The first release candidate for X-Plane 11.51 is now available. (Release notes here.)

Thanks to the users who filed bugs (especially Bill), we now understand the issues with the HP Reverb G2, but the fix is not in 11.51r1. The fix needs more testing than will fit into this patch. If you have an HP Reverb G2 and haven’t filed a bug, please do, so we can find you to send you a possible test build. In the meantime, we won’t hold up 11.51 and the new Gateway airports; rather we can work on the G2 in parallel.

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.

58 comments on “X-Plane 11.51r1 Now Available

  1. I am using 11.51r1 with a G2 without controllers.

    Even if I check vr mouse I cannot use the mouse within VR.

    Is this a bug?

      1. Even when using the controllers there is no button which creates a “left mouse click”… I can press any button but I do not have any reaction.

  2. Thanks for your efforts.

    After trying the (other sim) im pleased to say im sticking with Xplane mainly because i only fly in VR and Hand controllers are a MUST!.

    But the last few updates have killed my sim going from 45 fps stable to 30 with many many Stutters.

    So last week i decided to refresh my system with a clean install of windows and Xplane, no addons only basic XP11, however the low FPS and stutters are still there. has this been looked into?
    i’m worried if i update again it will make things worse..

    Keep up the great work

    Russ

      1. I have done Ben a few times.. I have 12G of VRAM so I’ll assume it’s the CPU bottleneck even tho I’m running 5.1 GHz..

        Quite a few people have reported a huge drop in FPS and more stutters in the last few updates so it’s not just me..

        1. No, it’s not just you.
          i7 4790K / DDR3 CL7 1600 24 GB / GTX 1070 OC 8GB / Seasonic Ultra 1000W Titanium / ssds Samsung Pro 1 TB / ND-H15 / and everything perfectly configured for all cores and threads to use … Nothing, than NO, the second core is that it works to the maximum and the others very little. The graphics at 50-60 (1080p-60Hz) / NVIDIA 460.89 … I had to lower resolution so that it has nothing but a little stutter … BUT STILL HAVE IT !!, with Vulkan especially.

  3. After downloading the steam version, the ACF files of some aircrafts are missing, indicating that the downloaded files are missing. Then there is no way to go next. The integrity of the verification has passed. I don’t know what the problem is

      1. Hi, please could you look at orbx south of England as this program places fasades all over your global airports and these look really bad and only a few airports are payware, I would much appreciate if you could fix this in your next update. James

        1. Ok but it is also in 11.50 as well as orbx put there own autogen in and this is what affects the airports.

          1. You have installed OrbX wrong – in a normal installation this does not happen, but it is a common problem when users don´t follow the instructions precisely. Check the OrbX forums for a fix to this.

  4. I have an rtx 3080 10gb on the latest driver (460.97) and a reverb G2. When I turn off VR, textures show at maximum resolution with no problem, loading up to 3-5gb as shown in the xplane UI. As soon as I turn on VR, they fall back to blurry textures, occupying around 1-1.2gb, consistently. They they often yoyo between 1 and 4gb (as shown in the xplane UI), even in the hangar where the walls show high quality textures then drop down almost immediately. Is this a known bug which will be fixed in 11.51, or should I file a bug report? Or, am I doing something wrong?

    1. Hi Nick,

      I suggest you try and search for some of the suggestion around the web that explains how to make the Reverb G2 experience much better. What is alarming that the issue is not X-Plane own issue but on any other title and the main cause might be part of the OS you are running the G2.

      Here are some links, hope it will help I know my experience with my 1080TI is quite good with the G2.

      //www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaMdAVFBgMA

      //www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zzkSB5AvSs&t=22s

      //www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6fQD1dDtTk

      Also disable “XBOX Game Bar” (search using the “start” button”). Remember to disable also the “Graphical settings” on same screen (scroll down) and disable “Hardware accelerate GPU scheduling”.

      Hope that will help.

