefer they not state what’s in the channel either; usually if we say “this is our bug” they’ll ask us if they can state that publicly and we will tell them yes.

  15. I am pleased that you decided to use the third party developers as your “testers” for X-Plane. Who would have better understanding of the intricacies involved and make good, useful decisions, thereby saving you from having to sift through useless comments. Great application of talented people to enhance a great product!

    1. We actually did it because we thought the beta would have such an impact on third party add-ons and we needed detailed info about compatibility issues.

  16. Funnily enough beta6 was the smoothest for me so far, beta9 just crashed the whole app on approaching EHAM and, on launch, “claimed” not to have enough VRAM. That was a very first to me, haven’t changed my settings since 1989 😉

    I took the antialiasing down notch (from 3 to 2) and that did the trick. I have to say, though, that the lighting looked different and in a better way, a big of jagging, of course, but all in all it is a substantial improvement on my cMacpro-cum-Vega56, I can fly my Marchetti and enjoy doing it.

  17. The sound system in x-plane needs little overhaul, to support better wind speed cracking/blowing sounds – especially enable when in external views.

    Like the camera chasing the airplane, we could only hear the engines – as if the airplane is stand still on the airport – whereby in fact the wind should be even more obvious than the engine sounds …

    this adds a lot of realism

    1. It is tricky to do that in FMod app. You need that sound isolated from everything else, and it would be unique per plane. It could be cooked up relative to airspeed I suppose. But I would want to do it as a human hears it, not as a microphone picks it up, so that means synthetic white noise based subtractive synthesis. You could render that down but to get a lot of variances, esp for sailplanes would be a huge amount of work. It is also possible to use a convolution engine to get the cockpit sound to resonate realisticly. But I want to leave you with the correcct impresison that it is a lot of work to do this.

  18. Hmmm, I’m down on performance again. I run 32gb DDR4 RAM at 3200mhz, i9 9900k at 5.0ghz and 1080ti but still both cpu and gpu are not used to their full potential it seems. GPU is at 25% usage, CPU as well. Frames don’t go over 20.

    1. Thanks for your efforts, sadly I saw no change from 6 to 9, stutters are still a problem. at high alt and at EGLL all defult.
      I7 5.0ghz
      32G 3600mhz
      1080Ti

    2. some thing is very wrong then i have 9700k at 5ghz and 1080 and i get 100fps with the 172 just about everywhere

  19. Ben I really love the new vram profiler.

    I’m doing some ridiculous testing and inducing some crashes that aren’t really game play related. I need to go back and read what you said about the crash reporter, because I hope i’m not contributing noise and anxiety. I’m intentionally trying to push my system to the limit and running some experiments with some obscene scenery and mesh with many million vertices.

  20. So far, B9 is working great for me. Will try the big birds this weekend. Again, many thanks for your open communication and for having us being part of a constructive ongoing process. Keep up the good work.

  21. I appreciate your work but I still get 9FPS near the cloud, I have 40G of ram, 8G of Vram, Maxed out iMac 27, all settings are set to the looooowest, and I still can’t fly through the cloud and I have been reporting this since 2017, please tell me the state of this issue, you can’t sell us a flight simulator that can only work well on ground 🙂
    I hope you can reply to me if you are planning to solve this but what I believe that I will keep asking this question until 2023.

  22. AWESOME!!
    Thank you so much guys, you have changed this from in interesting/fun toy (tongue in cheek) to an immersive experience!
    I flew around Manhattan in a 172 in the dark, low over the water (maximum reflections). I was on and above 25fps with everything maxed bar the antialiasing (it’s off, I let my radeon software do it at no frame loss). It runs smooooooth.
    I found myself with my mouth hanging open, fantastic work!
    THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!

  23. Even if there are still errors and fails occuring: You´ve all done an incredible job! The “performance boost” is amazing! Thank you all for your great efforts. I´m absolutely in Love with vulcan. Thank you!!

    Greetings from Germany,

    Chris

  24. Loving the performance improvement with Vulkan. Unfortunately every time I fly into heavy clouds then Vulkan shuts down and crashes the sim. Same with both b6 and b9. I have a decent spec machine so would love to find a fix.

  25. Out of curiosity (there is no way to “discuss” bugs in X-Plane): Why the fix XPD-10809 (AI planes being visible in the map)?

      1. OK, so the bug is not “AI planes being visible in the map” (what worried me), but “AI planes being INvisible in the map” 😉

  27. Good evening, beta 9 is good. The only problem that when I’m on the track, it takes a while to load textures clearly. The blurred textures of the scenario have slightly improved. A sign that the management of the vram has been improved. For beta 10 I expect a definitive removal of the blurry soil textures.

  28. In terms of roadmap, somewhat related, do you have an idea of many more 11.xx releases there will be before you shares info about XP 12?

  29. With all settings the same, I took a pretty noticeable hit on fps in VR with this build over b6, along with much more head-turning stuttering. Also, the northwestern horizon line bug now appears at much lower altitudes (2,500 to 3,000 feet over Boston in b6; only 500 feet in b9 at 20 mile visibility levels). Very reproducible and very ugly. 2080Ti and i9.

  30. Overall, on balance, it is clearly getting better and better. Love it. In a recent video Austin said something very brief and tantalising about future new scenery development – are you able to say anymore about that or not? Thanks and Cheers.

  31. Still stutter in multi-monitors system if the AI is included, even the FPS is kept stable at 60. Not all monitor, just one of the monitor is stuttering. The irregular line also appeared in the sky if the visual is setted as HRD, beta 6 without it. Beta 9 is worse than beta 6 for visual performance, the stutter become more frequently. I had posted a lot of bug reports for this, but never to see it was posted in the bug list.

