Today is the day. X-Plane 11.50 public beta 1 is now available for download to everyone. (Steam users: the beta is staged on the servers, and we’ll let it loose this afternoon if it isn’t setting people’s machines on fire.)
I want to extend my appreciation to the 50+ third party developers who participated in the eleven (!) private developer previews. This is probably the most complex single patch we have developed with regards to third party add-ons; their help testing and trouble-shooting issues was invaluable.
Like all public betas with the number “one” in the title, this is a very new, very untested beta; if you wish to try it, maybe keep your regular X-Plane install around. If you post in the comments that you got the beta and now you can’t fly and you are sad, probably the other commenters are just going to say “I told you so” a few hundred times.
Getting The Beta
Non-Steam users can get the update by running the installer, checking the “get betas” box, and running; Steam users will be able to get beta soon by picking public betas in the application properties.
If you can run X-Plane 11, you should be able to run X-Plane 11.50; if you have an old operating system or hardware, you may be stuck running X-Plane 11.50 with only OpenGL as the driver. Here’s a break-down of what you need to run with the Vulkan or Metal drivers:
Operating System:
- Mac users need 10.13 or newer.
- Windows users need Windows 10—we do not support Vulkan on Windows 7.(1)
- Linux users need a distro that can run reasonably recent proprietary NVidia or AMD drivers.
GPU Hardware (Windows and Linux):
- NVidia: GeForce 600 seres or newer
- Any GCN or newer AMD card (E.g. HD7000 series or newer)
GPU Hardware (Mac):
- Any GPU that comes with a Mac that can run 10.13 or newer or
- Any eGPU supported by Apple
- Hackintoshes: we have heard anecdotally that GeForce 10 series on a Hackintosh does work, but we do not have this hardware in the company, so YMMV.
Drivers (Windows and Linux):
- NVidia: 440.26 or newer
- AMD: 19.12.3 or newer
To run with Vulkan or Metal, there is a new check-box in the rendering settings screen – just check the box and restart. If Vulkan or Metal crashes on startup, we will turn the check-box off automatically so you are not locked out of X-Plane.
(1) In theory Vulkan should run on Windows 8, but our devs are all running Windows 10. If you have Windows 7, please update your OS – Microsoft isn’t security patching Windows 7, so it’s more than time.
The First Run Will Take a While To Load
For some users, the first time you start the sim in Metal or Vulkan you may see several extra minutes of load time while X-Plane compiles shaders. This will not happen every time you start the sim, so my advice is: get a beverage appropriate to the time of day and let the sim load.
What you’re seeing is shaders compiling. X-Plane 11.40 compiled shaders while you flew, resulting in stutters. Try this in 11.40: start the sim cold and dark at night, and turn on the battery and landing light. Feel those stutters? That’s the sim going “oh noes, I need the terrain shader with the landing light now”.
X-Plane 11.50 loads every shader it could need up front during preload of scenery, but that’s a lot of combinations. On the first load, the compiled shaders are saved to a disk cache, so load times will be back to normal the next time around.
We are working to make the first load faster, but because it’s a one-time thing it didn’t seem like a good reason to keep everyone out of the beta.
Will My Add-Ons Work?
First, we expect every add-on that does not use undocumented hacking to “just work” in OpenGL – if you find this is not the case, please report a bug.
We expect most add-ons to just work in Vulkan and Metal; we are keeping a list in the release notes of add-ons that we know do not work and require an update from the developer.
Please go easy on your third party developers – in some cases they will need to update code that has “just worked” for over a decade, and the author of a popular add-on will probably hear from users about updating to Vulkan hundreds of times a day. Some add-on authors are part-time or have day jobs, so as a community we will need to be patient.
Third party developers: we should have public docs and an SDK update by the end of the week with complete info about 11.50, but if you were not in the developer preview program and want to dig in now, ping us.
I Found A Stutter!
While we have made tremendous progress with stutters compared to X-Plane 11.41, I can tell you that as of 11.50 beta 1, we are not done, because Sidney is working on fixes for stutters that did not make the first public beta.
The good news is, we’ve reached a point where we can identify and kill stutters in a straight-forward manner – it’s never just “dark matter in the OpenGL driver” anymore. We also have tools built into the sim to collect stutter reports from users – we’ll help you use that once we kill off the remaining known ones (which appear to be in Windows itself – that’s how far we’ve come).
I Found A Bug!
The release notes do list some known bugs, some of which we already have fixed for an upcoming beta 2. If you find something you think is a bug, please file it. Commenting about the bug here, emailing us, and discussing it on a forum do not count! If you file it, it goes into our tracking system so we don’t lose it.
Thank you Ben & team. Going to give it a whirl by the weekend & install a 2nd x-plane copy.
2 questions:
1) what benefits should be very easily noticed? fps, stutters ( to a degree), graphics settings capability? I am on Mac
2) are any new art assets like LA or St Louis included? If not when?
thanks
If you’re on a Mac, you should see better FPS if you are not GPU limited and less stutters all around.
