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When we released X-Plane 11.51 beta 2 last week, we included up-to-date Aftermath support. Aftermath is an NVidia driver feature that catches detailed information when the GPU crashes (e.g. “device loss” crashes).

Full Aftermath debugging slows X-Plane down. The sim is still flyable, but you might go from 50 to 35 fps, for example. It’s noticeable, so we didn’t just turn Aftermath on for all eligible users. It’s too big of a perf hit to just leave it on all the time.

Unfortunately, while we know from auto-crash reporting that device loss errors are happening, we also know that no one is using Aftermath to capture detailed information that we could use to find and fix the potential problems in X-Plane.

So: if you hit device loss errors while flying with Vulkan on Windows with an NVidia card, please follow these instructions and run with Aftermath for a little bit. If you can drop us a few auto-crash-reports with Aftermath enabled, it could get us the key breakthrough we need to fix device losses.

Beta 3 Stuff

X-Plane 11.51 Beta 3 is here – here are the release notes. The most notable change is that we now have the new Gateway airports!

Tyler also fixed some low level networking bugs. This doesn’t change how multiplayer fundamentally works – if you can’t do a LAN flight across your WAN or you need command line magic to get the right NIC, that’s all still true and really not in the scope of what we’re fixing in 11.51. This whole beta run is targeted bug fixes.

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.

56 comments on “Help Us Find Those Devices”

  1. Hi Ben,

    I think the problem of users not running aftermath is threefold:

    – Most users don´t even know about this blog (amazing, isn´t it? 😉 and the option to run aftermath)
    – There are actually only very few that suffer device loss errors (certainly less than the outcry on certain forums suggests)
    – people don´t want to run with less fps, they rather would someone else do it and report the last remaining DLEs 😉 St.Florians principle at work.

    Cheers, Jan

    1. And most people with DLE don’t even read the forum on the .org either, looking at all the (almost) identical questions there with no search efforts upfront and just ‘complaining’ (was going to write a word starting with a ‘double u’ and a ending like the thing we do with christmas but I refrained)

      (And I had to ‘duckduckgo’ St Florians principle… S.E.P. right 😉 )

  3. I think it is important to write down which NV drivers might have the culprit.
    I use v452.06 and I don’t see these issues but they might not have the problem code to trigger it and therefore I and others won’t be able to assist.

    Cheers

  4. Any reason you’re only asking the users who have already experienced device loss errors? From that, you’re kinda saying you dont want _me_ to run with aftermath turned on.

    Is there value in asking everyone using nVidia (who take part in the beta) to run aftermath? By using betas, we are volunteering as testers anyway!

    1. Well, I figure if you’ve _never_ experienced a device loss error, it’s a bit of a fishing expedition to try now – 11.50’s been out a while, so you may have a stable system. Since we don’t know what causes them we don’t have a great sense of how likely they are to hit a particular user. But we -never- see them on our dev machines (annoyingly) which makes us think that maybe only a subset of users is affected and if you’ve never had them you’re in the lucky group.

      1. Did you already investigate the system sharing (virtual) memory (swap like) with the GPU, effectively giving it more than the technical VRAM? In some errors I saw in the logs in the forums on the .org it looks like a lot of (V)RAM trying to be reserved and it fails. So could it be that systems with no RAM available are going to swap and with no swap available or a slow disk or… suffer more than others… Just trying to help out

  5. I have aftermath turned on all the time now & I have experienced device loss errors in the past, though not so much with these betas. Fingers crossed I catch something with aftermath.

  6. When are you going to solve the “ugly” fog of the Horizon…?, the exclusive use of the 2nd core and therefore the micro-stuttering … That, above all that, penalizes the quality of this simulator, the micro stuttering, using a single core … In X Plane 12 … ??. Thanks for reading me, even if you don’t answer. Take heart with your “hard” work …

    1. “When are you going to solve […], the exclusive use of the 2nd core and therefore the micro-stuttering”

      On the OS I am using, there is no exclusive use of a single physical core by X-Plane. I see the X-Plane thread is hopping nicely between all eight available physical cores, from one to the next, and thus avoids thermally overloading a single core.

