X-Plane 11.50 has been out for a little bit more than 24 hours, and things have been a little bit nuts. Here are a few quick notes, in no particular order.

Bug Fixes and Work Arounds

While I don’t have work-arounds for the missing right eye in VR or older NVidia cards that won’t run in Vulkan, the good news is that we have fixes for these already. We are going to start testing beta two on Monday and try to get the fixes we have out as soon as possible. While we don’t have every major reported bug fixed, beta two should make a real difference.

Users who can’t start and have SLI setups: disable SLI in the Nvidia control panel and you will be able to run Vulkan. We are still investigating this – our goal is a bug fix so you don’t need to turn SLI off. (We do not expect X-Plane to leverage both cards – we expect it to run without failing.)

Finally, one thing I should have mentioned in the announcement: if you have scripts that modify art controls, please remove them, and don’t put them back.

The art controls are undocumented and subject to change, and they have changed a lot since X-Plane 11.41. Realistically the authors of these tweak scripts need to go back and re-evaluate every one of their tweaks in 11.50 to see if they actually help or are actually making things worse.

This is not like plugins or scenery; we tell you to get a second installation for the beta not because we want you to run add-on free but rather so that if the beta fails you are not locked out of X-Plane. We expect add-ons to work and we are taking plugin, scenery and aircraft bugs seriously.

By comparison, the art controls are “do what you want, but you void the warranty if you mess with this.” If you are running scripts that hack the art controls, we cannot tell the difference between real bugs in the early betas and art controls screwing things up.

The Road Map For Betas

Looking over the bug reports we have received, I think we are going to take on the 11.50 bugs in three phases:

  1. Stability and compatibility. We’ll start by making sure that we run Vulkan and Metal on every platform that should be able to run them, with add-ons just working in the cases where we expect them to. We’ll start by focusing on fixing crashes, black screens, device lost, unstable plugins, etc.
  2. VRAM use. We’ve received a number of reports that make it sound like VRAM management is not working properly. Once we can run, we’ll dig into blurry textures, running out of VRAM, etc. Sidney has built some great tools to get a good picture of how VRAM is being managed. VRAM management is one of the newest and most complex parts of 11.50 so it isn’t surprising that we’ve seen things that look buggy.
  3. Performance. Once we are running where we should and using VRAM that we should, we can look at the cases where users are not seeing performance benefits from Metal and Vulkan, as well as remaining stutters. Once again, Sidney has built some fantastic tools that should help us dig into this quite efficiently.

This is the only order that we can reasonably approach the bugs. If the app won’t run on all qualifying hardware, we can’t test our VRAM use everywhere, and if our VRAM use isn’t correct, it can bias performance testing.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

130 comments on “Some Quick Notes on the First Vulkan/Metal Beta”

  2. Thanks for the update! I’m one of those who’s waiting for the VR right eye fix as changing settings didn’t seem to do anything like some people have mentioned worked for them.

    1. Hi Rick, on my HP reverb I found that turning off anti aliasing turned the right eye lens on.
      Try turning off anti aliasing and you might find the right eye works then……..
      If it does then with vulkan you can crank up the resolution to compensate for the lack of antialiasing instead.
      It worked for me although it hasn’t stopped it crashing allot in vr.
      Cheers,
      Andy.

    2. On my oculus rift s. I found the rendering sliders need to be moved. I have 4 11.50 installed. using oculus and different orthos, I found it required me to move sliders differently for each install. In one case I needed to go into oculus debug tools and put settings to 1.2 and 45 max frames. many combinations to try. it takes a while. but does work. Also a note on loading. in some cases with installs involving 200 gig orthos, it may take up to 2 minutes to load. a hour glass appears and spins. When this is done everything works great. I am now able to crank sliders almost to max and still get 30 fps with heavy orthos and detailed aircraft that would bog down 11.41. Vulcan appears to be buggy, but does show great potential.

  4. Thanks Ben for the update. It’s a really impressive performance boost so far. Looking forward to the add-on developers like FlightFactor putting out their updates to take advantage as well.

  5. Thank you for your Efforts, looking forward for Monday since I only have the all black Version on my 750 Ti 😉
    Have a nice weekend.

      1. Yes for me also Black screen though the simulator running in background and I am able to even press Evey icon in the UI. But without been able to see them like a blind man.

  6. Just a point of clarification or additional information, I can’t confirm myself as I only have one card, but my friends experience was that he had to disable SLI to get x-plane to run with vulkan. Additionally, in order to get his Oculus CV1 to work (black screen), he needed to disable the card using the device manager.

  7. I don’t use SLI and had to disable my second video card to get decent frame rates as well.

    1. same here. vulcan kept sending data to smaller card that was used only for realsimgear g1000. Once smaller card was removed and everything running off 1 card, frame rate increased. I was unable to direct vulcan to use my 2080ti when another card was inserted.