No new art – new art will be in a separate release so it isn’t over-shadowed by Vulkan/Metal. We _will_ push new airports in the next few weeks during the 11.50 run.
Ok, thanks for the info Ben. Stay well to the team & family.
I would like to express my frustration for the beta release to happen ONE DAY after April 1st. You`ve just missed a huge oportunity to mess with a lot of people.
Never forget.
🙂
I feel you…we had multiple discussions about this, including whether to either ship on 4/1 or announce on 4/1 that we were shipping on 4/2, which would have been fantastic.
As it turns out, we sort of dodged a bullet. On 4/1 while prepping the beta, I discovered that the latest Catalina update (out about a week) that we hadn’t tried yet actually destabilized the Metal version, and we jammed a work-around in at the 11th hour. If we had shipped on 4/1, we would have shipped with “crashes on AMD + metal + latest Catalina 100% of the time”, which isn’t great.
Very disappointing that Win7 and 8.1 are not supported by LR although they and Nvidia are supporting Vulkan.
Win7 is still getting updates (ESU).
ESU for Win 7? Didn’t that end in January?
It probably does work on 8.1? The main thing is we _know_ Vulkan does not work on Win7, and I can’t sanely tell my devs to delay real work to go build a win 7 dev machine from scratch to go look at it.
The normal updates for home users ended in January. Until January 2023 there will be also ESU updates (for paying customers, but there are alternatives for home users). Win8.1 gets regulary support until January 2023.
11.50b1 with Vulkan is crashing on Win7 , but Win7 and Nvidia drivers support Vulkan (e.g. the new DOOM Eternal only supports Vulkan but also runs officially on Win7).
LOG says (driver is 442.50 with Vulkan 1.1.119):
0:00:00.000 E/GFX/VK: Failed to allocate from memory index. Requirements: { 8847360, 1024, 82 }
0:00:00.000 E/GFX/VK: Used memory type index: 7 (DEVICE_LOCAL_BIT (1))
0:00:00.000 E/GFX/VK: Memory heap Usage: 33579008. Budget: 8470331392
0:00:00.000 E/GFX/VK: Encountered error: VK_ERROR_OUT_OF_DEVICE_MEMORY
…
0:00:00.000 E/SYS: | Failed to allocate a GPU buffer
…
0:00:00.000 E/SYS: | (gfx_vk_memory_controller.cpp:354)
It would be ok if support for 7 and 8.1 comes later (maybe with 11.51 or so). Can be also unofficially, but it should work. Anything else would be disappointing for me since I’m very curious about the new texture management. As you know X-Plane can’t get enough VRAM. 😉
BTW: Win7 has still 26% market share.
P.S.: could you contact me per mail? I’ve a question about LODs. I tried to contact the support on the XP11 homepage in January and made a bug report in February, but never got an answer.
I’ll look for your help-scout ticket re: LOD…we’re really backed up in dev support tickets right now but I’ll try to get to it.
For what it’s worth, Windows 7 is sitting at about 4.8% of X-Plane Windows users… compared to 93.0% Windows 10.
Seriously? You wait until not to drop this little gem? If you knew that Windows 7 would not be supported, or even run, don’t you think it would have been nice to inform people in the months BEFORE the long awaited release?!
To be honest with you, we didn’t know Windows 7 was broken until about a week ago when a tester reported it. We don’t test on Windows 7, it’s out of the update cycle from Microsoft and it’s highly recommended to upgrade. I understand that many people believe that Windows 7 was the last good OS, and I completely understand privacy concerns with regards to Windows 10. That being said though, it’s an outdated OS with no security updates unless you pay for them and the user base is vanishing fast. The fact is, yes, Vulkan the standard supports Windows 7. However, Windows 7 comes with an old WDDM version and different GPU memory management behaviour. And unfortunately that different behaviour is not compatible with how we wrote our Vulkan implementation, and without a test system on a dev machine we can’t even begin to figure out what’s going wrong.
And, to be clear, Windows 7 is still supported in OpenGL mode.
@Tyler Young
I think you have your data from the optional telemetry data sent in XP11. I can only speak for me, I deactivated it and I think the chance that a Win7 user deactivates it is higher than a Win10 user. 😉
And what about Linux users? They are a very small group since years but you support them.
The worldwide marketshare of Win7 is constant since several months. As of April 2020 it’s 26%. In October 2019 it were 27%. So the vanishing is much slower than many expected.
There are several possibilities for home users to get security updates. So for security reasons there is no need to switch to Win10 if you use this possibilites. And of course you can use Win7 and XP11 offline (my notebook is most of the time offline).
We are not going to support Vulkan on Windows 7. That is not a good use of our dev time.
I can’t think of a reason not to update to Win10, honestly…
I was at the RSA Conference iN San Fran a few weeks back and Microsoft were unnerved by people asking why they are “giving up” Win 7. Because even they don’t have enough developers to cover every iteration they have in the field.
