Amazingly, I think the answer (and I realize I am cursing the next beta by typing this) is we’re getting really close. You’d be forgiven for thinking that’s lunacy given beta 15; here’s a little bit of info about the state of the betas.
X-Plane 11.50 beta 15 is out (and marked “unstable”) on Steam and amongst other things, has two big fixes for beta 14:
- Cloud performance should be back to baseline norms for 11.50 – when I fixed a multi-monitor bug in beta 14, I accidentally turned off a major cloud performance optimization,
- Fatal errors while resizing the window should be fixed. These squawks were coming from code that now checks much more heavily for error conditions, and revealed a problem when the OS delivers window resizes to us too slowly.
Note the introduction of new bugs in the process of fixing old ones – this is always a risk when a bug fix is intrusive or complicated; in order to get a shippable product, we have to keep ratcheting down the amount of chaos we introduce per beta, making smaller and more surgical changes.
Beta 15 also tried to fix one last plugin compatibility bug that we discovered very late in the game – under Vulkan, there’s no depth/stencil buffer available to third party plugins, resulting in incorrect drawing for previously working plugins.
I think you know where this is going…this new change introduced new bugs, even as it fixed the problem with the original add-on.
We have been working with third party developers over the last twenty four hours on fixes for the regressions here; our hope is to have a new beta on Monday or Tuesday that fixes these issues and has gotten a good third party once-over.
We’re Going to Have to Close the Door
We are reaching the end of X-Plane 11.50 – at this point the number of remaining bugs to be fixed in this beta is small enough that they aren’t that hard to keep track of. To get to a release candidate though, we’ll need to stop introducing major changes.
I am hoping that we already know about all of the third party incompatibilities, because at this point we have to close the door to complex changes to improve backward compatibility. For beta 16 we are fixing what used to work and is now broken (e.g. yes, SkyMaxx will work again), but if anyone is sitting on an add-on problem they haven’t mentioned, we’re out of time to deal with it.
Plugin Developers: Thread Safety!
Plugin developers: in looking at your compatibility with X-Plane 11.50, please re-read this post and check your usage of threads. We’ve had really helpful responses from third parties who we have notified about threading issues we’ve seen by auto-crash reporting, and I think this will help everyone–third parties, users, and us.
I believe that X-Plane 11.50 is significantly more sensitive to threading violations than 11.40, because the Vulkan driver doesn’t spend CPU cycles protecting itself from abuse. If a plugin calls into us from a thread when it’s not allowed to, this can cascade into crazy X-Plane behavior, which cascades into crazy Vulkan behavior that the driver won’t stop. So careful adherence to the threading rules by plugins is critical to Vulkan stability.
b15 has been running quite well for me today, minus the distant terrain artifacting and of course XPD-10925.
Ben, I suggest you to address the GroundTraffic plugin issues before the release of the 11.5 final. Why? Because so many people have so many custom (and payware) sceneries using it that you’ll start gather so many crash reports due to it after the final release!!! I know that someone already tried to update it (as it is opensource), but in its current form it’s still not suitable for the average user to install. Also, as the GroundTraffic plugins resides in each custom sceneries that make use of it, we need a script to update them all.
We don’t have an open bug with GroundTraffic. When we last checked, it worked in GL and didn’t render in Vulkan, which is what’s expected of a legacy plugin.
If you have a reproducible crash with the _shipping_ GT in that goes away when it’s removed, file a bug please.
If there’s an in-progress update to GT, and it doesn’t work, the person doing the update can contact us if they think they hit a bug or they need guidance.
JustSid was going to spend some of his “free” time to make it work AND make it a global plugin. As 11.50 is nearing RC status, please let have some of the “free” time he needs.
I was told by other community members that work for this is underway and I’d be wasting my time on this. So I currently have no plans of touching Ground Traffic in any way and instead spend my free time with my wife 🙂
Wait wat? Free time? Didn’t we talk about how you should be removing all of the locks in the pager? It’s not concurrent if you use locks!! 😉
If Intel didn’t continuously disable transactional memory on their shipping SKUs, we could write crazy lock free code. Imagine how glorious that would be!
Please, don’t hear the voice of those kind of community members! The guy that tried to update it for Vulkan was the first to call for help
Oh THAT guy? Oh jeez. He’ll probably just put all the calls to set the instancing position on a worker thread…
Ben Ground Traffic has been updated by the community to work with vulkan. If this could be included in the core X-Plane that’s a dif story.
https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/210452-groundtraffic-plugin-for-x1150-vulkan/
The announcement of no more refinements REALLY bothered me? I had with the v11.50b1 release 60+ fr, with around 40+ – 50+ with the sliders adjusted, but with v11.50b14 I am running in the 22+ 26+ zone and mostly on the baseline, so now having to adjust my features right down just to get out of the sluggish and slow zones…. 11.50b14 is now seriously running far worse than my original V11.40 OpenGL version?, Personally something went seriously wrong after beta8, as I was very good and clean before that?
You need and absolutely should file a bug report for this!
If you had high fps in beta 1 and have significantly lower fps now, you should file a bug. Also, I think you misunderstood my post. I’m not saying it’s too late to fix a perf screw-up if we found one. I’m saying that if an add-on has a -fundamental- compatibility problem that we don’t know about, it’s too late to build new mechanisms for better compatibility than what we have. From what we can tell, we will have hit our compatibility targets once the back-slides in b15 are fixed.
Indeed can cofirm that with latest 11.50b15 when panning the camera view pver autogenerated city area the FPS drops to twenties whereas looking at less populated areas the FPS is around 60. No addons installed and the scenery is stock autogen.
To be clear, if you look at an empty area and have high fps and then look at a busy area and have low fps, that’s…_not_ necessarily a bug. It might be that we’re just doing more work in the dense area.
That’s different than the complaint people have that FPS _temporarily_ fall and then recover on camera movement.
Sorry but this is the worst Vulkan Beta for me so far. Back to blurry objects at distance and a few micro-stutters. Plain vanilla installation, stock scenery, and no plugins. VR with a Vive Pro. I sent in a bug report with log files and got a reply back from Jen to run an ETW Trace. I’m kinda reluctant to do this because I don’t understand what it is, or if this is a virus or something, lol! Looking forward to B16. Thanks for all your efforts btw. Cheers.
(Buries face in hands.)
ETW = Event Tracing for Windows. It’s a profiler built into Windows that lets us capture what X-plane is doing when you say “it’s going slow”.
To be clear, I do _not_ expect you to run ETW if you are not comfortable doing that! It’s your computer, your call.
But if you file a bug report that perf is slow and you’re not willing to do follow-up, the bug report is not real useful to us – we have a crazy number of bug reports coming in, so bug report quantity without follow-up hurts our efficiency.
No one on the team is going to suggest to you to install a virus! ETW is part of Windows and stands for Event Tracing for Windows. Although by default it is a command line tool with arcane syntax, so Jennifer tells users to use a tool (UI for ETW) that is made by someone at Google and makes working with it easier. UI for ETW is actually used quite heavily by the Google Chrome team (you can tell because it has some options that are meant for profiling Chrome). All that is to say, ETW and UI for ETW are most certainly not viruses but legitimate tools.
With that out of the way, what ETW does is allow profiling of processes running on the system with very low overhead. It’s an absolutely fantastic tool since it comes with Windows itself and is crazy powerful in gathering information about what’s taking time on the system. If you report perf problems on Windows, you will be asked to run an ETW trace on your system because it’s the easiest way of figuring out what really happened on the system. Without providing one, there’s very little we can do on our end to track down what’s going wrong on your system.
Thanks Ben and Sidney for your ETW Tracer explanation. I’ll try giving this a go if I notice those SteamVR performance graph spikes. Deleting the shadercache folder and letting 11.50b15 regenerate it seems to have helped get rid of these. Distant objects and runway lighting is still blurrier than b14 though.
TomC – I ran ETW for a VR performance issue in B14 and the end result was the generation of a bug report / ID. I highly suggest you do the same – it increases the chances of squashing VR performance bugs.
Ha ha, that’s not the _end_ result…like, the bug ID just means it’s attached to a Jira ticket internally…hopefully the end result is, we, like, fix something.
I am experiencing all of the same problems. I have tried everything to fix. only solution was to lower all setting to a point were they are now lower than I had before vulcan.
Well it seems my posts never make it online. Is it because I complain about poor vr performance?
I own 2 copies of x plane one steam version and the other LR copy. When I post I try to have facts to back up what I say but lately it seems you guys are just not posting my comments.
So here goes a non vr complaint. My steam copy is b14 and my LR copy is b15
each copy is on separate ssd same airport same runway sitting in the B58
cockpit view
b14 – 56 fps
b15 – 37
outside view
b14 – 112 fps
b15 – 80fps
Am I also incorrect to say that b15 is using more cpu cores?
Thank You
I have no idea why your post wouldn’t go through – we only nuke posts for language, spam and duplicates, although sometimes WP auto-flags a post and we don’t notice. We don’t have a policy of intentionally nuking comments that are off topic unless the entire blog post is a dev RFC, or we give a warning that everyone’s getting into a flame war.