  8. Big thanks for this update all the work has been done and still push it even further to higher level just really awesome you guys big thanks ,

    running on vulkan it’s running so smooth and fast
    you won’t believe i love it 😉

  9. I noticed the frame dropping rapidly around certain airports.
    I sent a bug report. The airport is Gimpo International Airport, and when you look to the east, you find that the frame drops dramatically.
    Hope this solves the problem.

    1. The improvement for VR is quite unbelievable. The hard data shows about 10 frame increase for me, but the smoothness feels like 30. Its amazing and I thank you.

  11. One note worth mentioning,
    as OPENGL was not optimaly utilizing the hardware of either nvidia (80%) and amd (50%) …. you know what … it means that we would expect raw performance boost with new generation of graphics cards without blockage …. Vulkan has really sat the wheels on the hot rails……. people running multiple screens will joy.

    1. I am on a 1080 in VR and even with SS 200% my graphics card utilisation is maximum at 55%.

      I7-6700k overclocked to 4500mhz. Same as before using OpenGL. There must still be limiting factors on CPU side…

      Two things kill my GPU (Orbx area EGLC)
      SSAO and AA (2x / 4x) so I don’t use it. Number of objects one bellow maximum. Reflections lowest. Objects two maximum futher decreases frames.

      Also I notices that the memory usage showed in x-Plane is much lower then the utilisation reported in task manager.

      Have a nice weekend.

      1. Hello IntrudR

        i mean for nvidia 80% (not in terms of GPU utlization)
        But rather meant that overall preformance increased by 20% once moved from OpenGL to Vulkan for nvidia cards
        which means that OpenGL at best was using almost 80% of the hardware capability due to its legacy rendering pipeline limitations.

        As for AMD, as per results published by Micheal Brown from X-Force , his Vulkan benchmark tests showed double the frame rate on same hardware as compared to OpenGL drivers – meaning their own drivers were not doing fair to their own hardware!

        Cheers

      1. Yes, I am testing already. My first impression is that my script works with 11.50b1 quite well. The art controls it manipulates (or abuses…) still work and also do not seem to create stutters, at least on my computer.

        I will test some more and check the comments on the .org download page for the experiences of other users.

        BTW, a few more performance optimisations and nobody will need an auto LOD script in the future. : )

        1. I can confirm 3jfps works fine for me however I am only using LODs, Cloud puffs and reflections switch… Anyway, great job LR with this update, no more stutters and great FPS gain on my 10 years old i7 860@4Gz and GTX 1060 6GB 😉

        2. Jorn, 3jFPS seems to be working fine with 11.50b1 in VR (Vive Pro and Rift cv1) with auto-lod and 45FPS targetted. I really luv how it lets me use as high a world setting as I want to. Means a lot more rooftop heliports in NYC, lol!

        3. I have tried it with and without 3jfps and it hasn’t broken my beta build at all, the only issue I had was the menu flickering although that’s was only occasionally. Saying that I ended up turning it off because the performance gain from vulkan meant I didn’t need it anymore.

        4. Ben: “if you have scripts that modify art controls, please remove them, and don’t put them back”
          You: “I am testing already . My first impression is that my script works with 11.50b1 quite well.”
          I can only shake my head. You should tell people to stay away from your tools until the beta is close to RC, instead you tell your are on your best way to port this stuff…

          1. Wait, 3J is the guy who is _supposed_ to be using his own script with 11.50. If there is _one_ guy I want to use 3JFPS, it’s the author. 🙂

        5. I upgraded over the weekend and experienced no issues with the script & 11.50b1 (on a 6 year old imac with AMD graphics). I’ve not tried running without it yet.

          I might give that a go when I have some time. Just to see how well things work without it after Vulkan. But I don’t expect switching it off to make a positive difference. The premise of the script is very simple: if fps below threshold, reduce LOD (and a few other things). That still seems to work as you’d expect and it’s still a fair tradeoff.

          I have some areas with lots of pretty scenery where my setup struggles (also with Vulkan) and being able to continue flying and have the script keep my fps in usable range is highly useful to me. It means I can push the object slider all the way to the right and get a usable FPS in most places.

          I did a flight over London (heathrow to london city), which is a bit of a torture test for my setup, and was able to keep FPS in a usable most of the way. On my aging setup, being able to run at all with max objects is fantastic. I took off with about 22-25 fps, which is definitely up from what I used to get at Heathrow. Along the way, it dipped to about 17 but by the time I landed I was above 20 again. Not great obviously but definitely better. Overall it’s better than before the Vulkan upgrade. I’d call that a win. Other areas I get a very usable fps of 30-40. So, I tend to fly there if I want FPS.

          I looked at the script source at some point and I don’t think what it does is that terribly offensive. Actually dynamically changing things that have an FPS impact and that can apparently be adapted seems like exactly what you’d want.

          In any case, many thanks for this script; it has made a big difference for me in the past few years.