      I see no need for a fix because nothing is broken.

      1. We leave core selection to the OS – on one hand, if the OS can schedule us on a thermally cold core, that’s win, on the other hand, if we can not jump at high frequency and keep the caches hot, that’s a win too.

  7. Since upgrading to Big Sur, I’m experiencing visual frame dropping, but the fps display is indicating the usual amount. Is anyone else on Big Sur experiencing this? I am on a multi-monitor Hackintosh, so that’s certainly a factor, but was not experiencing this until Big Sur. Beta 1 (on Catalina) performed nominally, Beta 2 and 3 dropping frames under Big Sur.

    1. Yes, I’m having something like that too. Especially when panning I can see stutters that were not there before. But the fps count is the same as earlier.

      1. I’m going to try running latest Beta 3 off my final Catalina backup and see if things return to normal. I’m not positive it is actually dropping frames, but whatever is happening is creating a strobe effect on the motion. Again, fps reporting is identical to before.

      2. So, interesting results. After going back to latest Catalina OS running 11.51 Beta 1, no stutters. I then upgraded to Beta 3 and got the stutters, but the fps indicator was bouncing all over the place. Then rebooted in Big Sur, ran Beta 3 and got the stutters. I believe the fps indicator may be changing but significantly faster so it’s harder to pickup during a flight. So, in my small testing, there seems to be a step backwards in performance for Beta 3 on the Mac side.

    2. Yes, I had this issue too, on a 2017 iMac (3GHz i5, Radeon Pro 555 2GB). I have reverted to Catalina.

  8. Since I installed 11.51b3, I cannot start previous versions i.e. 11.50r3 anymore. It hangs at “Reading airports..”. Even 11.51r2 does not work.

    Do I have to create a bug report ?

    2. If you have them as separate installs, that’s totally weird. If you have the installs overlapping or shared in any way, that’s not surprising. We never have interop of the EXE with other versions of the resources.

      1. Oh, ok. I just keep a copy of the xplane.exe files and it seemed to have worked to run them for tests in the past.
        But if it „works as designed“ then it‘s fine with me 🙂

        1. Oh — yeah that’s totally not safe at all – the shaders in the folder are closely tied to the executable…definitely can’t mix and match.

    3. I guess you share the custom scenery folder between the two installs. If so, you can re-run the installer for 11.50r3 to overwrite the changes made by the 11.51b3 Installation in the custom scenery folder.

    4. Since 11.51 b3 I have frame drops down to 17 fps instead of 25-30 fps in the earlier version. Bottleneck is the cpu.

    1. Yep – same as with any other program taking command line options:
      Start it with the option of -h (or sometimes –help).

  12. Thanks for the continual improvements. Would adding a summary of this information to the loading screens reach more people? Even just pointing them to where they can follow instructions if they are experiencing DLEs might get more people using aftermath.

    1. You mean dynamically adding this information to existing releases? Might be a good thing!

  13. Hi Ben,

    I would love to be able to help. The issue is that I am running the latest builds of Windows 10 Pro, and when there is an issue, I get the Windows Crash report but not the X-plane crash reporter. I also don’t see any new files in the Output/crash reports directory in X-plane.

    Is there a workaround for this?

    regards
    Sudipta

  14. I’m using the Aftermath.bat file to launch XP and 2 of my last 3 flights have crashed with the Vulkan device loss error. Unfortunately, the auto-crash-report form has never appeared. I submitted bug reports through the bug reporting system and attached the diagnostic report and aftermath_1_gpu_crash_1.nv-gpudmp files. Are those still helpful for trying to diagnose the problem? Or is there something else I can submit when the auto-crash-report form doesn’t appear? Thanks.