ANYWAY. You should file a bug with pretty much exactly that info abotu the FPS loss. Please DO file the bug. We read every comment on this blog (because we have to approve them as moderators) but we do _not_ use the WP comments as a bug tracker because it’s a comment section. When you file it, it goes somewhere useful (HelpScout, then Jira.)
I would not expect b15 to use more cores than b14 but I’d expect it to use more cores than 11.41.
Just for giggles and grins When b14 is loading I see only 4 cores active
When b15 is loading I see all 8 cores being active
Just saying
Well that is clearly TWICE as good. 🙂
Only problem seems the b15 version that is using the extra cores has the lower fps
Maybe I am just crazy?
Maybe! But maybe there’s a bug in beta 15. Please file a bug so we can get you through the process of collecting detailed data.
Bug Report has been filed….
Thank You Ben
I too am getting poor FPS. It’s 2:00am Uk so will file a bug report tomorrow.
In short, plain vanilla XP scenery Was high 90’d to low 100’s – now 45-50
ORBX TE GB was high 40’s – low 50’s now 23-25
During b1 I was extatic to get world objects to max and later in the run, reflections to the middle and only lost a couple of FPS when you gave us anistropic filtering.today has been a HUGE disappointment
Meant to add, W10 updated yesterday. Hope this isn’t a Microsoft screw up
Me too, my FPS are lower in BETA 15 than all the others. I will file a bug. It’s the CPU taking the hit rather than the GPU. We’re talking between 15 – 20 fps drop.
Mac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2019)
3.6 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9
48 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
Radeon Pro Vega 48 8 GB
I can confirm that by 100%. I have the same hardware and I’m running into bad framerates in 10.50beta15, I have to reduce all settings for a reasonable flight. What happened?
Please remember to file a bug report today as LR needs to see and fix this. Any chance you have logs from both versions you can send?
I was able to file my bug report with both B14 and B15 logs
Already done it.
Will do, thanks for the hint!
You always say that most of X-Plane team are using Mac devices to develop and test X-Plane. Can you please tell me what Mac are you using and can see that X-Plane run with normal performance using it? And what Mac you consider a good Mac to run this simulator normally? What I mean by normally is to run on low setting or medium settings without plugins and without FPS going low to 15FPS and sometimes 9FPS.
My iMac has gotten quite old – it’s the 2014 iMac 5K – the first AMD iMac they made. I wouldn’t recommend it, but I’d expect to be able to run at > 20 fps with low or medium settings. My laptop is the 16″ MacBookPro – maybe a year old with a 5500M. It works better! But I’d suggest a newer iMac over a laptop.
Here’s the big X factor – I don’t try to run the sim at high fps, high settings _and_ third party add-ons; I tend to install add-ons only to reproduce a bug. And a lot of times we see a huge delta between performance out of the box and with add-ons.
The other thing to note: I’m not running at anything like the max display res – the iMac never had a GPU capable of driving its own display with a game at 5K with high quality graphics. If I try to run full screen at max res with the iMac, it’s really sluggish from day 1 and will fall over with its knees.
I ran fps test 5 with the 737 on my laptop – I only ran these once so it’s not great, but these numbers are ballpark for my normal perf.
1140 3072×1920 19.5 fps
1140 1536×960 24.0 fps
1150 3072×1920 32.0 fps
1150 1536×960 42.8 fps
Note this is without AA or clouds, so my guess is you could get AA + clouds on Metal at 108P at 30 fps, but not AA + clouds at 1920P and 30fps.
I have an i9 iMac with a Vega 48.
It’s about the fastest Mac you can get for x-plane at the moment. It does really well at 2560×1400 with very high settings, some reflections and shadows and FSAA+2X the other kind of antialiasing. It’s… surprisingly not a slideshow at 5K and no AA, but it’s hurting to draw all those pixels.
The specs though are kinda… midrange compared to an x-plane optimized pc, mainly GPU side and thermal headroom side. But I get 20-35 fps near very detailed airports and 40-60 once in the sky in 11.50 and metal.
I got it for other reasons, and x-plane is secondary. It’s super expensive *just* for x-plane.
I hope the situation changes with Apple Silicon macs. Really depends on what trade offs they make. Not having to shove everything over a slow bus might lead to gains, but using built in GPU might not.
Ben…back on the VR issue I’ve reported a couple of times. During the “Preparing World” step of the load my Rift S headset goes black, the orange LED comes on, and VR is disabled. Still happening with b15. The log shows this:
0:02:03.204 E/OVR: Session display lost, becmoing a zombie.
0:02:03.263 E/VR_BRIDGE: Shutting down hardware because the VR HAL is now in a zombie state.
0:02:03.466 I/OVR: Shutting Down VR Subsystem.
Right now the workaround is to restart the oculus software via the Settings/Beta Screen from the Oculus home and then reenable VR. At that point it works fine.
I was reading a post on the Oculus forums where a user named “Kojak” wrote an “Oculus Injector” program. When I use his app to launch X-Plane b15 the sim loads up fine and VR works without any issues. Here is what he said in his post about his injector:
How the fix works
When X-Plane calls ovr_CreateTextureSwapChainGL it passes in ovrTexture_Cube. I intercept the call and replace it with ovrTexture_2D. That’s it. It’s basically changing a 2 to a 0 with one line of code. It would have taken Laminar less time to fix this than it took me, if they believed my bug report that detailed how to fix it.
Why does Vulkan in 11.50b9 work fine without a fix?
The Vulkan code in X-Plane never tries to make a cube texture swap chain, and therefore runs correctly. It’s only the OpenGL code that does the wrong thing.
So while he says it fixes OGL in my case it fixes Vulkan. If I use OGL I do not have the issue. It only fails with Vulkan. Is there any chance LR can fix this in the X-Plane code so that an illegal value is not being used in this function call? Again..if I launch b15 using his injector app I have zero issues with VR but without it VR fails every time in the Preparing World part of the load. It will even break if I’m already in a VR flight and go back to Flight Settings and do something that forces X-plane to do a scenery reload (ie change locations)…again at the Preparing World part of the load.
I have filed a bug on this a couple of times but never get any kind of acknowledgement or an XPD number for it. Would be nice to get some feedback on this issue even if it’s not affecting everyone as it’s been affecting me since at least b11…maybe b10.
Thanks!
Right – a recent version of the Oculus runtime broke the GL cube map API – have you tried their early access driver to see if it’s fixed? If it’s not, and you use 11.41 you can contact our support and they’ll send you a hot-wired version of the sim that has the cube map removed.
11.50 “just works” because the cube map is off, hence the loading screen has a black background.
Now, Vulkan vs GL, here’s the story:
1. 11.50 works without a work-around on your end because we worked around the issue.
2. The issue affected older 11.50 betas even in Vulkan because we use _OpenGL_ to talk to the Rift _even_ when Vulkan is the driver.
What we found is that if we talk to the Rift SDK in native Vulkan mode, we get big pauses every now and then in the Rift driver. But we have a GL<->Vulkan bridge already written – it’s how plugins work. So we show the rift our final image as a GL texture instead and it just works. I don’t know why this is and I hope we’ll be able to talk to it in Vulkan natively someday, but since we also are looking at moving to OpenXR to talk to the Rift some day, this isn’t something we’re going to mess with right now.
You misunderstood what I was saying. 11.50 Vulkan is what is NOT working unless I use the “oculus injector” app to start X-Plane. With 11.41 it works fine…with 11.50 OGL it works fine…with 11.50 Vulkan it does not work. So something is still being missed when in Vulkan mode causing this issue. To say you are going to mess with this is a bit bothersome. I should not have to jump hoops to get X-Plane to work. If you support the Rift S then you should be doing an necessary workarounds so that your product “just works” and not put that task off to the paying customer.
Yeah I did misunderstand. I don’t know why you’d need the injector for 11.50. Since we don’t use the cube map *at all*, I don’t know what benefit it would be getting us.
To be clear, by “not mess with it”, I mean, we are not going to make another attempt to switch from the GL to Vulkan API when communicating to the Rift SDK. I do not mean we are not going to try to make the Rift work with the GL SDK. But your reported issue is really strange because it doesn’t match any of the known facts about the previous Oculus problem we had.
Hi Ben,
I’ve been having similar issues since about beta 13 or maybe 11. I’ve filed a bug report and have heard nothing back. During the flight loading (it seems to be dependent on what aircraft I’m loading – the default 172 doesn’t have an issue, but the Carenado 172 G1000 does as do others) the image starts to sputter (freezes in rapid succession) and then I get the Oculus “Play Area Could Not Be Found” message. This prompts me to reset my floor height and redraw the boundary. If I’m successful at completing this while the loading is still progressing, it might go through this cycle 2 or 3 times during the load. If I take off the headset during the flight loading sequence, there’s no problem. Once the flight finishes loading and I’m in the cockpit as can be seen on the sim window, I then put the headset back on and fly with no issues.