    1. I am also seeing the same stuttering on multi monitor setup on one of the monitors

  32. Ben and team… just amazing to be able to fly on my ole rig which just wasn’t pulling its weight with all the addons. Steady at 30 works for me.

    Is it me or are the clouds improving on vulkan?
    Ground shadows etc?

    Please push xEnviro to vulkan…

  33. Been spending two months relocating. Just got back to my rig and tried beta 9, my first test of Vulcan. Left my settings alone so same as those in Open GL.

    Crashing due to VRAM. Starts it with sharp textures, then begins to blur followed by the crash.

    RTX 2060 with the latest nVidia driver installed today.

    Thanks Ben to you and the team. Hope it all comes together soon. Any interim advice would be cool.

    Cheers
    Pat

  34. Okay, second CTD with 11.50b9, Still hoping you will someone automate the Crash screen because I have no clue how to get – -aftermath to launch. Will submit bug report with screenshot of msg.

    Going back to OPEN GL until things improve. The only thing I have added is ORBX TRUE ALL USA but CTD happened departing KTPA on RWY01L at 2500AGL both times.

  35. Since installing b9 xp won’t launch at all. I very briefly see the loading screen for about 1 second and then it just disappears and sends me straight back to the desktop.
    I tried a fresh install but it does exactly the same, very bizarre as none of the other versions have ever crashed on launch.

  36. Thanks, each time there is a new beta I am happy, bouncing and screaming like a child. Is there any planning for the clouds improvements and optimization?, I think is the more fps hungry when crossing them or in a cloudy day. The chemtrail black is going to be fixed for something more white in chemicals or white viruses in it?, and make it less suspicious for the masses that they are being fumigated really from us?, and to continue with the conspiracy without get up too much suspicious of it real existence?.

  37. Does anybody else still experience simulator crashes during icon regeneration? Mine still crashes every time.

  38. I see the release notes still list FSEconomy as potentially incompatible plugin. I happen to be the current maintainer of the FSEconomy X-Plane plugin, and I’m not aware of any issues (x-economy is simply a Python script, using Sandy’s old PI plugin). It doesn’t use any drawing calls (only uses standard widgets), and our testing gave us no further issues (other than those coming from a very dated PI plugin, but they’re not specific to 11.50, but also concern 11.41).

    I wonder if this “plugin” might have been mixed up with FSEnhancer (also frequently referred to as “FSE”, which might have caused the confusion).

    However, if you have any evidence of problems caused by the x-economy script in conjunction with 11.50 I’m not aware of, I’d gladly take any hint where to look at.

  39. Ben,
    After my previous post on CTD#2 in b9 I have made two more flights. What is interesting is my FPS. With all sliders to MAX except Visual Effects and Anti-Alias (one tick from max) I am getting 35 to 48 FPS in Vulkan. What is odd is the fact my i9-9900K at 5.2Ghz (all right side sliders) is running between 56 and 61% while my RTX2080Ti 11GB KingPin Hybrid is only running at 65% nearly on par with the CPU. Now, if I crank the GPU slider (Left side) Visual effects to max I loose 5 to 7 FPS and my GPU load goes to 83%. If add the Anti-Alias to max I loose about 20 FPS and GPU load jumps to 95%. Now here is where it gets weird. Returning the sliders to back to one tick from Max the CPU and GPU return to their previous loads, which makes sense but the FPS never returns. It cycles between 30 and 39 FPS. Hope some of this helps you. Keep up the good work, and give the kids Donuts this Sat AM for doing such a great job programming along side Dad.

    1. Some settings are effective until you restart X-Plane. It’s not obvious all the time…

  40. All the effort seems to be about Vulkan and NOT Metal. Like Ahmad Abou Hashem above said he has an iMac with good specs but cannot fly through clouds. Can Mac users expect more effort towards Metal or are we all supposed to sell our Macs and go to PCs. I have an old iMac and Metal does nothing for me but OpenGL seems to be an improvement over 11.41

    1. We are spending effort on Metal too. Right now Metal has a bug where the graphics queue backs up on the DMA queue causing stuttering. This is the same kind of messy low level bug that takes up our time as Vulkan has. On average I expect Vulkan to have more of these kinds of things because it’s lower level, but then Vulkan has more market share so we can live with that.

      A lot of the issues we see on Vulkan are cross platform, but we get better reporting from Vulkan because we don’t have auto-report on the Mac.

      Finally, cloud perf is totally unrelated to Vulkan. If you fly through the clouds, you get hit with fill rate. The cloud algorithm is _not_ changing in 1150, so I would expect it to not get better or worse. If you have a reproducible case where the clouds are more expensive in 1150 than in 1140, you can file a performance bug. If you have a bug where the clouds are the same amount expensive in 11.50 as 11.40, you need to turn some kind of settings down – the most likely one is AA + monitor res together.

      1. I’m afraid that I’m alone, but I’d prefer “ugly clouds” over a massive drop in frame rate.

    2. To add to what Ben said, if we didn’t care about the Mac, we wouldn’t have done the Metal port at all. The reality is that most people at LR use Macs as their daily drivers (with me being the exception, not the norm). We are actually super excited about Metal because it finally brings the Mac on par with what was possible on Windows and Linux for years. If you see Vulkan mentioned more, it’s also because it has lot more bugs issues than Metal.

  41. Very nice progress on performance (FPS) in VR. I have less stutter with higher settings of object and texture quality compared to 11.50b6. But now there are 2 (so far) very obvious problems, with me at least.
    1. I have no water texture (the waves) anymore? It’s just flat blue.
    2. I guess you must have heard of this one all ready: The mountains on the horizon disappear partially when I move my headset (VR).