    2. 3fjps made 11.50 completely unplayable for me, after disabling it everything worked fine.

  13. Just curious, what has DreamEngine Sound with Vulkan?
    Graphic api vs sound “api”.

    Thanks for update.

    1. Nnnnnnot really. With Vulkan, apps can hand-code their own multi-GPU support; the Vulkan drivers do not attempt to ‘transparently’ do this automagically.

      We have _not_ coded anything like this yet. We have considered multi-GPU for multi-monitor but we have not seriously considered multi-GPU for one monitor.

      2. That would be ideal…3 graphics cards for 3 forward displays.

        With support in graphics setting for each monitor.

        Austin talked about multi computer setups…does multiple copies of Xp11 on one PC still work with Vulkan?

        My feedback is: Ryzen 1600, GTW 1650 and 8gb works on a desktop at 70fps at 1440p.

        I haven’t tried it on my sim pc until after beta.

        Great job.

        1. Yes, our standard pro setup is multiple computers, and it works better in Vulkan than in GL because the framerate of each machine is more solid.

      3. I have a related question (because you/Sidney are well placed to answer, not because I am expecting anything from you guys ;-))

        SLI (including Crossfire) has never been a thing on OS X but multi-GPU definitely is. It seems that SLI is even going away on Windows now (I’m a Mac guy really but I have to use Windows for VR and my main mission now is keeping my RL flying skills up using X-Plane, which is especially valuable now we can’t actually fly due to the human malware going around).

        So my question is – if Vulkan allows for a cross-platform multi-GPU implementation, does it also allow for a cross-platform SLI/Crossfire implementation, or is that done in a different layer? I am thinking about how to leverage 2 middle-of-the-road (read _cheaper_) GPUs for VR and whether this could be better achieved with SLI or with multi-GPU per monitor/VR headset.

        Would value your insight, thanks.

  17. Hi, did you fix the bug of multi monitors in beta2 ? I mean the black region appears in some monitors.

  18. Great job guys it really is a step forward with noticeable difference in VR.

    I did lodge a bug and hopefully you guys can find what causes the VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST crash when going out and back into VR multiple times during a flight.

    1. I encounter this bug as well when changing Graphical settings while in VR. I submitted the crash reports a few times. Hope that helps.

          1. If I play with graphic settings enough, I will eventually get this error. However, I have done many long flights with 11.50 beta 1 one with complex aircraft, and never have had any issues.

    2. I get this when loading up a flight at night, and once when flying through clouds.

  19. Hi Ben, just to clarify on the SLI subject, I do not have SLI but do have a secondary card. I have a gtx1070 as main and a gtx650ti as secondary. I had to disable the secondary card to get Vulkan to start. By the way, Vulkan runs great on my setup, I haven’t had any issues with blurries or CTD. Vulkan is a keeper as it is now.

  20. Thank you Ben for your explanation. For my part in oculus VR rifts everything works correctly and following the video test that you posted to me. Jonathan

  21. Thanks for the update Ben! As usual, another well thought out road map and I am happy to wait for developments as and when you and the guys bring them forward. What I have seen is SOOO promising!

  22. Of course, OpenGL has to be overcome. I am glad you went through the big effort of doing that. But also, please, give the users some way to change the visuals of XP so that they do not have to use own shaders or Art Controls. XP has its ugly sides which I am sure you are aware of. E.g., I fixed the zig-zag shadows by setting the cockpit cam to 8196. This no longer works. I also do not think your water waves are appropriate for rivers and likes, so I changed them too. I softened the clouds to make them look better to my eyes. That kind of stuff. I understand that you do not want to track bugs and keep everything simple, but some users have a different taste.

  23. Ben there is a bug with VR using the Oculus traytool to for Super sampling that crashes the sim. the auto bug catcher is getting it you could have 2-3 emails from that. any chance of it getting fixed?

  24. Win 10, XP11.50b, HP Reverb Pro, wmr for steam, MSI RTX 2080 Super. Thanks for the great xp11.50. My vanilla xp11.50 installation is running in VR sweetly, at all high settings. Just blurring on lower cockpit panels at the mo. Much appreciated.

  25. Amazing work and a big step in the right direction ,thanks

    A lot of VR users are using a tool called OVR SETTINGS, which enables 30fps lock in VR , it works wonders in heavy load situations,specially after vulkan , Only problem is tearing around edges .

    Is it possible to add this option natively to xp11 and tweak it so we dont see that tearing ?!

    Many thanks , and great job anyways

    1. I also use this too. Reason being, for some reason either in 11.41 or even now with the 11.50 beta release I get stutters unless FPS are at 22, 30 or 45 using the Oculus Rift. I use the OVR tool to ‘lock in’ frames at 30 or 45 using GA aircraft, or set it to Auto (which usually gets me down to a solid 22) using larger payware aircraft like the Toliss A321.