I’m also hopeful you’ll be able to fix the issue with XP hanging on exit if VR has been on _at all_ during that session. It doesn’t have to be in VR mode when quitting. It’s like something doesn’t complete when exiting VR mode and the sim is waiting on that process to complete before it will fully shut down. I’ve filed a bug report on this one as well and I’m sure many others must have as well. Discussion on the forum indicates this is only present on Oculus-based systems.
Just want to know if rain and reflection in vr will be fixed in this version?
Also in vr, clouds are getting a blur effect, is that normal?
it’s been a long time since I’ve asked this question, but is there any word on multiplayer/multi crew,. And to this date why is there still no topic for this in the discussions archive? I tried looking for anything on networking or multiplayer or multi crew and was able to find Nada. Ben you guys have done a heckuva job no doubt about it. I don’t envy the amount of work you have to do. But for all that’s holy will somebody talk to us about multiplayer networking ? And I don’t mean on a local lan, we know that works. I want to see the kind of multiplayer that puts dozens of people on a single server in a single instance all synchronized. so what about it guys?
We haven’t said anything because there’s no announcements right now. The mobile guys just did server-based mass multiplayer; we have gotten a number of requests to make that available on desktop, and that seems not crazy to me, as the code should in theory be portable.
Yes, please! I realize it will not be in 11.50 as this is more focused on Vulkan/Metal, but PLEASE do consider it in a very near-term version.
But you guys DO ROCK!!!
Thank you Ben : I realize I’m being quite a pain about this but I wouldn’t be if it wasn’t really important to a lot of people. You guys are doing the most amazing work. And it is appreciated. I go back a long long way with you guys I don’t know if you remember but we spoke many years ago back during version 6 or 8 I think it was. I was kind of disappointed to hear that you changed your meetings to the West Coast, especially since I moved up to your area and am only a stones throw away from you.I would have liked to have met all you guys. When you did your open houses at the New England airspace Museum.
Well, the Expo moved around – Vegas, but then Orlando…I don’t know what will happen in the future, as in-person conferences are all canceled now. But yeah, the north east was great for me. 🙂
Is X-plane now only using VRAM and no system RAM anymore? My (low-end) laptop only has 2 GB of VRAM and 8 GB of “shared” VRAM which I assume is ordinary RAM. I’m not able to use X-plane anymore other than the default Cessna maybe. Using stock Xplane with (as an example) the Zibo 737 everything becomes blurry. In Open GL I was able to use X-plane just fine with third party aircraft and scenery etc. of course with the occasional stutter and 30 fps average but that was acceptable for me considering the alternative would be buying a new laptop. Is the Open GL option going to dissappear eventually? Because this would make X-plane unplayable for me.
We do not put _textures_ in system memory….Vulkan doesn’t allow it and your GL driver probably wasn’t doing that either. If you file a bug we can look at how X-Plane has allocated your VRAM.
Here’s the thing – and this question is _not_ snarky (well, okay, it’s a little snarky, but it’s also a real question about usability): if we gave you a slider, and one side said “more blurry” and one side said “it stutters”, would you move the slider to “it stutters” to get rid of your blurries while using an add-on that uses a lot of VRAM on a 2 GB machine? If you read these comments, it’s just filled with complaints about stutters.
But your GL driver was getting you a sharper image quality on the Zibo by throwing out things it wasn’t drawing from VRAM and then stuttering/paging if the view changes rapidly and you need the stuff that was missing. We could potentially code something like that, but the sim would be virtually guaranteed to stutter when the camera moves.
Hi Ben,
I would accept the stutters honestly, I know I’m using a low end machine and I know I won’t be able to run everything maxed out with 60 fps. But I was able to run third party scenery, planes etc. with 30-35 fps and a stutter here and there. Now I can run the stock X-plane at 50-60 fps but as soon as I use any third party software everything becomes so blurry its unplayable, I don’t mean a little blurry, I mean as blurry as it gets. I’m a real life commercial pilot and this is just a hobby for me. It isn’t worth it for me to buy a new computer just to keep using X-plane unfortunately.
If it’s _unplayably blurry_ please file a bug. Include a screenshot!
OpenGL is essentially the ‘stutters’ end of the slider.. I dont use VR or the large commercial multi-monitor setups Austin talks about so I dont mind them. If anything, hopefully you keep 11.41 and/or the version just before you remove opengl available for download somewhere.
Or hopefully just keep it in through 11s life..
Having said that.. i haven’t experience *unplayable* blurriness myself like the OP has
GL is _not_ going away during the life of v11, because we’re not dropping the hw we support that doesn’t have Vulkan/Metal drivers.
The unplayable blurriness probably means something’s gone massively wrong, but without seeing the diagnostics, who knows.
Yes Yes and oh btw, yes.
…. One (very tongue in cheek) question.
Is multi threading still the “strange feature request” it was waaay back in 2009?
Yes! 🙂 It was strange back then and it’s strange now. “Faster load times” and “faster FPS” are pretty good feature requests. “More multi-threading”, to me that’s like “stop using Boost” or “please use Intel TBB”…it’s a request that we solve a problem in a specific way, not a specification of the problem.
Let me give you a real example: I made the FFT water *less* multi-threaded in 11.50! Really! And this is clearly a huge improvement.
The FFT water in 11.40 ran four FFTs in four tasks on up to four cores at once. GREAT multi-core distribution. Each FFT took a while.
Here’s the problem: what if you have an i5 with only 4 cores? In 11.50 we need threading time to do background paging of textures, background analysis of texture res – this is all NEW work to make the paging system work and it’s all multi-core. What we found was that users with only four cores didn’t have enough cores to load DSFs in the background rapidly _and_ keep paging _and_ launch all four FFTs and get everything that had to be done “per frame” done in time. We ran out of _multicore_ time on low-core-count machines.
So I changed the FFT to do all four FFTs on a _single_ core – less multicore! But the FFTs do all four FFTs in parallel using SSE. (We use KissFFT, which has this, so it was a straight forward change.) That brought the total _computing_ time for the water WAY down – but more importantly it fit the FFT into a single core ‘lane’, leaving room for all of that other background processing.
So going back to the “more multicore” request — if the REAL request is higher FPS, are you better off with us making something more multi-core or just making the code faster? I’d argue if the FPS jump is the same “just faster” is better because you still have your cores left over for “more cool stuff later.”
With that in mind, I do expect we are going to continue to push more things to other cores, just like all of the _new_ computing work for paging and pipeline building in 11.50 was pushed to background cores.
One other thing please
Is there anyone out there that can check CPU usage between B14 and B15?
What I see is that during game load on hwmonitor is B14 is only using 4 cores of my
i7 10700k where B15 is using 8 of the cores
As I have said above post B15 is running much slower fps could the extra cores / threads be causing the problem?
@Ben
The Goodbye-Sound which used to be played on Shutdown of XP 11 is still missing in the betas (running Vulcan mode on Win10). I had already reported this much earlier but it did not get fixed yet.
What is the “goodbye” sound?
I found that it is part of X-Ivap plugin sound directory at Resources\plugins\X-IvAp Resources\sound\disconnect.wav, provided X-Ivap is installed, of course, and is played on shutdown of XP 11.41 (and earlier).
In XP 11.50b15 (also in earlier betas) this sound is not played on shutdown, neither with Vulcan nor with OpenGL mode.
Thus I have got the feeling that some Plugin code is not getting called anymore by 11.50.
Oooooooooh. I have _no_ idea why the sound would have stopped. If the developer of the add-on contacts us with info about how the plugin works, we can help.
My rig is a bit old one (i7-6700k no OC with GTX970 and DDR4 32GB RAM). Since b11 my system looks very stable at about 25-45 with the default sceneries. VR also runs smoothly. Thank you for the excellent job done.
Very happy former user of the ‘other’ big simulator platform here and enjoying this beta so far. Cloud performance seems to have improved for me. Disappointed however that the weird lighting bug is still present where the effect is similar to someone turning on a very bright light bulb inside and outside the flight deck depending on the orientation of the aircraft. This gives enormously different lighting levels which breaks the immersion badly.
I’ve seen this on streams and videos of X Plane for a while so it’s clearly not just me. It’s the only show stopper for X Plane right now. But you’re doing great work, I’m with you for the long haul.
agree
Was too busy with other issues, but agree immersion break. Usually just on the approach dome lights are suddenly on and this distracts any attention.
Please contact SAM – Scenery Animation Manager? That plugin needs to sort themselves out. I have removed it as it caused crashes
That is only 2.0.8 and I think I have read it’s already known and getting worked on. Just downgrade to 2.0.7.
I am very happy with B15. Running pretty well maxed out with all kinds of plugins and getting better fps, especially in busy airports. BTW, Skymaxx is working for me. Thanks….
I believe there is an issue with fps dropping while changing views and is still persisting in b15 and I think according to the org forums couple of members have already filed bug reports about this issue, is this hopefully will be addressed in the next b16?