    Good progress though towards a stutter free VR experience.

    i6700K, RTX2070Super, 32GB ram, M.2

  42. Nearly every 3rd party aircraft crashes X-Plane with “This application has crashed because of the plugin: [XPLM_PLUGIN_XPLANE]”. Removing the plugin doesn’t work either, X-Plane won’t start without it. The crash reporter dialog does not pop up.

  43. Advice often repeated on the Boards, especially now in regards to the betas, is to delete the shadercache between betas (or changing drivers, etc.). Is there a definitive position on this from Laminar Research?

    1. We think it should not be necessary. You can test whether this really works by, rather than deleting the shader cache, just moving it to the desktop so you have two you can swap in and out.

      1. Hi Ben, in the Italian community we often discuss about the need to delete the shader cache or not, actually the most of us does have indeed a improvement while deleting the cache after installing new betas so I’m particularly interested about this matter: I’m wondering, what you mean about ‘moving it to the desktop so you have two you can swap in and out’?
        Speaking about windows we have an heterogeneous group of users having XP11.50 installed in various paths: desktop, c:\, non-system internal disks and external disks too, all of them get an improvement after the cache deletion.
        By the way, is the cache deletion applicable even to Mac systems?
        The few of us that own Mac systems (I’m one of them) does not see improvements while using Metal so I wonder if the shader cache is applicable even to our systems.
        Thank you for your big big efforts!!!
        Best regards

        Angelo

        1. MY point is just that instead of deleting the shader cache (or any prefs that are a problem), you can move the folder somewhere else that you can find but that isn’t the normal place for X-plane. (X-plane never looks outside its own folder.). So this way if it turns out that getting rid of that cache or prefs fixes something, _we will have the old, “contaminated prefs_, and we can do experiments to see what has gone wrong.

          1. Thank you Ben, got the point.
            I’ll report this to the other users in order to do specific checks… if our tests will confirm that the new cache, against the old one, do a performance improvement what you will need for a complete bug report?
            Thank you again.
            Best regards

            Angelo

          2. Been a while since I did the “delete shadercache” fix (9 apr 2020) so thought I would give it a look see.

            after renaming the shadercache folder, resuming last flight and then quitting
            all folder names are the same
            All file names in the folders are the same
            The contents of the files are significantly different (e.g. particle.pipeline increased in size from 358.5KiB to 358.6KiB)

            hdr.pipeline
            legacy_flat.pipeline

            are no longer present

            repeating the process, the only difference between the folders seems to be the creation date (although only quickly scanned a few of them)

            So imho, shadercache probably needs deleting any time the pipelines change so as not to persist the old versions?
            ____
            On a completely unrelated note:
            Is it safe to call XPLMSendMessageToPlugin off the flight thread for Lua script memory allocation

            There seems to be a bug with XPLMUnregisterDataAccessor failing silently in xlua – any ideas what could cause this?

        2. I see large improvements on my Mac (iMac 2017 with Radeon Pro 570 4 GB), but I live in Sweden 🙂

  44. I’ve been noticing a trend in the comments that folks using identical settings with b6 are reporting, in some cases, quite large fps gains and others getting pretty noticeable fps losses in b9. Maybe some telemetry information shared with beta testers showing performance feedback based on equipment or configuration might help to see how real this is and how it may be characterized. I know any a/b test I do shows definite diminished performance on my fairly high-end equipment in b9 over b6, but I also don’t doubt others who report dramatic 10 or more fps improvements. If there was some indication that said (or just best-guessed) that in this build we expect that users having X configuration or equipment will see Y result based on internal testing. Such might help to make such asymmetric results more understandable (or at least less perplexing).

    1. @David §Dahlstrom
      Ben will correct me if I’m wrong, but if you’d had access to the log.txt from most of those who report lower FPS all your perplexity would be gone : its mostly an issue with plugins and scripts and not the new X-plane’s beta version.

      2. My issues are the same and it is a completely new installation with new hardware and everything installed as of 15th of May. (No b6 trial)
        And every step I checked and nothing stood out. So the comments about plugins and scripts do not appear to be correct.

      3. I’ve found a potential reason for at least some of my spurious results. When testing I have a usual test flight in Boston. I then go to settings and change my location to a rural airport that I also test. Today, after being surprised again at how lousy my frame rates were in the rural airport (which used to be so good in b6), I exited X-Plane and restarted it, going directly to the rural airport this time. Low and behold, my framerates were back to being smooth. I don’t recall this phenomenon in b6, but it does seem like perhaps there are some VRAM init or leak issues when switching modes in b9 that weren’t there in b6. Anyway, I’ll be restarting X-Plane when testing out different scenarios for the time being to try to get as consistent results as possible.

  45. Thank you for that. Now i have stable 35 fps in VR with very nice scenery settings.
    no of objects high
    textures max
    the rest medium
    Xeon e5 1620 @ 4 ghz
    Nvidia 1080ti 11 gb
    Samsung Odyssey
    22 gb ram
    scenery ortho4xp
    XP11.50b9 does all i hoped for. I am really flashed.
    Helps a lot to stay@home.
    Thank you!

  46. Well here is a puzzle for the team on VR performance…

    Just changed hardware from 8700K (it was dying but last tests at only 4.8ghz) to 9900k OC 5.2ghz and stable all cores with 3200Mhz RAM 32gb and a Z390 Dark with the same 1080ti as the old system.