      Cheers

      //www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w4hZ3fZXzU

      1. Nope, not using FlyWithLua .
        I did try the “VMI-twick VR” which I think is good, but I also fly without it with good results.

        Of course I have to tone down settings, I suggest to disable AA first to boost performance.

  5. Will install it tonight, thanks for this update.

    I do have one question, more out of curiosity than anything else. I see that “XPD-7871 Dark contrails instead of white.” has been hanging around since 11.35 days. Just curious if that is something planned to be fixed? I don´t want to be a pain in the …. about that, and I´m ok with the contrails, but was wondering why has this been on the list so long?

  6. I’m sorry if this is off-topic, but are you planning to ever update the navdata of X-Plane? I’m not expecting monthly updates or anything, just maybe a 2020 or 2019 airac?

    1. Even free updates are going to be six months old, if LR has the same constraints that developers have when releasing navdata with their products. Updating your own Custom Data folder to the very latest AIRAC costs right around $10 USD or so. Navigraph or Aerosoft would love to help you out. 😉

      1. Yeah, that was what I meant in the original question, I was meaning like once a year or something. And, as long as you fly in the United States, you can geet the FAA CIFP with the latest Airac for free! Well, I guess we’re paying for it with our taxes…

    2. You can buy from third parties such as Navigraph. It is very cheap. But would likely cost Laminar a significant sum to license for their whole user base, which is why you probably won’t see updated nav data outside of full paid versions of the sim.

      1. That makes sense, although I do think they updated the nave data once (from 1702 to 1802) in XP-11. $10 USD is pretty cheap as you said.

  7. Ouch. 11.50 to 11.51 and back to Open GL stutter experience. Frighteningly, when i went back 11.50 (complete reinstall and vanilla C172 test flight) the stutters were there. I filed bug report. Hope to get back performance I had before trying 11.51 whether with 11.50 or 11.51. Ill keep testing to see what might be happening to cause the performance drop. Thanks Ben et al Laminar for the journey.

  8. Yesterday I saw a update for my x plane mobile app. It included FMOD sounds to the Cirrus SF-50. When are these sounds going to be in the desktop version?

    1. No public date for that yet but almost everything from mobile makes it to desktop eventually – there are a small number of mobile planes licensed from third parties directly that can’t come over, but we really try to plan everything to go everywhere.

      1. I bet it’s going to be in 2021 april or something like that. 1. Because you can make a post saying X-Plane 12 IS OUT… APRIL FOOLS, ha! Got you! 2. Because it’s FMOD sounds. They shouldn’t be hard to port over to X-Plane 11. I’m just guessing that you and your team is working hard right now.

        Man, this simulator just gets better and better! Thanks!

        Marco, a aviation enthusiast that learned to fly because of X-Plane 11.

    2. There is a freeware mod on the forum that has FMOD sounds, an autothrottle, an updated flight model, and a few other changes. You should be able to find it by searching “SF-50 G2 for X-Plane 11”

  9. Hi, one that could possibly solve an ongoing issue. When we select to regenerate icons, could you have it so it detects those already done and display possibly with TiC box , than give us the option to only do those without, or all. A bit like the installer as I have asked before, Shouldlshow current and new version than ask would you like to update before it goes through all the mosions, save a lot of headaches.

    THanks for all your good work Xplane is flying, literraly.

  10. XPD-11079 Fixed inverted normal maps in Vulkan/Metal with HDR off.

    Hi,

    finally.. this _XPD-11079_ is fixed..
    reported this looong ago..

    It was said you couldn’t reproduce this..

    Nevertheless, thank you!

  11. Updated and confirmed Stutters are present… but not all the time.

    seems to get worse as i get close to the clouds, this problem went away in B9 but sins has returned… all stock with no mods.. This stutter problem has been one of the Biggest and main problems for me and many others…

    clearly x-plane is pushing to much for 11G V-ram and a i7 9700K @5.1 Ghz
    the problem has not gone away in many many months ben and its reported evey time by so many members.. Can you please please please give us an option to Lower the cloud resolutions and some more control of what is being displayed.. your settings and so BOLD and basic we cannot tailor the sim to what our system likes…. with out need to “hack” the game.. if i did this the sim is no longer Stock so support is out of the question… and why would you want us all to hack the game in the first place relying on 3d party lau scripts?

