Right – so I think your situation is typical.
– You’re trying to max EVERYTHING out.
– But the domain of “everything” goes well beyond what we shipped in the sim – the gateway artists have cranked up JFK, you’ve installed a third party aircraft, XPTG is adding stuff, etc.
At some point, your machine could no longer hit your FPS target while doing all of that stuff.

There’s no guarantee that the machine is even being used efficiently. People have taken plenty of shots at us for not using more cores for rendering (something that is a goal but not for 1150), and I know XPTG does do some multi-core work, but just by having add-ons from third parties there’s a risk that everyone sits on the same part of the computer.

In your case, the thing to do is to compare FPS at 4k vs 2k – it’s quite possible that the problem isn’t the 4K at all but is CPU side.

I can tell you one specific gotcha: scenery shadows and water reflections both _amplify_ the amount of geometry being drawn by max 3-d objects. So this is sort of the equivalent of having objects on “super high.” If you find that keeping the 4K but turning objects down gets FPS back, you can keep objects maxed out and back off on the shadows or reflections or both.

This issue of ‘how do we run on hardware X’ is not an issue on the iOS product – the product is sealed – no enhancements. So we know exactly what things cost and we can tune our own artwork to hit the perf we want. In other words, _we_ set the meaning of “max sliders” so we can just make the max _do less_ to hit FPS targets.

I’m also trying to understand the whole fps situation.
I have a gigabyte h310ma mobo, rtx 2080 super, i7-9700k, 32GB ddr4 2666mhz with 480GB SSD.
I might be wrong, but I think my pc should be able to handle b17 maxed out with little to no issues(pls do correct me if I’m mistaken). However, like many other users the fps drop never ceases to baffle me. At 4k resolution together with the toliss a321, traffic global, visual effects high(hdr), texture maximum, antialiasing fxaa, anisotropic filtering 1x, world objects max, reflection minimal, scenery shadows checked and vsync on, the fps drops to 23-25 fps at jfk airport with scattered clouds. But then at Amsterdam airport with the exact same setup, I get around 32-36 fps. If I bring the world objects down to high, in both scenarios I get about 10 extra fps. Once I’m above the clouds it’s smooth like cooking grease at 60 fps. I’ve also tried to tweek some 3D performance settings in nvidia controle panel but x plane seems to totally igore it and still do it’s own thing.
Is there any way to run xplane 11 at 4k with world objects at max and get at least 45 pfs as base?

Thanks for answering.

Oh uh…yeah. We expect that you’d be able to run older versions of X-Plane on an ARM mac under emulation. But we don’t know how well that will work and if it doesn’t, it’s not something LR would address (e.g. if the bug report is “v10 doens’t run on an ARM mac in emulation on Big Sur”, we’d be like “it wasn’t supposed to.” So we’ll have to see how it works when the tech is available.

That implementation of 3-d water never shipped because it had unsolved problems in _real_ test cases – it was a cool tech demo. We _do_ want to make water displacement real 3-d some day, and I expect to make my _third_ attempt at such a feature at some point.

I don’t think it would make a difference. Since our graphics abstraction is modern, we don’t have cases where we have to make a large number of small function calls to accomplish work, so the cost of the dynamic dispatch is quite small. If we did have a ton of HAL function calls to do stuff, we’d already be writing bad graphics code.

The run-time abstract interface dispatching gives us better code structuring than conditional compile I think.

Thanks Ben for sharing this.
You didn’t mention Rosetta 2, does it means that we won’t be able to emulate x plane x86 on arm ?

I agree! This is the BIGGEST improvement for b17 IMHO. Great job, team. 🙂