    So I was expecting at least some FPS up. (This MoBo is a beast)

    VR Test flight Las Vegas saved flights:
    Last test with 11.50b6 on old system was better than the new system on b9. As in 5-10fps better with the Las Vegas saved flight. And 11.4x runs at the same FPS as 11.50b9 right now?
    I have been able to OC my 1080ti more than my other system!
    Tried multiple settings, tried turning Off hyperthreading in bios and run 8 cores instead of 16, tried it all.
    I mean it was a bit of a cold shower to see performance go backwards.
    If I turn up AA or down similar things happening as in b6 so nothing strange there. Shadows up or down, nothing weird.
    Textures etc etc..

    You guys rock and 11.50 rocks, just maybe not sure about b9?

    1. Maybe this answers some of it?
      Fresh Vanilla 11.50b9 no plugins, no third party.
      2xSSAA+FX, HDR, Objects one step from max.

      VR -Las Vegas Saved Flight ( over buildings looking down)
      FPS. CPU. GPU
      16-19. 8%-0.05xx/6xx. 70/79%-0.001?
      Thrdd Opt on. 20. 6%- 0.054. 90%-0.001?
      No VR and thrdd. 87. 10%-0.008. 98%-0.010x!

      Now truth be told, I don’t know what this was in b6! If VR always looked weird.
      But Something is not handled right with VR? I have the HP Reverb-WMR thru Steam.

      1. Sorry guys another post…. I will ease off on the coffee next week!

        So following results from above test:
        VR 11.50b9 FPS=16-19 – CPU 8% – 0.05xx – GPU 70-79% – 0.001(?)
        VR 11.41. FPS=20-23 – CPU 11/15% – 0.04xx – GPU 99% – 0.048x

        No VR 11.50b9 FPS=87 – CPU 10% – 0.008 – GPU 98% – 0.001(?)
        No VR 11.41. FPS=83-85 CPU 22/25%- 0.01x GPU 98% – 0.01x

        In VR WMR thru Steam the Vanilla 11.41 is faster than 11.50b9.

        1. Arrgghh… small mistake but big in understanding the results. Apologies team..

          So following results from above test:
          VR 11.50b9 -> FPS=16-19 | CPU 8% – 0.05xx | GPU 70-79% – 0.001(?)
          VR 11.41. -> FPS=20-23 | CPU 11/15% – 0.04xx | GPU 99% – 0.048x

          No VR 11.50b9 -> FPS=87 | CPU 10% – 0.008 | GPU 98% – 0.010x!
          No VR 11.41. -> FPS=83-85 | CPU 22/25%- 0.01x | GPU 98% – 0.01x

      1. No, I haven’t. Why would that help?

        My initial thought was that it’s weird the GPU is almost at a 70-80% utilization and it takes 0.001 sec to produce a frame.
        The CPU is at barely 10% and it takes 0.05 sec to produce a frame. Why wouldn’t it ramp up the CPU to lower the time it takes to produce a frame?

        1. Because overclocking can sometimes produce anomalies, that’s all. Anyone who has done aggressive overclocking for any length of time (including myself) can point out times when an OC produced negative results in performance or artifacts. And a 5.2 OC on an i9 is definitely in the aggressive category. Not saying that this is your issue, but it is an important variable to at least eliminate.

          1. Please: if you OC, the very first thing you should do when you see instability is….stop overclocking. Maybe the OC isn’t the problem and you can keep trouble shooting, but if OC is the rpoblem you’ll just never find the issue. And OC crashes are _not_ something we can possibly solve on our end. It is something that produces incredibly misleading data on our end.

          2. Thanks gents for taking the time to respond!

            @ David, apologies if my question back was a bit direct. ( I am Dutch and we lack some filters sometimes)

            @ Ben, awesome work with Vulkan! So not complaining I am just trying to understand. Beta’s are for testing. And Xplane has been great for seeing a xplane crash vs a system BSOD.
            And when I wasn’t sure I made sure I put it in the header of the report. But roger that for all overclockers.

            @ Ulrich, yep and not even close to that. @ 100% load about touching 90-93 Celsius with Prime95.

            @ All. It’s now down to 5.1ghz with a step down to 5ghz. Running a cool 80-85 Celsius under full 100% load.

            —> to me the puzzle is why is the core usage ( MSI afterburner to show all stats) at a ~10% with a slow time to process a frame 0.05 and the GPU at 70-80% with a 0.001 to process a frame. In 11.41 you can see the stats being much more “normal’. Or in 11.50b9 with VR turned off.
            How can I interpret that? It looks like the CPU is the hold up, but not being utilized enough?

        2. The question is whether the CPU hits the thermal limit and forces a slow down.

  47. Just got XP Vulcan to load. Beta 9 seems to have sorted out device not found, at least for me. Looks excellent. Took a while to load first time as quoted. Will give it a good try out tomorrow. Well done guys !

  48. I’ve got a weird problem with beta 9(steam), installed all excited this morning, but have an issue with the latest zibo+updates which was fine on beta 6 (through steam) I only quickly tried it a few times, but the Zibo mod is missing mesh on the wings, they are literally see through and my joystick and throttle (thrustmaster) do not work, so I literally fall out the sky, my orbx mesh also seems broken too (only tested in the UK Cardiff area). But stock planes are OK and throttle/joystick functionality is restored.

    1. Chris
      These issues can be easily dealt with over on the Zibo Community Facebook group. Instructions have been there for some time on your issues.
      This is not the place for specific Zibo and Joystick issues. Try it, you’ll be fixed in 5 minutes. Best wishes.