Thank you
Since I start run vulcan I get a very high fps and am impressed with the XP team for their good work. But I have a small problem. Anytime vulcan is activated my display start to blink and it not stable.
Please tell me you guys have xp12 hiding up your sleeve! Sorry but this 11.5 beta cant compete with the devil companies new platform.
My feeling: The Devils new platform is far from finished…If you ask me LR still has time to come up with a very competitive product. And they are doing a great job so far!
Agreed, Xplane will still have the best VR sim…. sins switching to VR I have tried to use the monitor again… impossible, whoop whoop pull up pull up…
How I do it, if my threads are finished with the work, they fill some sort of a message list. Usually a vector. That list will be disassembled in a Flightloop. From there I call the necessary functions that are related to the messages.
Right! As long as the vector has a lock and you don’t hold that lock for very long, this will work well.
There is still a severe critical bug reported many times that is a total show stopper. Vulkan 11.50 is not close to done yet, especially with this issue:
1. Load Flight at JFK on High Settings with Max Objects.
2. Note Frame Rate in cockpit view 1.
3. Switch to Outside View.
4. Switch back to Original Cockpit View.
You should notice the FPS quickly dip low and take time to ‘recover’ to where they were in Step 2.
This is a really bad one.
Doug.
Hi Doug,
We don’t have any bug reports or help requests on file from you. Who was it reported “many times” by? Could you file a single report _now_ against 11.50b15 if it’s still visible?
I have reported 3 times since B11. Jeniffer asked to run Windows Performance test. No feedback or follow up.
Clearly this issue exists and been reported a few times on this very blog; albeit it seems for a small percentage of users.
Dan
Your reports are sitting in line in Helpscout waiting to be triaged. We have a lot of perf reports to go through right now.
As was posted by Laminar team, one of the last steps to Vulkan development was performance tuning.
XP Vulkan is currently Not performing. In fact FPS is terrible including for VR. In many cases (see above) FPS are well below XP 11.41 Open GL.
Fixing the remaining bugs and completing performance tuning is critical for Vulkan patch. Especially after 4 years of development.
Do not skip these steps!
Doug.
If you have a case where you have worse fps in 11.50 Vulkan than 11.41 you should file a bug, so we can grab a trace of what your machine is doing.
Just filed a bug because 11.50 Metal is worse than 11.41 when it’s cloudy
Vulkan is definitively a huge improvement and a big step forward to improve the graphics platform. The only time I had problems was with b13 and the Nvidia drivers update and Windows 2004 transition, I think it was the “perfect storm”.
99% of my flight is smooth as velvet and I don’t remember doing such smooth approaches in high density areas such as Mexico City.
However I just have one question regarding the optimizations phase.
It is still happening and more when you are in the ground taxiing that turning the airplane, not the head, there a still a couple of stutters. Is this something that you are still planning to improve, or this is as good as it gets in Vulkan or anything else.
I don’t want my post to be misunderstood, but it saddens me to see that after so much effort, of which I am aware because I follow you continuously, I still get a better performance in 11.41 than with the betas in vulkan and opengl, maybe the issue is in the hardware, but of course, as I say, it saddens me to foresee that I will have to update the hardware in about 1000 $ when for the rest of the tasks that I develop it is not only enough but it goes very well the one I have.
If you have an apples for apples case where 11.41 out performs 11.50 Vulkan or 11.50 Metal, please file a bug so we can capture an ETW trace of what’s going on.
like many others i have been getting reduced fps since B13 I am now getting 28fps in B15 where i get 45 fps in 11.41 same scenario vulkan is making simming slower
Hi,
I must leave this comment since I got more and more frustrated about the progress of Xplane11.5, recognizing so many Beta versions and in my System of 3 PC always one or two of them are hanging up, crashing ….Beta4 I made the first time that the whole System was running, now I moved forward after weeks not starting Xplane with B15 and it is still a mass to bring all systems to work. No improvement in the loading time or stability. In comparison to the old MS FlightSim X Xplane with ortoscenary and all this add-on is much nicer, but always diffcult to setup correctly, but after each upgrade after many hours finding the issues it was working.
I am not a retirierend man, so my free-time is really limited and currently Xplane 11 is wasting my free time more and more, it is so frustrating me that the Log text is not indicated why the System isnt working. I must clearly say that the only what I wan t to do is flying 2-3 Hours in the evening with good fps and nice graphics and not waiting 15 minutes till everything has been loaded and then it is crashing or not responding anymore. I was really a fan of Xplane, but when this MS Flight 2020 is working and not wasting my time like xplane is doing since months and will not keep me frustated when the system is hanging, crashing or what ever happenes..than Xplane will be history.
Hi Marco,
I am sorry that you are frustrated, but…if you just want a nice flight in the evening, please go back to 11.41. The beta’s not done. It’s marked as beta and not final specifically so people like you can fly the stable version and _not_ be exposed to the chaos of each new beta.
I know I have been very critical but let’s make this comment very clear to be more constructive. First you at X-Plane need to know that most of your users are using this software as a game not as a professional simulator with perfect physics simulator. we play X-Plane for fun and for having a great free time. but this is not the case for years. I keep writing code for 100 hours a week then I choose to have a weekend rest by making a 2 hours flight then I find my self frustrated by a crash at the middle of flight, by sudden FPS drop and I can’t move around, by crash before landing or by any bad experience that you don’t care about. And I don’t agree with you to always say (It’s marked as beta and not final) because this also was the case with every stable release you had since X-Plane first release. So now we wasted years with the hope to have a great weekend flight and everytime we fail to get it. Ask yourself please why does only X-Plane have this large community of Beta testers and Beta complains in the blog, and the answer is that Beta is same to Non-Beta most of them people don’t use for testing and debugging, but use it for the hope that you already fixed or improved something that’s already in the stable version. And ask yourself again why many people is complaining here in Blog here instead of filling a bug. Me, personally I read every single post and comment in this blog and I feel that it’s the only friendly channel to reach you. And now problems already exceeded the level of filling a bug, we are not talking about a specific bug, we are talking a complete experience, we are talking about your philosophy, your vision, your way of thinking, your way of dealing with problem, your way of planning for new features. You always ship new features and you always start long term plans before you improve already exists features and before you finish the short term plan. Yes sometimes you need to do short time improvements that you know you will change later in your long term plan but just to make the game playable and working good for the people who are using it now, then you more to your great plan. you could also work parallel, make small fixes and improvements to the already exists stable version while your doing your great long term in VR that took more than a year and while you are moving to Vulkan/Metal which that also took a year. I have my own business and shipped software products that get millions of earnings each year, and my clients called us in reviews (The Utopia of Software) just because we have one simple and clear philosophy (Never make anyone frustrated) we can do great features and work then roll them back because we feel that they may waste users time or may make them do more steps or have bad experience. we never ship a product that’s annoying. we can spend years of making small and hidden tweaks instead of adding a single new feature that make every single experience perfect first. So I really want you to appreciate this long comment and rethink of changing your way of dealing with problems and planning your roadmap. because you are starting to loose the people who were really fans for you and were willing to waste valuable times of their weekends to help you, support you, be patience with you, and make the free marketing for you. Personally I gifted about 15 copies to my friends over last years and I recommended the software to hundreds, so please care about making us have a great experience with hoppy without wasting more time talking with you, and care about protecting us from frustrating in our weekends. Have a nice day 🙂
I believe this version of X-plane is becoming a debacle. Months overdue and judging by the amount of bugs being reported still a long way to go. By pushing betas out too regularly (and some do not even work on release) you’ll start to lose your users. Judging from the frustrations on this site, this appears to be happening.
Hi,
I am really a gret fan of Xplane and willing to go with betas where I know that there are some bugs in. But we have reached a level, where we are not talking about small bugs, I am talking about crashed, instability. I am recognizing you are working hard for bugfixing one issue and causes sideeffects with new bugs or bugs already solved are back again. This leads to my understanding that process & config mgtm needs to be improved. Please concentrate on stability, please give clear advices which plugin is working now, which add on scenary is working and upgrade you health monitoring system to write better log files. Yesterday 3 PCs are working and today two of them are crashing again, where no modifacation has been done. I know we are in beta, but its beta and not alpha and I agree to other pepaople here, most of the relase since years…we are in beta mode…so when I will stay on releae mode…there will never any improvements. And I want improvement in performance thuis the ffps is 20 in alps and with orthoscenary…and vulkan ist mandatory to reach at least 30fps….and its not the issue of money and HW….the system is already based on high performance HW…
Just as I have been very critical on other occasions, now I CONGRATULATE you with the solution of the clouds.
You still have to solve the stuttering in the camera turn.
We continue in X Plane 11 the small “virtual pilots community” and awaiting the solution for “release candidate” of the Vulkan stutter. Thanks.
And what is the conclusion :
Don’t assess the pastry,
be patient and wait for the cake.
Happy flying
Why is it that the germans have a reputation for being “tröstende”…?