      Wondering why I need a plug-in to eliminate stuttering anymore with Vulkan which I thought was supposed to eliminate stuttering. Now please understand, I am not complaining – simply reporting this since I know it is a beta and I am grateful to be able to participate. I also filed a bug report using the bug reporter.

      Hopefully someone is looking into the VR ‘smoothness’ and stuttering issues that I have seen several people report in other forums. It would be so nice to not have to use a plug in to lock in frames and just have the sim be stutter free regardless…. even if that meant dropping down to lower FPS as long as it would make for a smooth VR experience. Even at 22 FPS, things are smooth enough using the OVR plugin.
      And thanks for a great beta!

  26. Downloaded 11.50 on Friday. it would not run in VR. Got it running on Saturday by lowering textures and anti aliasing. Today i deleted the content of x-plane/Output/shadercache. After that i was able to rise settings to what they were before: textures max, aa 1, objects high but with a 25-30 % rise in fps.
    No problems to stay at home with that.
    Thank you for making that fine simulation and for communicating with us the way you are.

  27. Hey Ben,

    I’m rooting for you guys, but became utterly disappointed with recent developments. With 11.50 beta, you also changed the old, OpenGL shaders as well. Which means, that even if opt out of Vulkan, many different visual addons will stop functioning completely.
    Whether you realize it, or not, X-plane is extremely undersatured and foggy, and unfortunately it’s very depressing to look at. You probably don’t realize this, since this aspect of the visuals is always been like that, but if you take a look at screenshots from Aerofly FS2, or the elephant in the room, MSFS 2020, it’s very evident that X-plane has a very different color palette.
    With the recent changes you made it impossible for addons like X-Vision to work, which at the moment is the only solution to make X-plane look palatable in VR.
    If you don’t want your shaders to be touched, than make sure than no one wants to touch them – provide visuals that are good enough out of the box, so that people won’t have to resort to all sort of tweaks. The reason why the internet is full of payware and freeware addons that mess with your shaders is because the default visuals are so underwhelming, that people are taking matters into their own hands!
    And I’m not talking about art assets or any other stuff that would require many months to develop and complete. A simple, custom adjustable system (Arma 3 style) would do, where users can set custom multipliers for brightness, contrast, RGB values (and possibly bloom strength) in the options menu (perhaps you could throw in some curves as well, with saveable presets). Such a solution would be quick to implement and would do miles to enhance the overall atmosphere. The fog_be_gone dataref is great first step, but it’s not enough in my opinion. This regression in visuals could not have come in a worse time with MSFS 2020 on the horizon. We can change sky bitmaps, but we can no longer change anything else, and this sudden inflexibility is a big problem. So far these visual shortcomings were fixable, but that is no longer the case. I’m a payware developer, and I’m afraid that your reluctance to improve anything visually (even if it could be done with a few hours of coding) will drive away customers in numbers. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but the sheer number of color/shade/skybox addons (whether payware or freeware) should be an indication that your defaults are just not visually appealing.
    I know you have your priorities, but the changes I’m talking about can be implemented very quickly and painlessly- having a small development team is not a good excuse in my opinion.
    Adding a couple of datarefs which would multiply image output values surely couldn’t be that hard, with some sliders added to the UI. People could set it up according to their tastes, and everyone would be happy.

    The long running Vulkan beta won’t do any good for customer satisfaction, and if you read some forums, I’m not the only one with the opinion that I would rather have the same performance but better colors, instead of +5-10 FPS and the default gloomy uninviting atmosphere.

    A simple sider-based image tweaking system could be a quick interim solution until a possible X-plane 12.

    I for one will download and additional copy of X-plane 11.41 as long as it’s still available for backup, and will stick with for the remainder of X-plane 11’s lifetime, unless I can have a proper looking color palette in X-plane (which so far was possible with X-vision).

    As I said, I’m supporting you, but please, please, think outside of the box a little bit!

    Regards,

    Peter

    2. Fully agree. That shall be priority future after stability of Vulkan. I think this would allow to have significant improvement for visual look together with low cost of performance impact. Please LR consider it.

    3. I agree 100%. In X-Plane, the colours look unnaturally pale and unattractive. On Windows, I increased the display saturation by 50% (!) via the AMD driver and was surprised how much better it looks. It is a clumsy workaround that shouldn’t be necessary. But on macOS with an iMac, I am stuck with the pale colours. Laminar, please make the colours more saturated or at least add a saturation slider to the graphics settings.

    5. Totally agree with the comments – plus a plea to fix the abominable cockpit jaggy shadows, which at times are completely distracting. Eliminate, or bring back some user control, please!

    6. Also, a lot of data ref that fed Xplane Lua plugins to manage visual performance are gone. Plugins like “Rendering options for XP11” or “Advanced Rendering Options” allowed us to manipulate drawing distance for some objects (road traffic, static aircraft, shadows, etc) which made XP11 w/o Vulkan already very fps friendly and like you said more pleaseant to the eye.
      I really wish Laminar would again make available the /sim/private data ref.
      The actual Graphics UI sliders are just not detailed enough.