  49. Hi Ben & Laminar Team, please let me know if I should file this as a bug:

    I’ve noticed in X-Plane 11.xx through 11.41, setting my Nvidia control panel’s anisotropic filtering to let the application decide, the runway centerline would be fairly sharp to only the fourth stripe before blurring. However, setting the card setting to 16x keeps it sharp almost alllllll the way down the runway. It was never a bad hit on performance either!

    In 11.50 B4, B6, and beta9, the sim seems to ignore the video card being set to 16x.

    I wasn’t sure if this was intentional, missed as of yet, or a bug. It would be great to have control over this if possible.

    Thanks!

    1. This is not a X-Plane bug. We don’t see the anisotropy request you put into the driver, instead the driver will manipulate what kind of texture sampler it’ll create when we ask for one. So in this case the driver will need an update to bring that functionality to Vulkan applications.

      1. Thanks for the reply. So does this mean 11.41 can see the anisotropy request by my driver (OpenGL?) setting, but 11.50’s Vulkan has to be the one to ask for my setting and Nvidia doesn’t support that yet?

        1. No. No part of X-plane ever “sees” control panel settings. What happens in 11.41 (and _probably_ 11.50 OpenGL) is we ask for 4x aniso and the driver goes and DOES 16x because (based on your control panel preferences) it decides it knows better than us.

          In other words, this is a form of helpful disobedience on behalf of the driver. Since the spec for GL has no concept of “the API just ignores what you asked for” we cannot even find out this happened.

          Now…what Sidney is saying is that NV has apparently not yet made their Vulkan driver intentionally disobedient, so the control panel feature appears to not “work” for you. If/when they make their driver do this, then the control panel will “work” for Vulkan. X-Plane is never involved.

          1. Hi,

            Does this also apply for NVidia VSync?
            At least up to beta 9, vsync must be enabled/adaptiive in The Control Center and deactivated in X-plane to get super smooth frames.

            Enabling in x-Plane does not work, regardless of the settings in NVidia control panel. There are always stutters.

            I could imagine many users complaining about micro stutters did not setup this correctly.

          2. Can we have a slider in X-Plane that lets us choose 16X pretty pleeeeeeaaaase??? Thanks!

          3. I was thinking about just Ned Torbin said.

            Is it not possible to put a slider to control anisotropic filter?

            Anisotropic filter doesn’t consume a lot of CPU or GPU, especially on computers that we usually own (flight simulator’s users). Maybe you can set it fixed at 16x.

            Or 16x in med-high objects settings and 8x in low…

            (it’s a simple idea)

            Regards!! We almost see the light at the end of the 11.50 tunnel!! 🙂

      2. It would be nice however if X-Plane had a setting to control the anisotropy level.

        1. You can control a lot of Nvidia settings using the Nvidia Inspector app. Have you tried it? Although there is a X-Plane profile in Inspector I think it is dated and certainly not optimized for Vulcan. It would nice if LR has some suggestions on the wide variety of option Inspector offers as to what setting might yield better results than default Graphic settings and the few inside the basic Nvidia Control panel.

      3. really be nice to have an option set AF IN the sim… and really since the NV 8000 series x16 cost nearly nothing in frame rate. lack of options is still a huge issue. the rest of the PC gaming world FINALLY came round on this years ago. look at the number of video settings in something like Elite or Witcher 3. The issue in XP10 wasnt that there where to many options it was they didnt have any explanation of what they DID. AND we still dont… how about blog or video on what each level of reflections REALLY is doing other then higher = lower fps

  50. Guys, congrats on Beta 9, have been playing it today and I have seen something that i thought I would never see in X-Plane.
    Got 72 FPS on VR on a scenery that wasn’t even loading on Beta 6 (not enough VRAM).
    also, I know that you are still on the crawl state, so not complaining here, just saying, even with 72 FPS got a lot of stutters, but than I closed x-plane, overclocked my GPU, and started it again, got the same 72 FPS, but no stutters….
    Not sure if it was because of the overclock, or some caching that may have happened, because on the second reload, I just selected resume last flight.

    Again, keep up with the good work, and as it was stated by someone on the last post, if you open a donation box, I would be happy to make a donation to you in order to keep it evolving as it is.

    Thanks Ben, Sidney and Stephany.

  51. Thanks to all who made Vulkan and b9 possible, it’s a monumental effort from you guys and much appreciated. Beta 9 addresses a whole bunch of issues I was experiencing in B6, the blurry textures seem way better and the management of VRAM in my case seems better optimized. My hardware is on the high-end scale but I keep it realistic with the sliders as this reproduces no errors with smooth performance.

  52. Really happy how it is going I got from LR standard Cessna 85-160 FPS depends where I look. Other aircraft like zibo I got 50-60 fps. Maybe it is more advance. My problem is now cpu, that is the current problem I got 9900k and i feel xplane is not using all of it yet, same with my 2080ti. But I have a good feeling. Keep up the good work and thanks for everything cheers !

  53. also are you guys ever going to fix the speclure bug where you get sun-glare off the panel when the Sun is directly behind the aircraft even when there is no way for light come in the cockpit from behind?

  55. For 11.50bx on MacOS using the Metal API… I recall in an early beta for 11.50, Ben said that MacOS (or Metal) had issues with frame counters (resulting in “gpu time” always showing 0.0000 on Macs running 11.50bx with Metal rendering). My [possibly incorrect] understanding is that f-act measurements are calculated from cpu time & gpu time. If so, are frame rate measurements in MacOS necessarily inaccurate? Or is each of the metrics related to frame rate calculated independently?