Move to Win 10, smile more and be happy its a supported OS 🙂
Thanks for the beta – I expected update to be a long and slow process but took only a minute or so 😀
Anyway just a quick initial feedback – just tried two identical runs – first without vulcan and second one with vulcan render enabled.
My initial experience is – to my surprise – that I had much less stutter with vulcan disabled. Strangely the framerate counter indicated 60-90 fps all the time but screen seemed like low framerate in the 20th fps region. Will experiment more and report back.
Rig is: I7-8700@5Ghz on all cores, 32GB Ram, GTX1080 8GB, WIN 10.
All the best 🙂
Did you try with Vsync on too?
Hi – yes that made little to no difference.
I have tested a bit more and the strange comon thing between VULKAN / NO VILKAN with all other parameters the same shows a much higher frame rate with VULCAN enabled (53 to 85 in air with NO cockpit) and (24 to 30 on ground with cockpit enabled) so definately a huge improvement there!!
But its visually MUCH more stuttering in a very “fine grained” way (dont know how to express this in another way) with VULKAN enabled. So even though the framerate are significatly improved the actual experience is much more stuttering and far from the normal fluid experience!
btw running in 2560×1440 resolution fullscreen
I have somewhat similar experience (3950x/2020Ti/64GB Linux). Lowest and average frame rates are much higher with vulkan, but every few seconds it stops for a second (fps = zero) then goes back up to 30. GL is much slower on average, but doesn’t have those large hiccups.
Also there’s an annoying 1-second lag between mouse input and action on screen (menu and flight), but that’s probably linux-specific.
Fantastic work guys, just updated and tried it, I had a huge amount of stutters when Vulkan was activated, but don’t see this as a complain, I didn’t had any time for debugging so far, it might have something to do with one on my plugins..
I’ll work on disabling some of them tonight and trying to tune it and let you know.
But again, Thank you very much for this…
If I am running 2 pc’s networked together, (1 for visuals and 1 for instruments) do both pc’s have to be running 11.50 or can I just run the visuals pc in 11.50 and not the other in 11.4?
Both have to run 11.50 – we don’t support mixing versions, ever.
Ok thanks.
Thanks for the FREE update guy’s, look very good to me at this point.
Now BREATH……
Stay safe
Sadly I just get a black screen when it loads with the Vulkan settings box ticked. Left it for half and hour and still black screen (I realise it would take a few minutes anyway).
Log txt stops at: 0:00:00.308 I/GFX: Loaded archive Resources/shaders/bin/spv/light.xsa with hash: d9a21cdc3e8c958a8744231f26bef321
I have a GTX 770. Works fine with OpenGL setting. Latest Nvidia drivers downloaded and no additional plugins. A Vanilla version of XP. Can’t think what has going wrong. Anyone else had this problem? Will file a bug unless someone points out I am missing something obvious
Many thanks
Upkeep
Had this problem twice as well. Now after updating my driver, XP is just about to load – we’ll see. I’m using a GTX 1060.
My Nvidia driver is up to date. Trying yet again (now 25 minutes after start – black screen) and still sticks in the same place. Tried redownloading all shaders. Made no difference. Perhaps Ben might have an idea what is going wrong. Will be interesting to see if you can get it to load at all. Perhaps the GTX 770 is not good enough. Not sure if this is a bug or my spec?
Regards Upkeep
Can load it now, yes. Perhaps your VRAM is too low?
I am also getting it, and i have a GTX 760.
There are also some reports on the org forums of others having the same problem with nvidia cards. I have checked and Vulkan supports the GTX 770 so it should have been ok. Laminar have not responded yet to this post so I will need to file a bug I think.
Also having this problem. Seems like I can click on things in the menu but I can’t see them. I’ve got a GeForce GTX 960 w/ the latest drivers.
GTX 960M here as well, same black screen issue. Weird.
I have the same error, in OpenGL everything without problems, my graphics are a little older, GTX660TI. Black screen and nothing else happens.
Driver: 440.65
OS: Linux
Did you update your graphic drivers to the latest ones maybe the issue
Pure love for you folks.
Already gave it a nice testrun and as an AMD fanboy this is super awesome. Literally doubled my framerate in most places and way less stutter.
Now I jumped from being GPU limited to CPU limited 😀
System is R5-3600 and a 5700XT on Win10
Wait, do you mean you went frmo being CPU limited to GPU limited? Either way it should be faster. 🙂
CPU time per frame dropped from 0.03 to .04 to steady 0.03 and even below that on the outside view.
GPU time per frame dropped from 0.026 to .028 ish to 0.009 to .01 ish
So GPU improved nearly by factor 3 !!!!11eleven. I knew AMDs OpenGL stack on Win was not the best, but not that it was THAT bad. 😀
CPU may very well be limited by slow RAM. The new one is on its way as I write.
CPU load seems to be a bit higher on 4/6 cores (same for the HT ones so 8/12 w/HT)
GPU load is less then 50% and I don’t have the exact numbers but if I recall that correctly its actually less then with OpenGL. So whatever you do in Vulcan is seems to be more efficient then what OpenGL did in the driver 🙂
And yes. Way faster. And smoother.