Ben cudos to you and the Xplane team. I have been enjoying Vulcan and your latest updated beta so much in VR. There really is. Thing else like it. I know your into the VR in part. I was wondering if we could get a little bigger font on the 737 Default navigation screen. The waypoints and tcas are basically unreadable even to super sampling 1.5. Thanks for the great product.
737 nav display isn’t in the cards for 11.50 but it is absolutely on our radar…we have a bunch of things we want to do with the airliner displays.
Just get Zibo instead.
Hi, I submitted XPD-10919 with a ETW for a performance regression in the recetns betas (around b10)
I do not see it in the known issues, does that mean you do not acknowledge this bug or simply were not able to repro yet?
Its a bug talked quite a lot when looking left / right tanking the fps and making the gpu usage 100% during that time.
Yer bug is still open – it’s not in the known issues list because that list isn’t comprehensive and is mostly meant to list things that are easy to explain. It looks like you’re probably seeing AGP paging stutter…I’ll write something in more detail soon but at the time you filed, I think NV driver issues were floating around too. Anyway, work is ongoing.
Guys.
VR User running on a 2080 TI Driver Version 445.86 (haven’t upgraded to 451 because of the Valve Index Bug)
I’m getting stutters now which I was not getting on B14 the FPS looks the same.
I’m running it on high settings so some stutters are expected, but on B14 it was a lot better.
I don’t really know if you have optimized B15 for 451 driver set, or if it should be fine on 445.86 as well…
Is there anything that I can provide to you for checking?
Thanks.
Ben,
Thanks so much for all the hard work. I was wondering, did you guys lower the distance shadows are drawn in exterior views? (Running Mac/Metal). I’m not complaining and I know you can’t provide sliders for everything. The realism boost with them say… covering the whole airport instead of disappearing on the other side of a runway, is nice.
Also I have noticed that shadows fade near sunset, when they should be most prominent. Is that because they get crazy otherwise?
Last one, I promise. Does the x-plane engine allow for other environment wide/large scale lights, like blue sky light, moonlight, and that orange glow cities give off that illuminates the clouds? Or does that start to get ray-tracey? (Or, do you start clipping saturation values? Ie, you crank up atmospheric scattering and the horizon clips to RGB 0 255 255 … would a transfer function similar to filmic help? (https://youtu.be/m9AT7H4GGrA) [i know, you aren’t a ray tracer, but you do cram things into sRGB]
I know it’s a flight sim and not an earth sim and all these questions come from a place of love and appreciation.
Thanks!
Yes – exterior shadow distance has been lowered in 11.50 to reach a consistent shadow resolution per meter – it’s a compromise of distance and res, but it moves the balance more towards sharpness and not distance. The shadows have always cut out at dusk because they start to look bad with the long stretch.
X-Plane encapsulates the environment in a pre-convolved cube map that is periodically updated while you fly. This is why the reflections on the AA MD-80 look like the weather. We have a TODO to add an analytical light back for the moon, but the general atmosphere is taken into account to some extent. We do not have ambient light on the clouds – I used to see that effect IRL flying into San Diego in the “winter” (which means a thin overcast layer through which you can see the city lights…I think they don’t understand the meaning of the word out there).
The scattering starts to look silly because the math of the algorithm isn’t great – we have better stuff coming; you just run the scattering in HDR and then tone map it down. The HDR tone mapper in mobile is actually really good – it comes from a talk Timothy Lottes of AMD gave a while ago – we’ll bring it back to desktop. Chris is a big photo nerd so he wanted a tone mapper that preserved rich color, which it does.
Ben,
Thanks for the answers. I imagine shadows everywhere is just a matter of waiting a few years until everyone has 32 GB graphics cards and/or some sort of “shadows for free with a per light Z buffer” sort of thing?
I wonder though, for non moving objects, can you compute the shadows every large N of frames like you do the reflections? Again. Not pestering.
Also, I fired up x-plane mobile – I don’t play it much cause while you guys did a great job with the controls, I.. just suck at them. But yeah, the Scattering/sky math looks a lot better. It lets you crank it pretty far without going all cyan. I did notice no “exposure” simulation as part of the hdr. By that I mean if your plane is in the foreground and sun is right behind it, plane should be super dark as either a lens or your eye lowers the exposure to deal with the super bright sun) but if you are doing hdr in the first place, that’s not insurmountable.
If Chris is a photo nerd I am sure he’ll put it on the todo list.
I know everyone is clamoring for whatever dark magic MSF2020 is doing, but I think most of the bang for the buck would come with realistic lighting, and you are getting there! (My other issue, the weird grass color, comes from the tone mapping)
Last thing I promise promise promise. Any thought of using the native display color space of a device (ie P3 on macs) rather than slamming it down to sRGB?
Thanks again!
Large gamut displays and HDR displays: the wider gamut isn’t that interesting to us…we just don’t have a lot of material we need to show that’s out of gamut. The sim doesn’t _increase_ saturation with any part of the lighting pipeline (and is unlikely to ever do so), so if the reference material (e.g. albedos of stuff) is in gamut or very close, the final image will be. I don’t think you’d see a difference going wide. (You will see a difference with a better tone mapper that doesn’t desaturate! But that can be done entirely within sRGB.)
High dynamic range is another story – we can always use more dynamic range, and there are HDR displays out there. The mobile tone mapper is designed to support a range of display brightness ranges, e.g. it’s meant to squash more in LDR and let HDR breath a bit.
Ben. I may be way off in understanding this exchange, but I remember you posting that you were surprised by a very speedy discovery that Developer, Show Sky colours broke an early beta.
I suggest this is a very popular setup as it is principally the easiest and best way to get an acceptable ground cover look. Default being very “thin”, requiring some wide adjustments in the display control panel, taking it away from application controlled.
I understand that many many users will accept a default display screen setup (masses of white light for Office documents etc with very little chroma), due mostly to inexperience.
Driving the display with increased contrast will inevitably increase any unexpected HDR effects and likely stimulate reference to irising of light levels..
I really appreciate all your teams hard work, and dont subscribe to earlier disparaging remarks made earlier in this blog
Arrabest
What’s the proper way to contact Chris to share thoughts on the photo realism stuff without being annoying? (As it’s not about “bugs”)
It cannot be done. Chris is like Luke in Episode 8 – he hides in the mountains, tells anyone who shows up to “go home” and drinks weird blue milk…it’s kinda disturbing actually.
Seriously, I can’t give you his email address. We _are_ looking at doing some kind of actual, real life feature request board, which would let people put out their thoughts about how to make the sim better in a manner that was persistent, could be commented on/up-voted, and would be a lot less scattershot than the mix of bugs, blog comments, tech support, and emailing Austin that we have now.
I don’t know why you don’t do that, I seem to recall way back in the day, of the earliest versions when this all started that that was something we all used to do was post our wish lists and you guys would respond and either work on them or not. But that went away so long ago I don’t even remember when it happened. But it should come back. I haven’t been run and x-plane as much as I should lately simply because I’m swamped with other things and other simulations. As a developer I have to divide my time. So I know how much you guys find it hard to allocate time and resources for “wish list items” . That being said the current state of affairs with the simulator everyone should realize and understand that the guys work their butts off and really need to fix all of the outstanding issues before they worry about little bells and whistles that we might want. before you start laughing Ben you probably think how ironic from the statement to come from me of all people who has bugged you repeatedly for specific feature. You know what it is… LOL keep soldiering on we still support you.
I have also bad FPS in B15, down to 25 from 40.
I delete all of prefs – files and I got back my old performance.
Sorry. 30 bpp mode is still not supported. Reported two years ago.
You mean “we don’t support 10-bit HDR”? Thta’s a feature request, not a bug.
I mean neither X-Plane nor Installer starts with X server set to 10 bits per channel mode.
Whoah — no matter how hard I tried, I failed to get a GLX visual. Something’s seriously wonky on your machine.
Reported on August 12, 2017. Never heard back. Nothing at all.
Ah. This is not something we are going to fix any time soon.
Hi guys !
Hi X-Plane team !
Congrats for your communication while making changes, this is very respectful for your customers.
My 2 cents:
I’m trying to convince my friend to jump to the Vulkan release, but, on my rig, (3Go vram, he has the same), tough I could move the sliders of reflection to 3rd position, textures to max, aso, when I show him the results he sees only the BLURY planes or vehicle or facades in sight on ground.
And I have the same fps as in OpenGL.
My rig:Pentium Core I7-7700k / ram 16 Go /GeForce GTX 1060 on Asus Z270/ Dual Boot Windows 10-Ubuntu 18.04/ X-Plane 11 boite/ Joystick Saitek X52
I have to confess that this does disappoint me too…
Otherwise I haven’t seen a performance improvement other than reflections.
Sorry to complain, but my friend says: “It’s more beautiful on OpenGL 11.41
Hi guys. Great work on all the Betas. My little 152 sim built in a real fuselage feels more real each time I fly it. I agree with a few others here that FPS does seem variable between Betas and there is some stuttering still when doing certain things…..but……I really do understand the concept of Beta and ….”its not finished” so I’d accept all this to help the development and finding the bugs.