  56. There are four very important points:
    1. Background processing is not even close right now. If you fly into big cities, even with a powerful rig, the fps plummets to 2 fps. The scenery loading must be optimized in a background thread.
    2. 11.50 needs to support legacy addons. There are thousands they need to work in 11.50. adding new code which kills these add-ons does not fly.
    3. Please eliminate the error popup, it kills user exp. Make an alert when you mouse near settings at the top. Click alert to see error details.
    3. Performance is honestly quite shocking with beta 9. It has fallen below 11.41. This is major red flags and needs to be addressed asap.

    1. 1. What city, what equipment? I have a powerful rig and would be happy try that same scenario to see if I get similar results.
      2. Which legacy add-ons are you having an issue with?
      3. I haven’t seen this yet. But will keep an eye out.
      4. I’ve had an issue with b9 falling below b6, but 11.41 is consistently far worse. What scenario, and what are your framerates in both b9 and 11.41. Again, I’d be happy to try to see what I get (so that two voices on these matters will be better than one).

      1. 1. I have an 8700k overclocked, 32GB ram, 1080 Ti 11GB card etc. I have Drzewiecki New York and airports. Flying in with Ortho is an extreme case but when FPS go down to 2 FPS it is proven that XP Vulkan has no change in the way it loads scenery. It needs to be done in a separate thread(s) not the main thread. It needs to be caching scenery objects in the background.
        2. I am just saying any legacy addons can potentially not work if they make it less flexible for objects to have a double header etc. There could be an untold number of random and annoying popups. Think why MS Windows is successful? It can run programs from way back long ago in the 90’s. *Backwards Compatibility*.
        3. The blue error popup should only display if an “alert” icon is clicked.
        4. In most scenario’s I have tested Vulkan is not performing. Laminar may say performance tuning comes last, but regardless this is Vulkan running. It should not be comparable to OpenGL At All.

        1. I am an old programmer, not associated with the team. Your post has several problems.
          1) your bug may be overclock. Stop doing it. Anyone reporting overclock and bugs gets ignored by real programmers. We never care to even look at overclock bugs most of the time. And if we do it is a sure sign that there are new features we ought to be working on instead.
          2) Thread sync issues with background jobs is a) probably being done at least some of the time. b) A pain in the anatomy of significant proportions when it comes time to render.
          3) Open GL is still supported for 3rd party stuff. You dont even get to choose Vulcan. Software changes over time. 3rd party software is sometimes not maintained. Major releases of like the Vulcan stuff can and should depricate bad old practices.
          4) Popups and other annoyances are expected in beta software. Get over it.
          5) If you are really concerned about a polished clean UI then go back to official releases and stop annoying the good folks trying to get some work done here.
          For the record, I have been in software development over 40 years, and I typically lead a bunch of technical teams as a hands on Architect. Right now I have some time on my hands. One of the things I really like about X-Plane and it’s crew is just how deeply they go after excellent ideas. For me code like this is just fun. You cant make this kind of sofware without a few bugs and setbacks. In conclusion, You are not now, nor I believe have you ever been a technical decision maker on a software project. If you have been then I pity your team. Leave the rule making and guidance to people who know what they are doing.

          1. I just want to be clear: we do _not_ consider OpenGL to be deprecated for plugin use – it is the best and only way for plugins to draw. We do expect to move the sim itself permanently away from OpenGL -someday- in the Glorious Future™, but the sim can support GL plugins even when it is using Vulkan/Metal, as the beta does now.

  57. For me I now have lower frame rates and very,very slight stutters! It was excellent on b6 except for jagged shadows. I did/do not suffer blurries with either. PC is an i7920 o/clocked to 4.3 with an RTX2070 super, 16GB ram. Ground shadows on and all settings to max except reflections on two.

  58. Beta9 is really stable!
    The only thing vulkan still doesn’t seem to like is
    if you press “i” to open the in-flight settings.

    For example: If you trigger “i” the game will eventually crash.
    Not that this would be my hobby
    but I think it should not cause the game to crash.

  59. hello, the same or something similar, I press M to see the map and it closes automatically, and it is frustrating when you have been in flight for a while.

    1. I do have the same problem, even when I fly in OpenGL.
      Sometimes, and specially when I use Altitude for IVAO simulator crashes when I press the “m” key for the map.

  60. I switched on vulkan, but it stuck on “preparing world” and then the screen became black… Please help…

    1. How long did you let it sit in a black screen? I’d try waiting for 3-5 minutes just to be sure its not still loading. I have had black screens then had the sim show back up as it finished loading.

  61. Thanks for the amazing work guys, these betas are really pushing this flight sim forward quickly. I have noticed some things in b9 and previously but haven’t captured them for bug reports yet. I will mention some ideas about them here and will add bug reports when I can capture them.

    Lately people have commented on floating mountains in the distance, kind of looking like low level fog. In VR it more looks like a draw distance issue, as when you turn your head it changes how much of the mountain is visible. Should the draw distance be based on the aircraft or the camera? And should the top of the mountains be further away from the base?

    In VR when I am near the limit of VRam usage, if I right click the mouse to open the menu I get a CTD. Could the system swap out to some lower textures before opening the menu? I would think the menu is a known size so you could accommodate that amount before you call it, a minor pause to the user with less chance of a vram crash.

  62. So far I’ve not tried every beta update, I have just tried b9 and I have to say that I get better performance on 10.41 with a lot of addon scenery, a few addon aircraft and plugins than I get with a base 10.41 with nothing added and then updated to 10.50.

    This is using Metal on Mac. I will keep on dipping into updates and see what happens, but so far I’m a bit disappointed.