Thanks so much keeping up the platform and hardware agnostic approach and supporting open APIs.
Oh, Vulkan is *much* faster for us AMD users, pretty much a doubling of the frame rates throughout … https://imgur.com/9OcpREE
I have a three monitor setup with the monitors normally running 4k. When I then try to start up X-plane, it looks fine for about one second until the screen resolution is changed, as I have X-plane setup to run at 1080p. Then my center screen goes black and my side monitors shows the windows desktop.
What seems to happen is that when the screen resolution, all three windows started by X-plane gets placed on top of each other on the center screen, because I can see three windows when I click on X-plane in the taskbar. Two black and one with the menu thumbnail. However, when I try to select the one with the menu thumbnail, x-plane is often killed by Windows for not responding.
I have to try starting X-plane, often up to 10 times, before I finally get to play.
I assume I am not the only one with this problem. Has this been fixed with Vulcan?
I have a somewhat similar experience with 3 monitors: with OGL, the interior of the C172 is black, except for the yoke), as well as a band at the top of the screen, on center and left monitors, while the right monitor renders correctly (I filed a bug report, but mistakenly stating that the left monitor also rendered correctly). I then switched to Vulkan and saw the same thing and was about to file a second bug report when I decided to relaunch to check something first and the problem was not there. I have since gone back and forth between OGL and Vulkan with the same results: no problem with Vulkan but black interior on 2/3 screens in OGL.
AHH help me! i cant start xplane 11.50 im getting an error code :0xc0000142
what have i done wrong?
I also got that. If you haven’t already, try installing a second compy, but only install a small amount of scenery.
i have just deleted all .dll files in xplane and then it worked
Yes. A clean install is probably the best way to make sure (for the most part) you know xp 11.50 likes your hardware *and OS. And ofc this obviously avoids messing up your main sim setup.
Just run 11.50 as vanilla as possible (do your first flight in a stock airplane) then add add-ons one by one.
Error loading the file:
0:00:00.000 E/SYS: | Resources/shaders/bin/terrain_mapping.xsv
0:00:00.000 E/SYS: | X-Plane cannot run without this file!
0:00:00.000 E/SYS: | See the Log.txt file for detailed error information.
0:00:00.000 E/SYS: | (gfx_shader_module.cpp:119)
Got this message in the Log.txt after the update failed. Can someone help me?
Vast improvement and good timing. Well done guys!
Will Vulkan change how different components are utilized (aka. X-Plane doesn’t handle more CPU cores very good. Does Vulkan change that?
Vulkan does require more multicore time to do background paging, and uses less single core time cuz it’s faster. But we don’t do a multi-core frame render yet.
Is the multi-core frame render a feature for the near future?
No. Future, yes. Not super near. We’ll take incremental steps to get there – in some ways, 11.50 is a first step in that a ton of things that used to be stutters are now multi-core. All new code is multi-core aware at this point.
Any guidance on what NVIDIA settings to use in the NVIDIA control panel? Low latency mode, Threaded optimization, etc.?
We do not have guidance on this – threaded optimization should not matter or affect Vulkan so it’s no longer a big deal.
Are there any new “rules” for finding the optimum graphics settings now? What is the best strategy nowadays?
The big differences are:
– Reflections slider is recalibrated – it’s less expensive. You can get some without killing fps.
– The sim can manage texture memory to some extent – you might get away with a higher setting but if you get out of VRAM messages, turn it down.
– Shadows cost less on Mac (now compares to Windows) scenery shadows should be fine on modern high-end Macs.
Holy CRAP. This is screaming on my iMac, 40-60 fps with shadows, objects maxed, graphics pulled back just one (no SSAO, though I’ll try with that). Oh whoops, lying SSAO is on?!?!?! — all with a 90 degree field of view at 2560×1440. Most importantly, f-sim of omgwtf, with 16 planes and 4 flight models per frame… WHAT
I do have a couple “bugs” to note.
1. Clouds are no longer entirely transparent during night, making it easier for me to crash into things.
2. The sun knows where the horizon is now, and changes color appropriately. This is weird.
3. The sun looks like a star now, not a yellow light in the sky. I am stuck inside avoiding coronavirus so I can’t verify.
(Thanks! You guys rock!)
Same here on my iMac, almost pulled my face off with the huge leap in FPS! I had to blow the dust off the shadow checkbox and visual settings sliders (thought they may have been rusted in place after all these years) and lo and behold it’s still screaming at 50+.
Thanks guys 🙂
If I install this in a separate program directory (to keep a non-beta X-Plane ready), would I be able to use the shortcut method to use my main install’s scenery and plugins? It’d be handy to be able to A/B test the two installs apples-to-apples, without duplicate copies of all my resources.
We don’t promise you can link everything – depends on the kind of link you use. Aliases work for custom scenery.
I was able to use Windows mklink /D to make a directly link from my beta install “Customer Scenery” to my non beta “Custom Scenery” and all my ortho and other custom stuff showed up in the beta just fine.