One request from me and I’ve no idea how easy this could be. Can LR make the user interface screen scalable other than 100 or 150%. I use 2 oversized monitors for my side windows so I can have some peripheral view around the window frames if I lean closer…..ok it’s a bit unusual but it adds a bit of increased view and feels like looking out a real window. The problem is the UI then fills it and I lose the top menus and the bottom edge. I’d like to scale the screen to say 75% as it will still be perfectly usable but then totally visible within the frame of the fuselage window. Perhaps a UI scale slider or dropdown with a few more size options including some below 100%. At the moment I cant use it on my main view as thats a warped projection so I set a 4th monitor as instructor station. I then have to get out of the cockpit every time I want to alter something. Opening the door and “stepping out” whilst at 5000ft just somewhat breaks the immersion. 🙂 :-). Any chance you can tweak the UI. Would be grateful.
Keep going guys, it’s a great product giving a lot of enjoyment.
Cheers from.the UK.
Jeff
About VR, I noticed that the mouse is rarely functionnal when switching to my headset (HP Reverb) despite hitting the appropriate key. I have to activate (wake up) at least one of the VR controllers to have the mouse functional in the 3D environement. Is this expected behavior ? Cause I really don’t need these controllers to operate any aircraft. HOTAS and mouse do the job…
We’ve seen that too and we’re not sure why – as best we can tell, we get really unreliable “headset is active” information off of SteamVR. That’s interesting that hitting a controller changes the status – I’ll pass that on to Jennifer.
Is there any plans to address FPS issues any further? I’m on I7’s, GTX 1080, 24GB ram, and still only achieve 29FPS on Vulkan, with all the settings on Low – it’s ridiculous
You should file a bug – there’s something specific to your system – it’s not X-Plane. We’ve done extensive FPS testing over the last 48 hours and our baseline FPS are much better than that. My PC is an i5-4600 from 2014, and with Vulkan I get 40 fps with either an AMD or NV card (both worse than the 1080) with all settings maxed out except for reflections and AA. So there are a few possibilities:
– Your CPU is really really really underpowered…
– You’ve got add-ons installed or other stuff turned on that is causing the FPS hit
– Something specifically weird is happening on _your system_.
– Something specifically weird is happening in X-Plane — a bug that we’ve never seen on our computers — that’s hitting your FPS.
If you file a bug, we can have you run the tools that capture DETAILED fps info, and then we can figure out what has happened.
Or depends where he is flying.
on custom ortho I get 150fps with sliders set to medium (yes 1 5 0), but terrible lows if i go much higher.
and down to 15fps stock scenery at ksea with the same settings on the runway
I replaced most of europe I just fly over with low res ortho for 50fps constant in the 744. (panel taking most of the time) default scenery fell often to 10-15fps once I get high (id mentioned wanting to check high altitude before – this is all i got).
2700k@3.5ghz gtx1070,
the aerosoft sceneries also nuke flying over the uk and needed disabling.
29fps in vulkan on stock scenery is probably par for the course in many a stock scenery if coming from medium settings and not restarting xp after setting them to low.
my experience anyway. The worst of the nasty nasty stutters have gone, aside from the odd weird crash report which now seems to work everytime and needing a lot of effort to reconfigure scenery its looking and working great.
sorry not ksea… i meant klax
make sure you are not totaling your card with your nVidia control panel 3D settings. I made that mistake. I reset the whole nV control panel 3D setting to the global default and tweaked one or two settings (thread optimization and power management to max), left AAliasing completely alone and let the application do everything else. It was a total game changer for me. I was trying to have the control panel settings to do all the aliasing work and just ended up hijacking the card before XP had any utility.
I think I was getting better performance with some earlier (<b10) versions but hard to compare apples with apples as some variables have changed.
With b15, I get 58fps on Vulkan with 20% for GPU and CPU usage, while openGL runs at 52fps with near 100% GPU usage. That's with the default 737.
FF A320 (1.0.8b) runs at 36fps with Vulkan at 30% CPU/GPU and at 36fps with openGL at 20% CPU and ~97% GPU.
This is with the latest nvidia 451.67 on 1070. Doesn't seem right to me.
Flickering in the cockpit when vulcan is enabled. Any help
The “nice” Günter and Ben say they don’t know when but soon … They have a hard time
Hey,
First of all congrats on the move to Vulkan, x-plane is blooming here performance wise;)
Just curious, when you do your benchmarks do you compare between operating systems? Although in linux here and eveything is well however just curious what it is like from your perspective.
Second, and I know this is kinda early, curious again..this is more about scenery tools, have you considred something easier with a proper ui to edit meshes in the future or some kind of a mesh patch format that can be hand edited using blender (or any other) and even use stuff like tesselation, displacement maps etc..?
And lastly this more about stuff that im trying with x-plane, im trying to figure out how to randomly place 3d objects like trees in some sort of a polygon (like .pol files .for files)? Then using lods for the meshes to not tank fps.
Cross-operating system – we do not do this kind of testing on any regular basis because we don’t usually have machines where the hardware is the same but it can run all operating systems. We have much better GL-Vulkan and GL-Metal comparisons because that can be done with everything else controlled.
We have never considered a tool to edit the existing meshes – this has been discussed a lot in the past, and basically my view is it’s a request that comes from missing another much more important tool that we are more likely to make. That tool is the ability to have “patches” in an overlay that affect a local area and reshape it. (Once you have that power, editing the existing mesh is unnecessary – your overlay will drop in on top of it and “fix” the area.). We’ve been asked for mesh elevation patching many times a while ago and it’s the most important scenery tech we don’t have…it doesn’t exist yet because it’s not trivial to code, so it’s not something we could just sneak in while porting to Vulkan.
That sounds really great.
Makes me look forward for what kind of amazing scenes can one create in blender for x-plane.
And of course will solve a problem for developers publishing custom meshes.
That tool is the ability to have “patches” in an overlay that affect a local area and reshape it.
Yes please 🙂
The frame rate is lower than the previous version, Ben, you cannot compromise on the frame rate.
Lower than 11.41 or beta 14??
A little off topic but forward thinking, can you guys comment on XP 12 and or what you have planned to “combat” msfs2020 in terms of visual immersion? Weather etc.
I can’t comment on that right now but we’ll try to put together some announcements or road map or previews soon.
Looking forward to that, thanks.
If you are announcing “weather” can we please have thermal updrafts actually underneath the cumulus clouds.
A. sent you a doc from the x-plane glider projects group – appreciate you’ve been busy but no acknowledgement of receipt even?
Meanwhile our little gift from the gliding community (Therm-X) is receiving lots of pos. reviews from the G.A community
By the way, have you guys seen that open source project for volumetric clouds in X-Plane?
https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/218819-freeware-volumetric-clouds-for-x-plane-11/&do=findComment&comment=1969190
I think JustSid passed by the thread at some point.
Anyway, hope LR get “inspired” in that for future versions… billboard clouds are soo 2015. 🙂
Yes – we’ve see this and many other marched cloud tech as well.
Just downloaded b15.
I never posted this on b14, but I had issues with laggy mouse cursor and frequently keyboard commands were not being registered or were but with a huge multi-second lag. I thought my batteries (wireless KB and M) were dying so switched out for new but no difference. I hope b15 eliminates that weirdness.
XP11.50b15 is definitely blocking or locking my wireless keyboard and mouse inputs. b14 was the same. With b13 and prior I never had this issue. Even when XP is running in the background and Im using web browser, my keyboard and mouse seem to go to sleep. When I shut down XP there is no issue.
From Beta 1 to 3, i saw a really impressive FPS improvement.
There were about two times or more frame improvement over 11.41.
However, starting with Beta 4, the CPU cost has increased and the frame has been lowered. Of course it is better than 11.41. But not as much as in beta 1-3.
In some scenery, it is half that of beta 1-3.
my system
i7 9700k [non overclock, power limit off]
GTX 1080ti [non overclock]
32GB RAM [3200MHz]
I want to experience the smooth and high FPS that I saw in Beta 1~3 again.
you still have to restart your Mac to get 11.50 to work upon updating
Yep – this will not be fixed until we release the new installer.
Very nice work gents. this beta is a improvement for me over b13 and b14. i am seeing stable 60fps for the most part. under heavy cloud/storms and around major centers it dips to 30fps but is stable at 30. loving this new beta !!
I see a lot of comments about performance, and feeling that it was better in early beta iterations, and I see a lot of replies from LR saying that we should submit bug reports if a prior beta performs better.
It would be helpful if you would provide access to prior builds, so we can compare. I may have felt beta 10 performed better — but since then there have been new video drivers, a few windows updates, etc. And did I just “feel” it?
I am picking 10 out of the air, by the way, and its just an example (I really don’t think 10 ran better than 15)
But if I did, and I could access B10, i’d be more than happy to install 10 and then validate. It sounds like LR really wants this kind of feedback.
If we had access to install prior builds, we could do it.