  63. I know this is not the focus right now but….

    How about the “new generation scenery” ? Maybe on X-Plane 12? Can you give us a roadmap on future? Maybe after the stable release of 11.50 😉

  64. I know you guys have probably been existing in a bubble whilst creating 11.50, but there have been “fixes” (hacks) posted online, for a couple of well documented niggles. If you are aware of these, can you say whether these may become permanent in a future beta, whether they are detrimental to the operation, whatever is applicable?
    One is from Michael Brown from X-Force. They are:
    Shadow jaggies –
    Modify the settings.txt in Resources… change the values of ….. renopt Scenery Shadows to Shadow Cam Size= 8192 (10 entries)
    Ground Flicker –
    Simple FlyWithLua script reading
    set( “sim/private/controls/clouds/limit_far”, 0.1)

    Very exciting times. Best wishes, stay safe.

    1. I expect that a future beta with shadow tweaking will address both of these issues.
      I do not expect that we will solve the shadow jaggie problem by using 3 8K shadow maps.

    2. Neat. Didn’t know about the “fix” for the shadows. I run near the limits in VR and am very sensitive to frame rate and stutter issues, but boosting those number to 8192 makes an incredible improvement in shadows with no performance loss that I’ve been able to notice so far. Of course, being in the forbidden settings.txt, I promise to turn this off for any benchmarking. Glad to hear though that there is probably an even better “official” fix for this coming in the beta.

      As far as ground flicker, I still see it pretty clearly with limit_far set to 0.1. The only setting I’ve found that works in removing it 100% for me is set(“sim/private/controls/clouds/cloud_shadow_lighten_ratio”, 0.0). I think this just kills all the cloud shadows, but to me better no shadows are infinitely better than broken shadows.

      The one other “fix” I’d put solidly in this category, and which I personally consider bigger than both of the previous ones, is setting renopt_planet to 0 in X-Plane.prf to get rid of the excruciatingly ugly blue horizon line artifact when using lower visibility distances. I’m sure this setting also has some side effect that I’m not aware of, but so far, whatever it is, I can’t tell.

      Now if I could just find the magic setting to get rid of the powerline wire reflections that travel back and forth across the landscape everytime I move my head in VR, we could just call it X-Plane 20 and be done, hehe!

  65. I am impressed with how much perf 11.50 is getting out of my MacBook Pro 16. I normally run WIN10 because there’s more plugin support for Windows, but the base XP performs just as well and reliably on macOS.

    For 11.6x or 11.7x, I would love to see much faster scene loading. I work at Nvidia Research (not that it makes me some expert, I’m not). The way I happen to do this is by writing the scene into an mmap()’able file keeping all data page-aligned then sucking in the whole thing without translation. It is instantaneous. The key is to make sure the textures remain compressed and the geometry could also use compression which I haven’t done yet. I use ASTC compression, but .dds is fine. I have some open-source code that could be used as an example reference for inspiration: gitHub.com/balfieri/gfx3d. Along the same lines, it would be cool if Ortho4XP could be integrated so that one could decide where he/she wants realistic imagery as part of those mmap-able scenes.

    Is there a place where I can submit RFEs?

  66. Like many others I am hugely impressed with the improvements I am seeing with Vulkan.

    For me, I saw the greatest stability and performance in b6.

    I only fly in VR with an HP Reverb on an i9900 pc with 2080ti graphics and 64mb ram.

    Not being any kind of IT expert my experience of b9 is that it is a step backwards. Loads of stutters again whereas these were all but gone in b6.

    Frame rates plummet around any terminal building default or add-on and as I am sure everyone is aware, Zibo Mod 737 now has no wings!

    I remain a huge fan of x-plane (I also have a full sized 737 flight deck running ProSim and P3D v5). X-Plane rules for VR.

    I am so pleased that Austin is prioritizing the experience for us VR fanatics!

  67. BUG or is it just not refined yet?
    After 3 CTD this AM , I managed to make it into KSFO with ORBX True Earth HD. On short final to Rey 28 the FPS had dropped from 30FPS plus from where KOTH ORBX True Earth HD to 14 FPS. Knowing better I decided to change my World Objects down from Max to High and BOOM! BSOD! Ben, you have my system specs from earlier posts here plus the CTD that sent you reports with my email so I won’t add them here. I know this is beta but Crap! This was AMD FSE flight too.

  69. A little bit better than the b6 but still get blurry textures 🙁 I’m looking to upgrade my 1060 3gb for a 1080 turbo…

  70. My X-plane 11 (with Vulkan or OpenGL)is crashing all the times during the cruise flight level after b9. I don´t know what´s the problem, i´m using ivao altitude, A319 toliss and Active Sky, everything is apparently ok, but xplane shuts down during the cruise flight level.

    1. It’s possible that this is due to Active Sky! We have seen a lot of crashes in our crash reporter that were caused by Active Sky, so you might want to try disabling it and seeing if that solves the problem.

      1. Sidney,
        I think at this point we are all better off to stick with Default everything as much as possible so you guys can get a stable Default. Once you are satisfied, let us know the plug-ins you would like us to try, and one at a time, until you and the app dev iron out the issues. If we keep dumping on you guys it only makes catching your tail that much more difficult.

        Keep the updates coming. This is fun! I’m tweaking my fun meter more and more everyday! HEHEHE!

        You guys Rock!

  71. hello guys i am not developer, nor a beta tester but i have over 350 hours playing in x plane 11 vr since may 2019 , and i have played almost everyday in the quarantine, problem is that i stopped playing like 3 days ago and now all of a sudden i cant launch vr, it used to be that whenever i opened x plane vr mode was automatic but it shuts down the vr mode.

    and when i put the vr option the game freezes and it goes back to nonvr mode.

    my pluggins are avitab,flyinside and i rarely make changes in settings so this problem is all of a sudden for me and dont find current information to solve it.

    already unistalled and installed the game again an still doesnt work.

    help me guys please as this game is the only tool i have to keep my skills current

  72. B9 gives me huge fps drops in VR. Goes from 45 fps to 8 fps on and off. When it happens it creates huge lag and then its like everything moves quick forward with high frame rate and back to normal. Then it happens again!