Astonishing framerate improvement! I was expecting a significant bump in framerate but wow! I’ve only had a chance for a 15 min flight around my area in the stock C172 but in OpenGL I would see 45-60 fps. Under Vulkan I’m seeing 100-120 fps sustained. Buttery smooth, too. I’ll put it through a more rigorous test this evening to see where there might be problems but the first impression is very favorable in my system. Well done LR!
My system: Arch Linux, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, 32 Gb RAM, Vega 56 8 Gb, Open Source drivers (yes I know, not officially supported but XP11 runs perfectly), everything updated to latest stable versions.
Thank you Laminar and Ben !
No stutters at all!! but many blurred ground textures..?
Graphic settings same as prior the update
Can I do something to fix that?
Moreover to add something…on the texture slider it says it only uses 350-400 mb when usually it was around 3gb
File it please.
Hey!
I have my textures on max in settings but I am getting some very low texture quality in game. On the aircraft and scenery. I also have Vysnc on but it makes my frames go above 100fps. I uninstalled every plugin and I am only using custom scenery with everything else in XPlane as default.
My specs are i7-8700k, RTX 2080 (NOT ti), and 32GB Ram. What should I do?
Also, there was a couple times where I would open up Xplane and even load into a location with just ocean. The frames would say like 150 but It was acting like I had 0.5 FPS, not just a normal stutter. Thanks!
Can someone give me a brief overview of what’s new in this update? I’m excited but I don’t know what’s coming. Thanks.
Should we expect a performance loss when going back to OpenGL?
I’m finding the frames for my test scenario drop down to very low levels, noticeable when facing dense autogen.
In my copy of 11.41 i’m getting double the frames in OpenGL
If this isnt expected i’ll send in a bug report.
There could be a small loss with GL in some cases, but it should be like 1-5%, not big enough to hit “very low levels”.
Did a quick comparison, about 10% gain in FPS on the same settings I used before in 1 scenario only (inc ortho xp). Less shutters but hard to put a statistic on this.
Sometime it does not load but it is a beta1 release so taking that into account with further improvements to follow, we should definitely see a benefit of this!
Keep it up LR!
System:
AMD 3700x
2080Super
32GB RAM
Overall this is running great (~30fps gain) on Manjaro+Nvidia 2060super+Ryzen3600X but I do have an issue that I am not sure is a bug.
I have two monitors, a primary 1440p monitor and a secondary 1080p monitor. Whenever the secondary monitor is turned on, even with nothing displayed on it and nothing running but x-plane itself, there is severe input lag from controls and mouse and occasional crashes. There does not seem to be an FPS penalty for having it on.
This could be a system configuration issue and I am working on finding what the issue may be, but if you believe this may be a bug I will be glad to gather as much information as possible and file it as such.
The steam update is taking too long.
“proprietary NVidia or AMD drivers.”
What a joke, I won’t touch the proprietary drivers with a 10 foot pole… step up your game. There is no reason you can’t make this work with the open source drivers as they are superior it the proprietary ones in most respects at this point with very few exceptions. If anything the open source driver developers have bent over backwards to work with companies like yourself.
Agree, I use open source AMD drivers with almost latest kernel and Debian, Vulkan works flawlessly for other games but XPlane 11.50b1 crashes with unspecific Vulkan error in the log. Is this because I’m using the standard kernel AMD driver?
Let me be clear about what I mean by proprietary drivers here, because the sands have shifted. What I mean is “the driver from the IHV themselves.” That meant full proprietary a while ago, but now AMD is I think half open half proprietary? Anyway, I can’t say why it’s not working for AMD, my Linux install is pretty borked and I can’t re-install because it has the tool chain to compile the SDK.
Looking forward to the new SDK. Not getting the 3D callbacks is potentially a problem – the reason I’m using those in Traffic Global is because the the datarefs for MVP matrices are only valid during 3D callbacks because they vary per monitor. I need these to detect what’s on-screen rather than to draw on it.
I trust there’s a way of getting MVP matrices per window via datarefs now?
YES! You can get the 3-d matrix from 2-d for ‘coach marks’. This is addressed in 11.50 – we should have docs “real soon now” ™.
i7-3770 with RX590…jumped from low 20s fps at MEH settings to around 40fps with WOOHOO settings on 1080p. And yes, those are the technical terms I’m going with. I did have the application crash on me after starting a 3rd flight without restarting the application, I’ll see if I can reproduce that one before filing anything.
Windows Mixed Reality, HP reverb, Latest WMR+Steamvr. Win10 pro build1909.
Hardware: i7 7700, Gtx1080TI, 32GB DDR4, Xplane on m2 SSD
Settings: All graphics to Minimal (but I tried medium/various combinations all with the same result). Steam Rendering resolution at 50% (1500×1500)
Game loads and runs fine in menu. Hovering around 1.5-2.5ms/11ms in main menu per steamvr developer overlay.