We are doing internal comparisons of past betas and there is a _real_ perf loss from b9 -> b15, which we are zeroing in now.
The thing is: it’s not a _big_ perf loss. It’s a small perf loss and not nearly as large as the _gains_ from 1141 -> 11.5x.
So in most of the cases where I am like “you should file a bug”, it’s because someone is complaining about just _absolutely bad_ performance.
E.g.
User: I have a super l33t gamer-class machine and I get 20 fps with all settings on minimum.
Me: Wat?? File a bug!
The theory here is that this isn’t just the regression from b9->b15 (which, since we see, we can go zero in on ourselves) – it’s something _else_….a particular add-on, a particular weather condition, a particular aircraft, a particular Windows problem.
The ETW traces are broad spectrum – they let us see a lot of stuff, which is why they’re our first choice. we get a ton of info from one trace.
Hi Ben,
Well I’m also seeing some performance drop in the evolution of the beta releases in the 11.50 program.
I filed a bug report on Sunday afternoon (Europe local time) and included the results of different ‘–fps_test=4’ runs with a pre-recorded replay file (using the ‘–load_smo’ parameter). I also included the pre-recorded file used and zipped the log files of all the tests I had done.
Also I in these tests I was using only the standard default scenery. The only add-on used in my case was the Bell 407 for XP11 and X-Camera.
Hope that the info I uploaded in the bug report will help.
In any case, thanks for the great work you and your team have done!
The thing is: it’s not a _big_ perf loss.
You are correct may 10 or 11 fps but when you are inside the HP Reverb that 10 /11 fps is a big deal
Noticed two issues that have carried over from b14.
Full screen vsync behavior appears to be double buffered. Windowed vsync behavior is fine with the fps cleanly varying but full screen it locks to 60, 30, 20 and even 15fps in very heavy scenes.
SSAO has a very noticeable alternating light dark checkerboard pattern to it. It’s quite obvious in the default c172 cockpit by looking at the windshield pillar in clear weather.
This is on Windows 10 with an AMD 5700 XT on the latest 20.7.2 drivers.
I noticed that fullscreen vsync behaviour too.
I think that is perfect, because locking frame rate to monitor refresh rate dived by whole numbers (e.g. 60Hz => 60, 30, 20, 15) is the only way to have a still smooth experience, whenever the rendering is too much to keep up with the monitor rate.
With vsync turned on, a stable 30 fps are _much_ better than a few frames with 60 fps and a few with 30 fps (constant stuttering), though the latter gives you a higher average fps.
I noticed it even works great with g-sync/freesync. Perfectly smooth (in my case with 60Hz monitor) in g-sync between 60 and 40 fps, and when it is struggeling to keep lowest g-sync rate, immediately locking down to 30. Then, after 40+ fps would be possible for some time, it “unlocks” and goes back to g-sync.
Reading all the posts about performance getting worse, I wonder if some complaints are caused by this new and _good_ vsync behaviour.
I have filed 2 Bugs please take a look. Serious issues. Also, issues with legacy addon Ground Traffic must be fixed. And I also have experienced the same performance Loss since earlier Betas. Everybody has seen this. Probably locks added by Justsid. Delete all that nasty code. I want my FPS back. FYI Aerofly FS Vulkan over 250 fps. XP not performing at All! Don’t even Blog about release candidates.
I’ve been telling Sidney to remove all the locks for weeks now. Once he does and we lose the device at 250 fps, I’ll probably tell him to put them all back.
Something something if Intel stopped removing transactional memory support from shipping SKUs something something great lock free code. I could put this into Slack, but did you see that ARM now has transactional memory as an extension to ARMv8? Imagine how many people we could upset by shipping lock elision code in mobile first.
I think they keep pulling transactional memory on x86 because it’s not that important – everything’s atomic on x86. ;-). It’s “fine grained locking.” When all you have is a DWORD….
Read comments above. Users losing keyboard input with current locks. Clearly fundamental design issues here. Performance FPS shouldn’t be tied to devices. And if that’s the case it should be a separate thread. C’mon on JustSid. Back to the drawing board.
Wait, Sidney and I are _joking_ about the locks. It’s a running internal joke about the state of concurrent programming in C++. I can’t tell if you’re being serious anymore here.
I was dead serious. We need threads. Lot’s of them! Loading weather. Loading scenery. Loading systems!
You already get as many threads as you have cores on your CPU. But if you want threads, I’m confused about why you don’t want locks. They kinda come hand in hand.
Additionally to that, you can’t hold a lock and lose keyboard input as a result of that. That’s not how event handling works in any modern OS. So I’m reasonably certain that none of my locks introduced that kind of bug 🙂
I see in Steam settings –> Shader Pre-Caching the is an option for Allow background processing of Vulkan shaders. Is there any advantage or disadvantage with selecting this option?
I don’t know what that setting does. We cache shaders, so certainly after your first run, there’s no win to be had.
When trying to load into an airport/region where Ortho exists using 11.50b15, the load times are very long, sometimes up to 15 minutes. Other times, the sim just doesn’t load at all. If the sim does load, it will crash-to-desktop a few minutes after loading.
In my test scenario, I flew from KCLS to 39P then to 55S. Around 55S, the sim CTDed with Forkboy Washington ortho loaded. I then tried to load in at 55S and the sim wouldn’t load at all.
I then bought Orbx Washington and deleted Forkboy thinking Forkboy had an error. I attempted to load in at 55S… it took forever (like 10-15 minutes). When it finally loaded, about 3 minutes later it CTDed.
I disabled all ortho scenery this seemed to correct all the issues. Maybe it has something to do with dense terrain mesh + ortho that the sim doesn’t like.
If you still see this in beta 16, please file a bug.
I definitely have notice working ortho tiles in 11.41 that all of a sudden need to be redone curvtol # of triangles maybe… but not a big deal. Excellent achievement Ben Sid and team
Ben, Sid, we are cheering you on- keep at it, we will support best we can.
I’ve been struggling (and analysing, and experimenting) with cloud performance all the way since about Beta 11 I think, and hoped that Beta 15 would bring me resolution based on Ben’s announcement of finding a cloud performance bug. But for my system in Beta 15 clouds remain the killer setting even though I can slide objects and textures all the way to the right with relative impunity. So today I repeated my Beta 14 experiment (varying clouds from ‘none’ to ‘stratus’ whilst calibrating levels of objects and textures independently – but this time, to the best of my ability, on a clean B15 install, no ortho, no map-based mesh, no custom airports, no plugins. ‘Broken’ clouds with Minimum objects and texture gives me unusability, microstutters in the Oculus Rift and <20FPS even on the monitor. Perhaps it is my systems – but earlier I could fly marginal VFR through the Welsh mountains with moderate textures and objects…it has worked before. So I've filed a bug, just in case, with all the data I could gather.
Just wondering – with VR and so many different possible integrated systems even in the Windows domain, wouldn't it be good to have some high-level tool for analysing where our bottlenecks lie? Until we have that, the majority of people will continue to blame XP first and only think about systems integration after. What about this Windows ETW tool that is mentioned above? Can that help non-professional medium-techie users? I know I have a new problem – I just don't know whether 11.50 is less forgiving of my particular setup or whether 11.50 ought to work for me after all.
Analyzing ETW probably isn’t feasible for non-devs. Once we get the bugs out, generally if other users have hw like yours and get way better fps, that’s a sign that your system might be borked in some way.
Sorry to say guys, but b15 is crashing on my system frequently, while b14 was so stable! I filed a number of bug reports. I did not change anything in scenery or plugins, although I tried the new Ultra Weather XP 2.6.1, but this generated skycolors errors so I removed the plugin from my beta test config.
I’am not quite sure, but I also see FPS quite lower with all ORBX scenery. I must go back to b14 to verify this, but I don’t recall noticing that in earlier beta so obviously.
Hope b16 is back to stability again.
A few others have asked about future things, so I dare to ask as well (“trying to look friendly and hopeful”) 🙂
Can we expect to see an option for Picture-in-Picture maybe in form of a “tiny monitor” on board (specially helicopters?)
I’m sure you know what I mean (the old MSFS-X got it) – a “monitor” view to watch the ground beneath without having to change to 3rd person view.
I guess an extra view is eating some FPS, but still: this would do an amazing difference for using helicopters with add-ons like SAR, fire fighting, the new X-duster and apps like Mission-X.
The “M¤#]#2030” is coming without any helis so far – I see an advance in doing just a bit extra for helicopters “soon” in X-Plane.
Please answer
(oh and the internal FLIR is simply not good enough for that).
Regards
Ha ha – Austin and I have had an on-going argument about this very feature – in his case he wanted _mirrors_, but it’s the same deal – you have to make a separate render because the camera angle is totally different and I went “nooooooo it’ll nom yer fps” and he went “we’re all grown-ups, we know, helicopter ops”. Suffice it to say, Austin made the case for why this is important ops wise.
Actually uh…you can kind of totally do this now – use the TV plane-maker instrument and use datarefs to ‘aim’ the camera. It’s not good for mirrors because you get only one and it’s not very realistic looking. Better tech is needed.