    Removed all plugins and still the same. Only me experience this issue?

    ( Intel 9900k) (GF 2080ti) (32g DDR4) (HD: M2 Drive)

  73. Hello, and thanks for the big game changer.

    Regarding to me, I had more FPS on B6 than on B9. I have the same FPS number in OpenGL and Vulkan. It’s very strange. And on both I can push settings without big drops. So maybe it’s a choice to don’t push at the maximum possibilities for compatibility. But now, my VR experience isn’t so smooth with B9

  74. After submitting a BUG Report to LR and ORBX. I wanted to post this in the hope someone can shed some light of what is generating this error.
    After finally completing, verifying, and subsequent updates of my ALL Orbx USA TE Scenery I began having load CTD in X-Plane 11.50b9. What is most disturbing is I have NO OTHER scenery installed except Global Forests and globaltrees reference below appeared before I install it. Unless something is amiss with X-Plane’s Default Scenery, the follow points me to Orbx. Please review and advise if the following has anything to do with Orbx? Thanks.

    Excerpt from my LOG.TXT file

    [AOS] [2020-05-21.09:09:33] :> Loading AOS
    [AOS] [2020-05-21.09:09:33] :> Configuration Loaded
    [AOS] [2020-05-21.09:09:34] :> Updated license
    [AOS] [2020-05-21.09:09:34] :> License loaded
    [AOS] [2020-05-21.09:09:34] :> Weather data loaded successfully
    [AOS] [2020-05-21.09:09:34] :> Registered and loaded flightplan datarefs
    [AOS] [2020-05-21.09:09:34] :> Aircraft data loaded
    [AOS] [2020-05-21.09:09:34] :> Error loading Seasons extension : Installation failed
    [AOS] [2020-05-21.09:09:34] :> Error loading StaticAircraft extension : Installation failed
    [AOS] [2020-05-21.09:09:34] :> Error loading GlobalTrees extension : Installation failed
    Trying to build mipmaps for font C:\X-Plane 11.50b3/Resources/plugins/SAM//fonts/Poppins-Regular.ttf, tex width 1024, tex height 64, texture data 000002AAA6033A10
    [AOS] [2020-05-21.09:09:34] :> Loaded fonts
    [AOS] [2020-05-21.09:09:34] :> Jetway status indicator initialized
    [AOS] [2020-05-21.09:09:34] :> SAM Library : Installation failed
    Loaded: C:\X-Plane 11.50b3/Resources/plugins/SAM/win_x64/SAM.xpl (stairportsceneries.plugin.aos).

    This occurs in both OGL and Vulkan.

    1. I’m fairly certain the lines starting with [AOS] are related to Stairport Sceneries SAM plug-in. If you already have the latest version of that, you might want to try removing it and then testing what happens.

  75. Hi,

    Are you aware of any problems with plugins that use external hardware (I.e. SimVim)?
    With 11.41 it works ok. With B9 it does not load, (even f it shows active on the plugin admin and says loaded in the log.txt). Only works if I re click the checkbox to load it again.

    The develioer mentioned something about virtual USB ports and Vulcan issue.

    1. External hardware – this is not related to us. But the plugin could be doing something else that doens’t work with 11.50 and failign before it gets to the hardware.

      1. Ben,

        Hi. The plugin does work with 11.50, the thing is that to load it has to be reloaded manually with the Plugin Admin.

        Chhers,

        Max

  76. Huge frame increase for me using Vulkan in comparison to Open GL. Ryzen 5 3600x CPU and Radeon RX 570 8GB. Getting around 50fps at EGLC on runway and increases while flying. All settings are at max other than Water detail and AA. Very smooth. Adding parked aircraft has very little drop in frame rate.
    Looks like Radeon GPUs and AMD CPUs are finally benefitting in comparison with Intel and Nvidia.

  77. Steam updated with new shaders last night. B9 now better FPS and virtually no stutters, performance back at least as good as B6. I can run GA over Drzeweicki Seattle City and airports with no lower than 22fps, mostly 30 plus internal and external, all settings at max. Frame rates higher again at 2 on reflections. Tried several short flights with GA aircraft, also in UK. Maximum settings, ground shadows and JF Traffic Global. In fact apart from slightly jagged external and more so internal shadows I am very pleased! I’m not to sure if the reflections image in water are as good though? Definitely going in the right direction again for me – thanks LR!

    1. I tested again the following night for over an hour. Started in Seattle using JF Piper Arrow, with various cloud intensity. . Then to the UK Heathrow to London City Airport this time using the LR King Air. Scenery is Simheaven v 4.5 and a separate London download. X-plane locked up just as making last finals turn. Maybe the scenery, or I had earlier used a slew mode add-on in Seattle, so these might have contributed to the incident. Love the visuals though and flight still smooth. I do notice a flickering cloud shadow which doesn’t look correct?

    1. I would not expect that before X-Plane 12 if I were you, not unless they need to do something which leverages the testing capability they have with the XP11 beta crowd. I gather this is essentially why we will now get Vulcan before XP12, as I understand it.

      I am sure they like to eat as well… 😉

  79. Hi, I have a problem. I have exact same fps in Vulkan and in Open GL, while in previous betas I had better fps in Vulkan. Does anyone have same issue?

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