    Not having a moan i just think enough is enough with the stutters now.. no headway has been made so lets look at it from a different approach, i think the Holy grail is to give us control of things like sky texture resolutions, airport cars, buildings etc, i think it will remove most of your complaints of systems crashing, failings, fps, stutters etc…

    if we did a Poll you may find 80/90% users would agree… would that be enough to tell the team what ” what we want ”

    Russ

    1. Hi Russ,

      I don’t think having a poll where 80% of the people who filled it out said “please give us more settings” would be convincing.

      1. We already know that some of uor users want a lot more settings. The users who want this have been incredibly vocal, so the problem isn’t “we need to be even more vocal because LR didn’t notice our previous very vocal, um, vocalizations.” 🙂

      2. The counter balance of this is not a group of users who will vocally say “we want less settings…we hate settings so much that we are going to go find a poll asking for more settings among a group of users who really like to tweak the sim and jump in and go “no no not that please.”

      The counter balance of more settings is the users who don’t understand what the settings do and therefore effectively set them randomly and then complain that X-plane “looks terrible and is really slow.” We use to hit this over and over and over and over – it was a constant source of stubbed toes among new users coming to the sim. Our goal with the settings has been “no wrong answers” in terms of how you can config the sim, something we definitely did not have before.

      1. thanks for your reply Ben,

        It’s a real shame so many users are forced to hack the game just to make it work stutter free.. I think you should include this in your sales pitch that the sim may not work correctly without 3d party interventions to change basic display settings..

        For me the sim is no longer useable in VR anymore, it’s just no fun with all the FPS and stutter issues going on at the moment, even with stock files it just isn’t working for me…

        I’ll check back in 6 months but for now I’m forced to switch to the other sim with all its fantastic display options and stutter free

        regards
        Russ

        1. I think you need to look to your own system settings, addons, plugins etc. because VR DOES work very well for a lot of people. I have just finished such a flight without SIGNIFICANT problems. But I do not expect everything to be perfect. Maybe you should ask yourself if you are expecting too much from a PC sim and your hardware?

          Glyn

          1. Hey Glyn.

            im running a I7 9700K OC to 5.2 Ghz. have tried slower OC’s and stock all with the same results. im running a 1080Ti so plenty of Vram to go around.. on SSD
            the system is 3 months old all ROG with a kickass AOI so good quality parts apart from the GPU that’s a little older.. i can run every game out there in VR at max settings across the board with out any issues so sadly x-plane is the (only) program i have that’s dragging its heals.. its the only reason i built this new system 🙁

            after formatting all my drives, reinstalling windows, updated drivers and a fresh copy of XP i found the same old stutters at key points and locations. looking at processes lasso the system is not running max but the stutters are still there..

            i did get a email from the team asking me to do a few things for them to take a look at so i hope there is an answer instead of just living with it.

            sorry ben if my post looked bad, that was not my intention, i still love ya

            Russ

          2. What I would say to Ben is that maybe, instead of opening up a can of worms with advanced graphics settings, have two sets of graphics settings. One for normal use and one for VR and the system automatically switches between them. That way one can have high settings for normal and lower settings for VR without having to go into settings every time and change things.

        2. I: 4790K 4.4 GHz / 24 GB 1,600 CL7 RAM / 8GB VRAM / SSD Samsung Pro1 TB / Seasonic ULTRA 1000 80+ Titanium. The same thing happens to me and I bet everyone does too. Consequence of being mononucleus and hardly uses the other cores and threads. The graphics do not use it enough … What a mania to abuse the processor so
          They have to do it with a new engine and I hope it’s for the X Plane 12 because if not, I’m going to MFS 2020, I don’t like leaving X Plane but, the stuttering irritates me a lot … and the ugly and unreal fog on the horizon .