    7. @ Laminar Research (Ben, Sidney)

      Could you please reply to this issue? Are you aware that quite a few users find X-Plane’s colours bleak? Do you plan to do something about it? If yes, what? If not, why? I think many would appreciate a comment from you.

      1. We are aware. I do not have anything to pre-announce about this and the lighting model and color scheme are not going to change in 11.50, as that’s totally out of scope for Vulkan. The look of the sim will change in the future, and if you are unhappy that it looks “too bleak” right now, you’ll probably like the changes. But until we show previews (which will not be soon) I cannot blame anyone for being frustrated.

        1. Ben, thank you for answering. I appreciate it and am glad to read about the upcoming changes you hinted at. It’s great that you put in the tremendous work of supporting Vulkan (which increased my frame rate by 75%!) and am looking forward to more vivid colours (either by default or through an option to adjust them) in the future. In the meantime, I’ll keep using the AMD driver to adjust them. Thanks again!

  28. Question: when X-Plane crashes under macOS, I always get the default macOS crash reporter popup. When I submit this crash report, will you receive the report in a usable way, or should I also submit a bug report?

    1. On Mac you need to send us the crash report, the submitted one goes to Apple. We used to have direct-report-to-us but the implementation broke when Apple changed a kernel debugging interface. We’ll get Mac auto report back someday.

      1. The reports end up in ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/ as X-Plane*.crash on macOS Catalina. Not sure about those pesky new filesystem permissions, but perhaps you could grab them from there on startup and ask if the user wants to upload any new ones?

        1. If we can’t make auto-report work, that’s a good backup plan. But it’s all just a matter of dev time – there is newer auto-report tech that we can just upgrade to. The win of not doing this way is we’d like something integrated with the back-end system (backtrace.io) we use for everything else.

  29. I have been playing with vulcan since day 1. What I have found is vulcan can not handle using 2 cards. I have a 2080ti running 3 large monitors and another gtx 1060 3 gigs running real sim gear g1000. vulcan keeps sending video for the big screens to the 1060. ignoring the 2080ti. this makes working multi monitor not reliable and picture and frame rates terrible and vram issues. I removed the 1060 and all but 3 monitors and now getting 20 frames with max setting using homemade orthos amounting to 180 gigs of scenery. orthos are at full 19. Using only one monitor, my frame rate is in low 30’s and smooth. work needs to be done on caching to right card and multi monitor support.

    thanks
    paul

  30. GREAT JOB!!

    … performance increased more than 100% with RX580 + Xeon and resolution set up to x1440 (before only x900) … with Rotate MD-80 Pro

    –> but for my opinion World Traffic 3.1.9 does not work fine … and it stop running

    I already sent some report …

    1. Me too. Wt3 stops it dead when trying to load traffic at airfield 1. Also I found the plugin drop down menu won’t drop but if I mouse over the developer and the flight menus they are fine. I used my keyboard shortcut to start wt3 but it stopped almost as soon as I hit the generate button

  31. Hello Ben,
    nice job, upto now vulkan-version runs good, frames (nvidia 1070) went up a lot.
    But, as you know a lot of the X-Plane users are flying online, either vatsim, ivao or whatever. Upto now it’s not the X-Plane users having problems but the controllers directing them because of the poor simulation-rate. From what I understood that is caused not by the normal framecalculations (to be seen as more or less stable FPS-counter) but by the spikes slightly reducing onse real speed seen by the other players as overall lower speed. Gladly you identified and also took this bug by the kneck by developing the vulkan integration.
    And here comes the problem. To ease the above any online pilot is keen on using the vulkan version, so the controllers stop complaining or even worse (valid for vatsim) drop your connection when the simrate is below 1. This is currently not working because all the clients are not able to display foreign aircrafts. The developers for example of Altitude (IVAO) say, they say there is no need to develop anything based on a beta and as well they are using a module to display aircrafts in X-Plane. Means, only when X-Plane Vulkan is final the would have an eye on it.
    That cannot be the solution. They say they use a library “XPMP library” and having a look into the github link reveals one of the license holder Ben … 🙂

    So my question, would you please do us online pilots a favour and have a look into this library so we can test vulkan also in online networks and stop that bashing of X-Plane users?
    Many thanks keep up the work!!!

  32. Just for info. Running the installer again (I have 11.50b1 running well) I see that there is an additional choice in the pick destination dialogue. I now have a 3rd location C:\x-plane11\ as well as mu original C:\X-Plane11.
    I also have a backup version on the D: drive.
    There is no additional directory with lowercase name.

    1. Although X-Plane wasn’t running, there was a lingering service which I discovered at the very bottom of the Task Manager list.

