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X-Plane 11 - VR and Metal soon

MacsRgr8

MacsRgr8

macrumors G3
Original poster
Sep 8, 2002
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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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gkarris

gkarris

macrumors G3
Dec 31, 2004
8,301
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"No escape from Reality...”
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... ;) )
 
MacsRgr8

MacsRgr8

macrumors G3
Original poster
Sep 8, 2002
8,296
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The Netherlands
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.
 
M

Mikael H

macrumors 6502a
Sep 3, 2014
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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.
 
J

jeanlain

macrumors 68020
Mar 14, 2009
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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.
 
Anonymous Freak

Anonymous Freak

macrumors 603
Dec 12, 2002
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Cascadia
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.
 
MacsRgr8

MacsRgr8

macrumors G3
Original poster
Sep 8, 2002
8,296
1,796
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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

gkarris

macrumors G3
Dec 31, 2004
8,301
1,061
"No escape from Reality...”
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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MacsRgr8

MacsRgr8

macrumors G3
Original poster
Sep 8, 2002
8,296
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The Netherlands
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:
gkarris

gkarris

macrumors G3
Dec 31, 2004
8,301
1,061
"No escape from Reality...”
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%
 
Janichsan

Janichsan

macrumors 68040
Oct 23, 2006
3,088
11,411
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.
 
gkarris

gkarris

macrumors G3
Dec 31, 2004
8,301
1,061
"No escape from Reality...”
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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