This sucks... the system requirements page on the X-Plane site says the following...

X-Plane 8.x is a 3-D accelerated program, which means that it needs a decent CPU and a 3-D accelerator card to run. 3-D accelerator cards are designed specifically to do high-speed graphics, so they work many times faster than your CPU ever could. The 2 languages of 3-D accelerator cards are OpenGL and Direct-3D.
All Laminar Research software uses OpenGL. You must therefore have a 3-D accelerator card that can run OpenGL to use our latest software.