Load up LGA flight. Steamvr overlay shows 3ms/11ms frametime but in game itself is incredibly stuttery. Its like its rendering at 10-20fps despite steamvr reporting it should be butter smooth. Doesn’t matter if I’m in Vulkan or Opengl mode.
No issues with 99% of other VR games I’ve run.
I am seeing more or less the same problems with the reverb, Gtx2080Super and an i9
I also dusted off my old Samsung Odyssey just in case it was reverb-specific and get the same result.
Just tried the FPS tests and difference between 11.41, 10.50 opengl and 10.50 vulkan.
X-plane Loves AMD now.
11.41 4k 72.49 63.82 53.27 26.47 17.39 21.27
10.50b1 4k 73.37 68.11 55.34 38.46 26.27 35.07
10.50b1 4k vulkan 139.49 123.64 92.08 64.13 46.66 60.93
increase 4k 1.20% 6.30% 3.74% 31.18% 33.80% 39.35%
increase 4k vulkan 73.14% 72.66% 54.23% 72.34% 70.68% 80.94%
I have an 8 yr old iMac with 2GB video that can run with Metal. So far it is worse than OpenGL. I know it is an old computer but I was expecting a little better FPS, It also crashed when I slid the texture slider from the lowest to one notch up. Missing shader. just filed a bug report.
Thank you all and congratulations on a truly outstanding job.
Well done guys, you delivered.
Xplane is running smooth as silk for me now and I’ve got a nice boost in frames as well. It was unplayable for me before so thank you all for your hard work.
Keep safe and have a beer or two, you deserve it.
No Win 7 support, I guess that is the end of XPLANE for me,. I did hope but never even thought. Best of luck. I have no confidence in MS sorry.
Wait, it’s only Vulkan that doesn’t support Windows 7. X-Plane OpenGL still supports Windows 7 and we don’t intend to change that one bit.
Cools so I have some hope
Have you considered Upgrading to linux?
(This applies to windows 10 users to.)
If you refuse to take updates you can’t really complain you didn’t receive the updates that were offered.
I actually think it might be a reasonable idea to make windows the minimum required OS and linux/mac the “recommended” OS’s.
WOW, X-plane is loading much quicker now!
Since I use a lot of orthophoto scenery, loading used to take a good 15-20 minutes, now it loaded in just 30-40 seconds.
Still difficult to find configurations that achieve over 18 FPS with Orthofoto and X-Europe scenery on a machine with an 2080 TI and Ryzen 3950x CPU, however…
When changing the graphics settings back and forth a few times mid flight, X-plane suddenly stopped rendering correctly. Just producing something that could look like a very fine mesh of black and brown lines. I am sure many others have reported it already..
Anyway, great work!
Could be a coincidence – orthophotos are often heavily influenced by the disk cache – if you go from 15-20 mins to 30-40 seconds, the one case I’ve seen is second load of an ortho on a non-SSD….
Hmm, I have all of X-plane and the scenery are stored on a pair of Corsair Force MP600 M.2 NVMe SSD PCIe 4.0 disks, so I don’t think the read from the disks have ever been the bottleneck.
That’s weird – I’d never expect that kind of slow load then….
This is crazy! Feels like a new game.
Smooth as butter. Never bevor have I reached a frame rate of 60-70 fps.
You deserve all our loyalty!
Getting a lot of CTD’s now. Removing one plugin after the after. I think it might be helpful if people would report plugins which do not work with Vulcan. Also, any preference for the Nvidia driver?
You might want to start with a CLEAN install and add things in….
Latest is always greatest! We have an outstanding bug report with them that can negatively affect Ryzen performance in some cases. I expect a fix for this to land in one of the next drivers given that it landed in the developer beta driver today. The driver guys constantly tweak the drivers and improve their performance, so I would definitely recommend to stay as current as possible.
Reading that the librain plugin is not compatible with Vulcan. Does that mean that it negatively affects the sim even if an airplane without librain is loaded?
I can’t say with any certainty whether a _particular_ plugin is hurting FPS if it’s around and not compatible…I can say in general that plugins that are incompatible with Vulkan because they depend on the old 3-d callbacks have no negative impact on perf because the old callbacks are ignored. But a plugin could, in that unexpected situation, go off the rails so anything is possible.
So cool to get an individual response. You guys are really great. That’s what I call a community.
Hi,
I’m not sure if it is a bug or something else but I can’t see any usage of GPU. No matter what I change It shows 0.00. When I maximize the graphic setting it also stays 0.00 but frame rate drops.
My computer is iMac 2019, i5, 40GB Ram, pro580x.
This is a work-around – GPU counters are broken in a number of places in Metal so they had to be turned off.
Thank you. Have I said thank you? Thank you. X-plane 11.50 makes my triple screen setup look incredible. No more side screen warping, I can run each monitor separately now and it just looks great. Thank you……have I said thank you?…….Thank you.
Wow, the performance increase was larger than I expected for an Intel CPU + Nvidia GPU rig especially at higher settings of graphics details.
Here are results from running –fps_test. The values are “,”.