  33. Hello I have one question.
    Does this mean (in future) X Plane on Vulkan wil also run on my Nvidia GTX 775m video card with driver version 425.31 – WHQL? There are no driver updates for this card anymore. The latest is from april 2019.
    I have an iMac late 2013 with 2gb vram and 24gb ram. On Metal I can’t load any buildings or the simulator will crash. (With opengl it works smooth)
    Thank you 🙂

    1. Wait – this is an iMac running bootcamp? If so, you may not be able to run Vulkan because you may not be able to find a recent _WINDOWS_ driver that will run on it. You’d have to try installing a driver straight from NV instead of getting one from Apple – Apple isn’t particularly diligent in updating their bootcamp GPU drivers. Better would be to run it under Metal.

      1. Thanks for your response,

        Yes that is correct. I was trying to run X Plane with Boot Camp.
        But Kepler-based GPU’s are no loner supported by NV so driver 440.26 is not available.

        I will use Metal instead.
        With Metal I get this popup message while X Plane is loading on low graphic-settings.

        ——————————
        X plane has failed to allocate sufficient GPU memory.
        There is not enough VRAM available on your system to run with the current settings.
        We can not finish loading and quit.
        —————————————

        With graphic-settings on zero is is running fine.
        I will wait for another beta 🙂

        My system:
        Imac late 2013 2gb VRAM, 24gb RAM Catalina 10.15.4

  34. Finally tried out the beta for about 40 mins.
    Considering this is Beta 1(b) 🙂 the FPS gain is actually good.
    More impressing though is the “lowest FPS”..
    It has really gained A LOT and is much more steady now and only changing a very few frames vs. max FPS (on same settings).
    So far I vote for this to be the best of the update so far 🙂

    I changed around with a few settings and it’s the same(ish) for even “pretty high settings overall”.
    Great job – looking forward to see even more squeezed out of Vulkan now 🙂

  35. So I have 11.50 installed and I don’t think the new engine. what is required for Mac OS?

    1. Check the graphics settings – there’s a not terribly obvious button off to the right to turn on Metal.

  38. Would is be possible to start in a paused state when starting a new flight on approach?

    The loading can sometimes take a little while and it is very easy to not be observant when the loading completes.

  39. My system is a rather aged i7-4770K@4.5GHz with a GTX1080 (slightly overclocked), and 16GB of RAM.

    I always consdered X-plane to run much smoother then P3D or FSX, most noticeably during a turn, or when panning around. However, the microstutters always bugged me, specially while panning, and I never could get rid of very annoying screen tearing when panning, although i tried every last bit to get rid of it. This jerkyness always kind of ruined the feeling of actually being in the air and flying for me…

    Well, what can I say, with Vulkan my X-plane runs as smooth as butter, no microstutter at all, nada. Even panning around 360°, there is no hick-up, no screen tearing (with v-sync enabled). It’s a whole new experience. To fly through some light turbulence is an outright joy now, with the plane seemingly dancing in the air.
    I hoped it would be exactly like that, but have not expected it to be that good with public beta 1.

    Congratulation and thanks for bringing out Vulkan, to all of you!!
    Fantastic job!

  40. Can we have debug symbols back for the Linux binary? I’m trying to debug a crash in “MicroProfileGpuInsertTimerGL()” at startup, the 2nd call into the “glExt” array goes awry, the pointer at offset 1136 (function 142 i guess?) is zero. Most likely the intel gl driver is missing an extension, could you tell me what it is?
    Thank you!

  41. Ben,
    Pardon my ignorance, Should I be able to add a second GPU (non SLI) for the purpose of driving my Real Sim Gear Avionics displays PFD and MFD without reducing overall performance from my main GPU which is a RTX 2080Ti 11 GB Kingpin Hybrid? Prior to 11.50 I had to run two pc in master (8700k) slave (9900k w/ RTX 2080Ti). I would really like to run 11.50 on a single PC but when the second GPU is added performance is 8FPS with same graphic setting I used in the master /slave config. Is their any way to dedicate XP graphic to only the RTX and simply pop out the PFD MFD and drag them to the second GPU displays for my avionics. Thanks

    1. Wait, I don’t think I understand the problem.

      You’re saying you have an RTX 2080 Ti, and that card is _so_ overwhelmed with X-Plane work that you need to offload an RSG PFD/MFD?

      What makes you think that this offloading is necessary?

      1. Ben,
        The RTX has 4 Video Outputs 3 of which will drive 55″ 4K Screens. That system in SLAVE mode with max GRAPHIC SETTINGS (AA @ 0 as it is not needed for 4K) producing outstanding results BUT if I add a second GPU to the system to handle my Real Sim Gear PFD, MFD and GTN 750, the entire system come to a crawl with even modest graphic settings. I am hoping you might be able to explain the overall performance degradation when the second GPU is added? Power is not an issue as I have a Corsair AX1200 reading 90% efficiency in HWINFO. In summary, the second GPU serves only to provide a video signal to the RSG hardware where popout windows are placed. All the Real work is done by the GPU and RTX2080Ti.
        Hope that helps clear up my issue. Thanks.

