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News! : X-Plane goes 11.50 final


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News! : X-Plane goes 11.50 final

 

Laminar Research have announced that X-Plane has gone 11.50 final. The statement is here:

 

"X-Plane 11.50 Released, introducing Vulkan and Metal Rendering

X-Plane 11.50 is a pivotal update to the app that provides faster graphics processing, fewer visual stutters and an overall increase of Frame Rate (FPS). Taking advantage of the latest rendering technology, X-Plane 11.50 ships with compatibility for Vulkan on Windows/Linux and Metal on Mac. Think of these as the language of your graphics card (GPU). We have measured improvement across a variety of different GPUs, including both AMD and Nvidia-built cards. As always, performance results with Vulkan/Metal will vary from user to user but we are quite pleased with the aggregate improvement".

 

Details of 11.50 are:

"X-Plane 11.50 is a major update that completely rewrites the rendering engine to use modern rendering APIs: Vulkan (on Windows and Linux systems) and Metal (on Mac). It is now out of beta testing and available to all X-Plane users!

This version includes new options in the Graphics Settings screen to enable Vulkan or Metal, which require a restart of the sim to go into effect. Please note that the first load time with Metal and Vulkan will be surprisingly slow. This is lots of shaders/pipelines compiling for the first time; subsequent runs will be faster.

Prior to 11.50, X-Plane used OpenGL exclusively. OpenGL is a standardized way to talk to a computers graphics card and put images on the screen. With version 11.50, X-Plane introduces Vulkan and Metal. These are similar standards but they are more modern and efficient than OpenGL. We chose to undertake this project because we were unsatisfied with the performance of X-Plane running OpenGL. This shortcoming was particularly visible in the form of stuttering, when the sim loses track of time and then jumps ahead.

Vulkan and Metal work in a similar manner to provide images on the screen. Unlike OpenGL though, they were designed with modern hardware in mind. Vulkan and Metal simply reduce the amount of overhead necessary to talk to the graphics card.

See the full release notes here for the list of all updated airports and the full list of changes/bug fixes. You can find instructions on how to update X-Plane here!"

 

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Comment courtesy of Laminar Research

______________________________________________________________________

 

News by Stephen Dutton

10th September 2020

Copyright©2020: X-Plane Reviews

 

(Disclaimer. All images and text in this review are the work and property of X-PlaneReviews, no sharing or copy of the content is allowed without consent from the author as per copyright conditions)


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An interesting post, thank you.

 

I’m very impressed with Vulcan but I did notice my rig was running harder. I’ve color matched components in my rig to their temperatures so visually I could see that more heat was being generated. More of the increase seemed to be coming from my RTX 2080. The setting that significantly increased the temperature of that was the difference between HDR+SSAO. The issue wasn’t huge but put the card borderline on what is recommended for normal operating. Changing the setting back to HDR lowered the component temperature by 10 degrees.

 

The positive is of course is that Vulcan is making better use of our rigs. However, at least in my experience and depending how conservative you are or aren’t about trying to maintain hardware life keeping a thought on not just what your machine can do, but also on what the temperature impact is might be worthwhile.

 

My CPU temperatures (it is water cooled) are well within recommendations.

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