Alienware Aurora R8 i9600k, 16GB RAM, RTX 2070,1920×1080:
v11.41r1 2020-03-23T15:14:03, 1,101.34, 2, 93.09, 3, 80.26, 4,47.18, 5,36.50, 54,42.64
v11.50b1 2020-04-02T16:55:24, 1,132.10, 2,122.23, 3,102.43, 4,77.41, 5,62.25, 54,73.51
11.50b1 has achieved parity between AMD and Nvidia GPUs.
Read this for directions about how to contribute your results.
https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/71725-x-plane-benchmark-charts-fps-tests/
Results are at the bottom of this spreadsheet.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15rNa7_naUM8a4YzzrzwrxvWSl4X8SHesshZGm7H54AI/pubhtml
The executable won’t start, neither by double-clicking on the .app nor by launching it directly from terminal (Killed: 9). 10.14.6 on a 2017 Retina iMac 5k
If you are on Mojave or Catalina try a reboot. Our installer doesn’t tickle the system security and code-signing gunk in just the right way, so it gets killed as malware until you reboot and purge the caches. A future installer will work around this.
Not for 7 ?
Well that’s a bummer.
AMD Linux wont work as well.
Kinda defeats the purpose for me.
Honestly didn’t expect LR of all people to push me towards W10.
We’re pushing you toward “not windows 7”.
OpenGL version still works on Win 7.
If you want to enjoy new tech features, your OS must be up to date. It`s basics.
But according to specs vulcan does run on win 7 its even installed on my machine, it might even work if we can get past the memory allocation bug. As for latest tech, I work in the broadacst industry, and the latest tech is the most difficult to maintain and repair, and never lasts as long, we have transmitters that are 30 years old, replacing them with units we be lucky to get 10 years out of. But I digress, opengl will do at least i can fly til ltha tgets broken.
I want to be clear here: the issue is _not_ whether X-Plane VK on XP7 is _possible_. It probably is with enough elbow greese.
The question is whether I should divert Sidney from fixing Vulkan/Metal bugs for everyone and working on the things that come after Vulkan to go set up a new Win7 machine so that we can debug Vulkan on an OS that almost no one is using, fewer people will use in the future, and that has no future.
cheers
Ben
I’m getting higher frame rates, but with the same settings as OpenGL I keep running out of VRAM.
Specs are:
i7-7700HQ, 2.8GHz
16Gb RAM
NVidia 1050Ti 2Gb (important)
I usually run with texture quality set to Medium and have zero issues with the Toliss A319 and the Rotate MD-80 in OpenGL mode.
At LOWI, with Vulkan, I reached 42fps in cockpit, 59fps outside it… but then when I started looking around the cockpit it just bombed out and gave me an “Out of VRAM” message.
Disappointing to be honest, as it’s unpredictable – the sim was only showing 837Mb textures loaded, and it was butter smooth – then… bam.
3 times now, at different airports.
Hopefully those of us with lower VRAM cards will get a better experience soon 🙂
Forgot to mention – this is with both the Rotate MD80 and the FFA350
The sim’s texture use does in the UI _not_ show the whole picture – there’s other stuff using VRAM and the _add-ons_ use VRAM too, which really makes things complex.
Absolutely.
I know that 2Gb VRAM is a small amount – but I feel like it’s worth pointing out that I never have problems with OpenGL with the exact same settings.
Additionally, before the crashes, Vulkan is running brilliantly. Frame rate increase, the image quality seems nicer (smoother aliasing?) and zero stuttering.
But yes – then the VRAM error appears all of a sudden.
In case it helps, here is my Log output of the relevant bits:
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: ——————————————
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Information for generic allocations:
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Info for heap: 0
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Block count: 22, allocation count: 2963
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Used bytes: 941813760, unused bytes: 379350016
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Info for heap: 1
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Block count: 12, allocation count: 7174
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Used bytes: 899918080, unused bytes: 945575680
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: ——————————————
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Information for custom dedicated allocations:
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Info for heap: 0
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Block count: 8, allocated bytes: 147961856
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Info for heap: 1
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Block count: 0, allocated bytes: 0
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: ——————————————
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Cached budget:
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Info for heap: 0
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Budget: 1764133683, usage: 2167373824
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Info for heap: 1
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Budget: 7693114982, usage: 1500106752
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: ——————————————
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Budget information:
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Info for heap: 0
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Budget: 1764133683, usage: 2167373824
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Info for heap: 1
0:09:40.584 I/GFX/VK: Budget: 7693114982, usage: 1500106752
0:09:40.584 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: X-Plane has failed to allocate sufficent GPU memory.
0:09:40.584 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: There is not enough VRAM available on your system to run with the current settings.
0:09:40.584 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: We can not finish loading and will quit.
0:09:40.584 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: Try running X-Plane with lower rendering settings.
0:09:40.584 E/SYS: MACIBM_alert: C:/jenkins/design-triggered/source_code/app/X-Plane-f/../../core/gfx/gfx_memory_controller_backend.cpp:228
0:09:40.863 I/MEM: Entered regular memory pressure state
0:09:58.211 E/SYS: +——————————————————————————-
0:09:58.211 E/SYS: | X-Plane has failed to allocate sufficent GPU memory.