Austin you’re my hero!!
Helicopter ops!
If “TV plane-maker” isn’t something new, I doubt it’s doable (as in “any good”) though.
I’ve asked a dev about this before and he said it was up to LR to make it happen.
I can hardly start up the plane-maker software so I can’t “mess with it” 🙁
“Better tech is needed” – as in user hardware or uhm programming?
Please Ben you……must……..make………it……”just work” 🙂
X-plane as the default helicopter and mission sim/game – that would be a great move (please heli guys chime in now!) 🙂
Thank you for your answer Ben!
Regards
I think there are also more modern airliner cases for In-taxi cams that are becoming more prominent e.g. 777, A350, A380. Not quite sure if running at reduced resolution or draw distance would help..but I’m not the programmer 😀
Yeah – good point about in-cockpit cameras for the airliners…
+1 on the additional window(s) showing a different camera. My use case is a little different; I’m teaching my daughter how to fly IRL and supplementing with your sim. (Your 172 is only a few years newer than the one we’re using!) It would sometimes be nice to show her a second view of what’s happening to the airplane from outside to help her visualize. I wouldn’t care about the FPS hit if it was even that big. Have a few free cores, and my GPU is never that busy!
I know this use case isn’t a big market for you, but it’s a different perspective anyway.
Thanks for everything you’re doing! Great product!
Again, well done on continuously trying to improve XP11, it’s truly a fantastic platform that many of us continue enjoying.
I have two betas installed at any time, currently beta 15 and beta 14, and I’ve not filed a bug report.
– Beta 15 performance down 20% to 25% when compared with the previous version, I revert to beta 14 and all is smooth as silk.
– Changing views causes an immediate 75% frame reduction (I.e. Wing view to Cockpit view) frames do recover after a few seconds.
– This issue is not beta related, but when will we get a view distance that extends to the horizon, the muddy washed out low res terrain at higher altitudes is the most unsatisfying feature of XP11 imo, adjusting DSF improves the terrain draw distance but not by much. It’s like watching a movie on 1 screen, where one half is in HD and the other half completely washed-out low res.
I see that X plane still uses 100% of a single core of 16, so I have a limitation in FPS, it is very complex to modify so that x plane uses all the CPU cores?, are you plan to include this?
Thanks
regards
It is very complex. We are incrementally restructuring things to use more and more cores, but we didn’t want to add this as a requirement to 11.50 – 11.50 already has too much in it.
Hi Ben, hi Sidney,
will 11.50 be the last version before X-Plane 12?
How many developers work at Laminar Research and how many of them are working on other aspects than the transition to Vulkan and Metal?
For programmers we have 7 or 8. Only Sidney and I are working on the Vulkan port.
So 5-6 programmers are working on other aspects and have probably been doing that since at least 11.40, i.e. November 2019. Sounds like LR will release additional major improvements this year.
I’d like to discourage speculation on such things…we have made no announcements that would shed any light on future stuff.
I love the Metal improvements in 11:50.
In version 12 or 13 I hope to see physics engine that can get flags, grass, tree close to the camera realistic movements in the wind (which you can turn it on or off – in case if the computer is to week doing physic engine tasks)
After that, in version 13 or 14, I hope to see real-time ray tracing feature that can be activated if you have the right graphics card (i.e with real-time ray tracing components e.g. Nvidia RTX2080, AMDs Big Navi) and should also have an on/off button to activate/deactivate real-time ray tracing features.
I’m getting this message Adding automatically generated stream AUTOGEN: North to the SBRJ list and my scenario doesn’t load correctly
It was not possible to find an appropriate flow in the SBRJ … trying to autogenize an on the fly
Ben,
not to “steal your thunder” of the real matter – the beta responses, but – the “danger” of “eating” too much FPS with an extra monitor-view is not as dangerous now as before because of Vulkan.
Vulkan has really changed “Lowest FPS” up to a level where I believe most people who wants to get this feature can accept it ( sure Austin will agree haha!).
Well you got me interested, so I started up Plane-maker, watched most of the vids about how to use it (including Austin’s nice self isolation videos), but nowhere I could find anything about TV/monitor/camera.
If you (or someone) could give me a hint I would love to give it a try.
I walked through all 2D stuff and it isn’t there I guess.
( I promise not to write more about this for at_least_a_week now – hope you give it some kind thoughts for an update soon) 🙂
Regards
Chris
Have you read the 182 comments that came before yours? It’s mostly a giant pile of people complaining about low performance. Some users would make the trade…but many would not. I think the biggest issue is the scalability factor – add two external views and you go from 1x the scene graph to 3. That’s 60 to 20 fps if you were CPU bound.
Could there be clever optimizations? It’s hard. If the camera is close to the aircraft, you eat drawing the ACF an extra time, often a big cost. We’d be counting on the authors to very, very, very carefully tune each third party aircraft to optimize for this case.
very unstable, first boot was CDT, second boot FMC said “EGLL cannot be found”, third boot was better. FPS are better when flying into clouds.. good job ben however still a major FPS drop over any large defult airport like EGLL, EHAM while other large airports from uk2000 or orbix run smooth as silk… don’t need to be on the ground, my normal flight is egss – edlw… over eham I loose 20fps and the VR becomes a stutter fest, its all defult scenery…. many bugs sent
Closing the door sounds like a good idea. I’m glad Vulcan has totally worked out for me (RX580) – getting up to 100 fps with stock planes and relatively high settings.
I do hope that Austin decides to make some game-play & content improvements after vulcan: Little obvious things – like a windstock-symbol on the screen where you pick the runway for take off. Not that I would expect anything more than I have already payed for. But newbes will decide for FS2020 if they get 20 payware-quality planes for just 120 dollars! Who will buy scenere add ons after FS2020? I feel like Austin ignores this – I know he has his own “mission” with X-Plane…
We are not _ignoring_ 2020. But we aren’t _talking_ about our future plans either. The timing of the product releases is what it is – we don’t have control of when they ship.
Hi!
would the VR performance get a boost if there was an option to not render the computer screen when in VR? Or is the computer screen just a mirror from one of the VR screens?
I don’t think so – blitting the results to the companion window is very, very cheap.
Dear X-Plane team, silent user of X-plane here and been trying out the Betas since b9 or so. Love your work, please keep it up!
I have an issue I like to mention, not sure others have it and not quite sure if/how I can report it.
When using Vulkan on my PC during almost every flight at some point X-plane crashes (can be 1 minute in or 5 or 30), not a CTD but rather screen goes black, white noise from speakers and after a few seconds a spontaneous reboot. Problem is that there’s nothing (I can see) in the log file and also no crash-reports so how should I report this as a bug? BTW this opnly occurs using Vulkan, OpenGL runs fine (also the betas).
Fwiw I’m running on an AMD Ryzen7 3700X, 32GB RAM and Radeon RX 5700XT video card. Use the Zibo 737 and Simheaven Europe scenery.
I am suspecting the AMD GPU drivers, went back to 20.4.2 but it’s still happening.
Should I file a report and if yes, anything else besides the logfile to include?
Many thanks, Johan
Honestly, I don’t think there’s any value in reporting this – “Vulkan driver causes my computer to reboot” isn’t something we can do anything about, because we can’t reproduce that with our hardware.
Have you adjusted the clock rate of your AMD card?
Thanks Ben, haven’t changed anything (ootb settings) but I will double check. In your opinion that’s the direction to look to?
Many thanks!
Well, I had heard from AMD that they see major instability with AMD cards when they are overclocked – in particular with X-Plane, we weren’t pushing the cards in GL due to CPU-side slowness…so one might overclock the card and maybe not have as much trouble in Vulkan. OC is one of those things where if you have stability issues, it’s the first thing to back off of.
Ben,
no camera talk, I promised ( I cry inside but understand…)
The matter of “above matter” is to help heli pilots using SAR, lifting etc.
Could we instead have a distance-from-one-object-to-another ref then?
As eg. “distance from lifting hook to this user made object”?
That could even be shown as pure text (or with very simple graphics)?
Please imagine how this could be used for helicopter pilots in a lot of ways.
Not stealing FPS, (sounds) simple to implement, more for helicopter pilots to have fun with? 🙂
Dear X-plane team,
Beta14 worked fine for me. However, after updating beta 15 , fps dropped dramatically. With beta 15, xplane always turner off (no log was ever created) while loading the first time and it worked after a second attempt. With beta 16, things have gotten worst as every time I try to play it crashes and several reports have been sent by me. The only solution to continue playing (apart from reinstalling x plane) has been overwrite the x-plane.exe from the previous beta. I am sure you are working hard to solve these issues. Just a request. Would there be the possibility in the short future of being able to select the most stable beta for each user until a stable version comes to light?
I looked up your bug. The ivao_pilot pilot is crashing because it is creating and destroying instanced objects on a worker thread. I am trying to find the author to send them the back traces, but I don’t know who the dev is and they’re not in our dev-rel program.