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X-Plane 11 - VR and Metal soon

MacsRgr8

MacsRgr8

macrumors G3
Original poster
Sep 8, 2002
8,339
1,864
The Netherlands
X-Plane 10 is awesome, and my iMac 2017 with Radeon Pro 580 is superb for running on very high settings with hugely demanding scenery!

X-Plane 11 is "more taxing", looks even prettier but I have to lower the setttings somewhat to keep the >25 fps.

But.... the guys at X-Plane have just made two huge announcements:
1. VR coming to X-Plane 11 (this will be sooo cool)
2. And, the use of Vulkan and Metal in future updates of X-Plane 11 (this will help performance HUGELY)

Check their FlightSimCon 2017 presentation:
X-plane YouTube Channel
 
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MacsRgr8 said:
X-Plane 10 is awesome, and my iMac 2017 with Radeon Pro 580 is superb for running on very high settings with hugely demanding scenery!

X-Plane 11 is "more taxing", looks even prettier but I have to lower the setttings somewhat to keep the >25 fps.

But.... the guys at X-Plane have just made two huge announcements:
1. VR coming to X-Plane 11 (this will be sooo cool)
2. And, the use of Vulkan and Metal in future updates of X-Plane 11 (this will help performance HUGELY)

Check their FlightSimCon 2017 presentation:
X-plane YouTube Channel
Click to expand...

I have the PC demo - not impressed...

Question:

Is the demo locked at 30fps?

I tried VR at a local Airfestival where the Civil Air Patrol youths had a VR headset running on MS Flight Simulator.

It's cool, but you can't see where the controls are. At least the plane I was flying had a different set of controls than the actual controllers and threw me off...

As I said in other threads, VR NEEDS to be TURN-KEY or go home.

I guess VR on a Mac can be like the old days where the games were turn-key like on consoles compared to games on the PC

(but then again, there's no more Soundblaster config files to constantly change... ;) )
 
I'm not sure about the demo, but the full version has no fps limits.
BTW, without 3rd party add-ons (scenery and planes) XP11 is quite boring with the built-in scenery.

I assume, looking at the youtube movie, that this VR is turn-key, so hopefully better than MS FlightSim's now.

We'll have to wait for it.
 
gkarris said:
Thanks will contact the devs.

My games I get 110fps in 1080p high but no matter what I set in XP11, I get 30...
Click to expand...
Have you turned on vsync on a 30Hz screen, perhaps?
I run X-plane in Linux, not on the Mac, but I had no frame rate limits in the demo either.
 
Again, this could be due to V-Sync. Depending on the driver, a game that fails to reach 60 fps will fall down to 30 if V-Sync is on.
 
I've been using X-Plane since the first release - when it was more an engineering tool than a flight simulator. Amazing accuracy in simulation of the physics of aerodynamics.
 
I've been playing X-Plane on a Mac for years now (X-Plane 9 - 11).
First Mac was a Mac Pro '08 (upgraded the grfx card a few times), later the maxed out iMac 27" late 2013 and now I have the "ultimate" iMac 27" 2017 with Radeon 580 Pro.

On all these Macs, X-Plane ran very well. The thing to do is get the best grfx card for that Mac at a given time.
CPU speed and VRAM amount is key.
 
gkarris said:
Just downloaded the latest patches and drivers - still capped at 30fps...

My RX470 at 1080p/med doesn't even break a sweat...

I have a question in at X-Plane
Click to expand...

X-Plane 11 got a major update from OpenGL to Vulkan.

Before, I was getting 30fps and:

CPU1: 98%
CPU2: 10%
CPU3: 0%
CPU4: 0%

GPU1: 0-10%

Looking at the forums, I wasn't the only one with this problem - their implementation of OpenGL only used 1 core and not the GPU.

In December Laminar Research updated the program to use Vulkan instead, now I get 1080/high/60fps (w/ vsync) goodness...

Using the Demo - Now I can buy the simulator!
 
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Been playing around with the 11.20 betas, maybe some Metal code has been used in X-Plane 11.20:
It seems it can use more cores than 11.10 could (seen sometimes up to > 300% CPU usage, and not just loading scenery, but in actual gameplay)

Looks fantastic..!
However, still is a huge burden on my 2017 iMac i7 with 580 Pro using payware / ortho4xp / X-Europe OSM. add-ons.
 
Last edited:
jeanlain said:
You're sure it uses Vulkan? I can't find anything about it.
Click to expand...

You are right - 11.2 is supposed to get Vulkan.

I have 11.1 - the better performance I'm getting is because it is now using all CPU cores, and after getting MSI Afterburner working again, I'm only getting 30fps.

1080p/high/30fps

CPU1-4: 78% (each)
GPU: 0-5%
 
gkarris said:
You are right - 11.2 is supposed to get Vulkan.

I have 11.1 - …
Click to expand...
<nitpick>
It's actually 11.10 and 11.20 as in "eleven point ten" and "eleven point twenty". :p
</nitpick>

Anyway, my understanding is that even 11.20 will not have Vulkan support. In a very recent Q&A, X-Plane's developers mentioned that they are working on Vulkan and Metal integration, but it's a very slow and stepwise progress. They explicitly mention there's no ETA for this, but it's probably some time later this year.
 
Janichsan said:
<nitpick>
It's actually 11.10 and 11.20 as in "eleven point ten" and "eleven point twenty". :p
</nitpick>

Anyway, my understanding is that even 11.20 will not have Vulkan support. In a very recent Q&A, X-Plane's developers mentioned that they are working on Vulkan and Metal integration, but it's a very slow and stepwise progress. They explicitly mention there's no ETA for this, but it's probably some time later this year.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the update.

I guess I'm happy that at least they're using all 4.0 cores.... ;)
 
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