  42. With the work required to ensure online flying, the CSL etc
    Would it be likely that the team will re-visit the Network data operation?
    I know it isn’t supported as peer to peer, but this is 80% operational.
    Defining what is sent in the data packets seems in the realms of the bug?
    Parked aircraft and livery are the major hiccups. Anything you can advise?
    All working great with 11.50 (following restart)
    Thanks so much

  43. I just tried this with HP Reverb HMD. Much better now, way less stutters.
    “XPD-10569 VR Right eye not working with Vulkan” applies if antialiasing is enabled, but with 1x setting it works fine.

    To me it feels like the stutters come from showing lots of 3D cockpit, not the actual scenery..

  44. Hi guys just wanted to say a massive thank you. I know you are working hard and being as responsive as possible. I know i have very hefty hardware with a 8700k and 2080ti but vulkan is the first time i could comfortably run a modern sim with the world objects at maximum. It was both visually stunning and smooth. If this is just the beta, you are onto something special, keep striving and thanks.

  45. Ben;
    In my setup I have 1080ti for my main monitor for xplane and I have 970 for my additional monitors for everything else and when I start xplane with Vulcan it is saying that that can’t run on the gpu because there is no enough vram memory. Obviously it is reading 970 first instead of 1080ti and defaults back to non Vulcan settings after. When I go back to device manager and disable 970 and start xplane with Vulcan everything works fine. So there is definitely a bug with multiple video cards running Vulcan. Please let me if this is a bug or I can change something is my Nvidia settings. Thanks

  46. Ben and team, using vulkan just almost doubled the frame rates! outstangind work gents! am getting 50/60 frames almost maxed out using skymaxx pro and TBM-900!
    Thanks for the effort!

  47. Great work on Vulkan guys.
    Are you still working on a fix for jagged shadows? I have a high spec pc and can run most on max settings but still have jagged shadows in cockpit.
    Thanks for all your hard work.

  48. Metal performance on my 2013 6 core (D500 3GB) Mac Pro running Mojave is smooth under the clouds and above the clouds, but drops to single FPS when passing through the clouds.

  49. Great work! My speeds have gone up a bit.

    Saw several comments on multiple monitors with dual cards on single cpu and seeing very low frame rates.

    With two Nvidia cards driving six monitors I have found that every time Nvidia sends out a driver update I have to tell driver in the Physx settings to use the 1080 T I rather than the 1060 OC. The difference in fps is about 6-8 vs. 23 to 27 with opengl. It might explain some others problems, hence the comment.

    My monitors use three for xplane, one for AirManager and one each for the RealSimgear units.

    1. Rileyrc, thank you so much for posting your experience with the Physx settings! That has fixed my problem running the multiple cards!

      Stay safe!
      Charlie

  50. Love the improvements from Vulkan so far, but I’m having an issue. The first couple of times I ran 11.50 things were great, with massive improvements and a great appearance, but since then I’ve had an issue where my cockpit textures are becoming very blurry. This is happening with various add-on aircraft and in various places around the UK (using True Earth), but has also happened in places where I have no ortho scenery.

    This just started to happen all of a sudden – like I said initially things were excellent. In terms of system I have an i7 7700k at 4.2GHz, water-cooled, 32GB RAM and a 1060 6GB card. Settings haven’t changed since the first time I ran Vulkan, but are essentially where I had them in 11.41. Only change is that I’ve increased World Objects to MAX.

  51. In 11.50b1, an optimization issue with the default Autogen scenery object was found.
    11.41 and 11.50b1 use the same Autogen object, so this is a problem that has existed
    before. If the Autogen object is not optimized, the meaning of the Vulkan update will
    fade. When using SFD Global in 11.50b1, I got 50 ~ 100% FPS gain compared to using
    the default Autogen object.

    1. I noticed this too using the world-2-xplane scenery. I don’t think that is optimized (something about facades). Leaving that out while testing out the 11.50 beta really helped (and was something I should have done anyway since this is a beta and I should be running vanilla).

      Point is, yes I think there are problems if you are using scenery/autogen that isn’t optimized.

  52. So now when the vulkan is out maybe you could enable steam overlay? You do understand this is a basic steam feature and people can disable it by themselves if they don’t like it. It also provides benefits for Laminar because people can share screenshots on their activity feeds, stream the simulator on steam which gives visibility and may lead to increased sales. No one benefits when it’s disabled.

    1. Steam overlay works fine for me, maybe it’s incompatible with a plugin you use under vulkan?

        1. Yep, didn’t work in OpenGl.

          I think the only plugin at this point is “Better Pushback” (v0.48 that is Vulkan compatible). For testing, I like to keep it simple and then add stuff as the beta progresses.