  15. Since I installed 11.51b3 I have frame drops down to 17-18 fps. Before I had 25-30 fps with the ZIBO-737 or the JAR-A 320.

  16. I own a YAW VR motion simulator, just wondering if you have thought about sending RPM telemetry data for real-time vibrations at some point, per plane/heli? Is this something present in 3rd party addons already?

  18. Successfully ran a vanilla x-plane install on my hardware.

    In OpenGL, i get 29.9 fps ( limited in nvidia settings to 30 gps ) with objects at Max ( home airport korh, c-172), shadows on scenery, draw parked planes on, reflection detail high.

    With Vulkan, i get the same frame rate with objects set to medium. Same Flight. Bumping up objects to high or max causes GPU loss errors once i am sitting on the runway.

    Submitted crash reports with aftermath detail … good luck and good hunting. Happy to send more as you need it. Latest Win Pro build and Nvidia drivers.

  19. Hey Sputnik upgrade the sim graphics already MS is kicking your tail. We’re all tired of hearing “soon” and “we can’t unveil anything yet” or “after Vulkan is complete we will focus on that”. Hurry up honestly

      1. I know its not very Laminar atm, but you could throw some fuel on the fire and tease us a bit with what we could expect even if it ends up being another 3 years before we get it.
        If MS and Textron promising every button working like the real thing can yield comments like the above post launch, you could at least dig up and brush off that old water proof of concept and show us some decent trees.

        Let the marketing guy flex some more. If you wait too long all the fresh blood that got sucked in to flightsim will have given up waiting for MS to fix their ssss and moved on to waiting for cyberpunk 2077 to fix their ssss

        1. No shooting until we can see the whites of their eyes!

          Basically the marketing guys _do_ have a plan to show new stuff, but we also have tried to identify how far through the schedule we have to get before we do that so we don’t get WAY out ahead of putting things in people’s hands. This plan…may not work! But we have to at least TRY to have a good plan up front.

          1. This unfortunately seems to suggest you are still quite far away from releasing any substantial update. I’m hoping to be wrong, I usually am.

          2. It was 2016 for this one….
            https:/2016/10/developer-blooper-reel-water-world/

            Im not even saying go that far into the future.

            You guys should be seriously proud of what you have achieved with 11.50, the tools you have put in place to address not just problems like device loss errors that keep you up at night, but “simple” killer features like the plugins performance tab that helps users and 3PD understand more solvable problems.

            Im solid 60fps in VR now – in linux.

            You’ve nailed the hard stuff already, please shout about it a little more, and drop in some eye candy teasers for those that way inclined, its basically 2 years now since the last dev Q&A all these new eyes can see and you are soooo much further than this now.

            https://youtu.be/876QHy7t0rY

    2. Jose, If YOU are tired, that’s your problem, don’t speak for me also!
      I will wait as long as needed for making a very good sim even better.

      I’m sure I’m not the only one who can be patient for further improvement of X-Plane, a defiant “but I want to…” certainly doesn’t move the project forward.

      Ben, don’t be discouraged, you are doing a really good job.

  20. In my case removing the skunkworksupdater plugin from the plugins folder made the auto crash report form reappear.

  22. Hello. Please help me solve the problem.

    I am using the Steam version of X-Plane (the latest at the moment is 11.50). When I started X-Plane yesterday, I got a joystick error message: “Error reading joystick configuration (.joy) file: Xbox 360 Wired Controller – Windows.joy – unknown button …” This error appears every time immediately after starting the simulator (once and only before the initial menu screen). It does not interfere with work, but it is annoying.

    I do not and never have had XBox joysticks! I am using a Logitech joystick!

    • MD5 checksum of the specified file matches the checksum of the file from another copy of X-Plane on another PC, where there is no error.
    • Checking the integrity of files using Steam did not find any corrupted files.

    P.S. Before the error appeared, I did not change any X-Plane settings – the last launch was the most common and there were no errors or warnings …

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