0:09:58.211 E/SYS: | There is not enough VRAM available on your system to run with the current settings.
0:09:58.211 E/SYS: | We can not finish loading and will quit.
0:09:58.211 E/SYS: | Try running X-Plane with lower rendering settings.
0:09:58.211 E/SYS: | (gfx_memory_controller_backend.cpp:228)
0:09:58.211 E/SYS: +——————————————————————————-
0:09:58.211 D/STM: Transitioning from state state_Normal to state_ShuttingDown
Massive improvement on my AMD 3600X, 5600XT. Quick trip around the patch shows nearly double the framerate I was getting. Silky smooth too.
The GUI looks a little different (fuzzy?) as do the text labels on the aircraft switches. Maybe I need to bump my sliders up one more notch to max.
The most exciting fix for me personally is… I can finally “Alt-Tab” back to items open on my desktop. Haven’t been able to do it on my AMD GPU no matter how hard I tried.
Thanks guys! Great work!
Can’t thank you guys enough for all the work you’ve invested in X-Plane to get here, good *lord* the sim is zippy now. Can confirm the new beta works with Metal on a Hackintosh in High Sierra. With maxed out settings in Seattle demo area and the MD-80 loaded up I’m at 48 fps with 2560×1440 resolution. Quick snippet of the log.txt below:
macOS: Version 10.13.6 (Build 17G8037)
CPU type: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9700K CPU @ 3.60GHz CPU speed (mhz): 3600 Bus speed (mhz): 100 RAM (MB): 32768
X-System folder:’/Simulator/X-Plane 11/’, case sensitive=0
0:00:00.000 I/GFX/MTL: Discovered Metal device: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, Metal. Score: 20
Selected device:
Metal Device : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
If a future update _braeks_ your hackintosh, please _do_ file a bug. We don’t have this hardware in the company, so if we accidentally break something that used to work it’d be useful to know.
Congratulations Ben and the whole XP team. We love you guys and that is why even if MSFS2020 is fantastic there will be minimal or no drift away from XP. I for one feel a deep sense of appreciation and loyalty towards you guys and XP. Using business jargon, you have built up very considerable goodwill! Cheers.
Ben –
I’m seeing miraculous improvement in FPS for a given configuration on my 3600X and 5700XT. Whereas I was previously a bit disappointed by having to reduce graphics settings to maintain a smooth FPS, I’m now getting 60+ FPS with higher-detail settings and (3 screens, vs. 1), even with some orthophotos and HD mesh in the terrain-y Sedona AZ. Simply amazing work.
I do have one bug that I’m curious about: my 3-monitor setup has dissimilar sizes and resolutions: I run 24″ 1080p monitors on either side of a 27″ 4K monitor that I usually fly at 1440p.
The issue is that, with my center monitor configured for 1440p, I only get a 1080p display area in the bottom-left corner of that monitor. Other non-1080 resolutions have the same issue. I have to set the center-monitor’s resolution to also be 1080p in order to fill the whole display.
Good lord ben, I went from 24/25 fps at DDs KLGA on a hackintosh with vega64 to 55/60. This will open up some doors X-Plane fur sure.. Thanks to all for the hard work
(edited for language)
Tim, sorry man, you can’t post language like that here.
I’m running Linux Ubuntu 16.04.
I tried to install “nvidia-440” from “ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa”
It doesn’t seem to be available. Neither is “nvidia-driver-440”.
The latest version in the ppa has for 16.04 is “nvidia-430”, which I have installed. Unfortunately, X-Plane 11.50b1 balks at this version and won’t support it.
So is “nvidia-440” suppose to be in “ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa” for Ubuntu 16.04?
Or maybe you guys only tested with Ubuntu 17.04 and I’d have to upgrade to that to get “nvidia-440”?
I have done the tests on Ubuntu 19.04. It’s possible that newer Vulkan drivers require a more recent version of Ubuntu, so I’d say now is a good a time as any to update! Ubuntu 16.04 support is ending in a year, so 20.04 might a good new LTS release to update to when it comes out.
My X-plane 11 is now crashing constantly since I updated to Beta 11.50. I’m running the latest drivers on my RTX 2080 and I have an i9-9900K with Orbx Scenery and a few add-on planes. I’m not able to load any flights….I’ve tried everything and the sim crashes every single time. I spent months building this sim and not it will not even load a flight without crashing. Very disappointed. Is there any solution? I wish i never saw the email about the beta version being available as now my X-Planed is dead.
It is a optional beta, the first public one no less. Of course we don’t want the sim to crash and you should totally file a bug report for it. But our general recommendation has always been not to update your main install but to get a second one for betas. Especially when it’s this early in the beta cycle.
If 11.50 doesn’t work out for you, you can also always downgrade to 11.41 and then retry it later or wait for the official release. Please do file the crash first though 🙂