  53. I can’t wait for that Vulkan VR fix for the right eye. Flying with X-Eyepatch is rough, lol.

    I can’t use VR with OpenGL at all, anymore. I get a crash right out of the gate that takes down my whole video driver. Oculus Rift S and Radeon Vega Frontier Edition with latest Adrenalin drivers. This has been an issue with the AMD drivers for a while.

  54. it is interesting p3d5.0 is announced with dx12, seems following the same go-away from dx11 (which was technically opengl equivalent), but i doubt they still have the flying-brick dynamics, as their change log did not talk about any new flight dynamics.

    1. More important are the clouds out of the box in P3Dv5, I wish XP could at least add decent clouds out of the box too.

  55. Hey Ben after 11.50 KMIA is not working properly i can’t even run the stcok scenery when i take off from Fortlauderdale i see alot of missing scenery and ground textures at KMIA… and sometimes it crashes if im too close to that airport, maybe you guys can take a look at that.
    Thanks.

  56. I can’t imagine I should be the first to ask, but….

    When, Ben? 😀 😀
    (Hint: next beta)
    Not that I need much more for now though ( but that internal camera for helis caugh caugh)

  58. XP11.50b1 has a big problem in openGL mode. Every “GroundTraffic” plugin from any scenery causes XP crash to Desktop. Hope you can fix it in B2.

    i.e EDDM SFD/Plugins/GroundTraffic
    EDDL JustSim/Plugins/GroundTraffic

  61. With so many conflicting error reports with the recent 11.5 beta issues, has Laminar considered stopping updates to X-Plane 11, revert back to 11.41 (stable platform), and concentrate on another verson (X-Plane 12). I read a lot of work went into the recent beta, but I seen (read) more headaches from customers and I can only imagine the headaches/heartaches for the engineers. I think it would be better to stop, think, and reevaluate your priorities. If you continue with trying to find quick patches, you only create more headaches for yourself.

    Develop a new version of X-Plane and set ACTUAL minimums specs. Please do not tease customers, set realistic goals.

    Thanks,

    1. No. We have _not_ considered backing out the Vulkan/Metal rewrite and building “v12” off of 11.41.

      I don’t see how that would help us at all.
      – We want to fix Vulkan-rewrite-related issues now _before_ we dump any more code changes on top of them. Delaying fixing those bugs makes the bugs harder to fix.
      – We want to build future updates of X-Plane on top of the modern rendering infrastructure of 11.50, not the old infrastructure of 11.40.

      It’s an early beta, and users have jumped in whole hog with systems with a LOT of chaos going on in them. To put this in perspective, on Friday, Jennifer Sidney and I dug into the reports of “it still crashes on startup in b3”. And we found that 100% of the startup crash bugs we looked at were due to either:

      1. Old drivers or
      2. A third party add-on (e.g. Bandicam, ReShade, etc.) crashing when we try to connect to the driver and they hop in the middle.

      So there’s a lot of teeth gnashing in the comments: “I have this and that and it exploded and I’m really sad”, but as I grumpily said in a past comment: the purpose of the beta is to fix the beta bugs, not to delight users.

      For what it’s worth, the amount of chaos that I see strikes me as reasonable given the _combination_ of it being and early beta _and_ the amount of third party stuff causing crashes. If we were later in the beta or we were seeing this on clean systems I’d be more alarmed.

      cheers
      Ben

      1. Thank you for your quick response and your detailed answer. I appreciate it. 🙂 I found 11.5 worked, but 11.5r3 had issues with not sufficient vram or program freezing. I have updated all the Nvidia drivers (restored to factory settings and changed both Anisotropic filtering andor Threaded optimization). As with all betas there are a lot of unforseen “bugs”. I do think things will resolve in the near future. Keep up the good work!

        1. The users who do not have problems are not commenting here. I had zero problems from beta 1, and I did several hour long flights. I also don’t use any addon besides the TBM.

      2. My crash on startup shouldn’t involve either of those. I’m using up-to-date NVIDIA drivers and a fresh copy of X-Plane with no addons.

    2. Good God man, It’s an early beta. Been out for 10 days in the wild. Stick with the stable 11.41 and wait for 11.50 to get stable.

      1. I already did! 🙂 I know it will eventually work. I was hoping to utilize my crappy GeForce 1050 better. I have i7700k 4.2 with 32 gb RAM. I see Santa coming early with a new card, which my motherboard can handle. Which one is the question 2080 or 2080ti? I would love to get the 2080ti, but $$$$ is the sticking point. Have fun and be safe!

  62. Ben and Sidney, thanks for your outstanding work!
    With the new texture loading strategy on Vulkan, are the non-dds (png without a pyramid) images also loaded on demand ? More specifically, I’m very interested in your answer for the case of the tiling shader’s png map.

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