  12. Hi Ben, just FYI,
    I will run few flights with aftermath.bat tommorow as dev loss err is happening to me. Expect few reports in your system by tommorow.
    Regards
    Jan

  13. Hello

    Seems maybe there are growing reports of increased stutters. Is this performance issue anomalous or do you think the culprit(s) is/are known? I have experienced increased stutters correlating with 11.51 and some of its RCs and betas which seem to have arisen since 11.50. These are tested via completely vanilla install with zero plugins. I think its safe to rule out hardware bottlenecks when the stuttering is evident at any frame rate. Im not sure why some users arrive at such a possible outcome to this performance artifact.

    Hope everyone in LR had a nice holiday and HNY to you. Looking forward to 2021 and purging 2020.

  14. I have discovered an upside to the apparently eternal issue of flashing clouds. Over Christmas, our two pre-teen great nieces visited, and they leapt on the simulator – two on one chair – mastering it within minutes (much to the irritation of their great-uncle, I might add). But when the clouds started flashing, they were delighted. ‘Oooh look!’ they cried. ‘Lightning!!’

  15. Hi,
    In the menu of the joystick’s configuration, for the throttle, I can choose the left toe brake or the right toe brake or custom command. When I select custom command with 2 commands, I can’t choose the left toe brake or the right toe brake. Why?

  16. I do get periods of very low FPS with 11.51r1 (low = one digit, with four digit CPU time, while GPU is around 0.00xx) and it’s rather challanging to establish a pattern. I can fly with the same settings (reflection details low, high amount of objects on an i7-10700k with 128GB RAM and 24GB VRAM) over the an area for many hours at 40-60fps (60fps is the cap), but in some cases FPS are dropping. If I let the sim run it will recover eventually, which can take up to 30-40 minutes (!) real time. Bug has been filed – just wondering if anyone else is experiencing this?

  17. I have found an airport incorrectly removed from the sim and Now need directions on how to have you guys put it back in. It can’t be done from the Gateway bug interface as it won’t recognize the code. I noticed several airports in WED were listed as closed but aren’t. What is the new way to handle this?

  18. Hello!

    When Vulkan was released, there where planes that were not able to load in with Vulkan or did not function completely. Is this fixed for some of them? Or is this on the plane developers side?

    Kind Regards

    1. It depends on the aircraft, but I am not aware of any cases where we had a compatibility bug that was not fixed (e.g. we intended to make X-Plane more compatible with old aircraft but we did not get to it). There are definitely some aicraft that will be “OpenGL only” because of what they do with the plugin system.

  19. I’m still experiencing significant frame dropping and stuttering in MacOS. Since Beta 3 on both 10.15.7 and now 11.1. Stock install no extras. Radeon VII and 64gb memory.

    1. If you file a bug we can give you some differential tests to run. But I just looked at the diffs between beta 2 and beta 3 and there aren’t changes that would affect perf.

      The big difference is that gateway airports are updated – so if some gateway artist added tons of detail to a sparse airport, that airport will now have slower FPS for the same rendering settings – that’s expected though.

      1. I never ran Beta 2. I upgraded to Big Sur, then quickly updated to Beta 3. So I never ran Beta 2 under 10.15.7, 11.0 or 11.1. I went back to my Carbon Copy Cloner backup at 10.15.7 and confirmed Beta 1 ran smoothly. At that point, Beta 2 was no longer available, so I upgraded to Beta 3 under 10.15.7 and the same stutters and fps problems showed up, so I don’t think it’s a Big Sur issue. Is Beta 2 out there to test?

  20. Great update! I’m not a VR fan but I’m a multi screen setup pilot. Looks great and keep up the great work! The future looks very good for Laminar!

    i7-9700 @ 4.7GHz | RTX 2080 | DDR4 32GB (2666MHz) | 3 x 43″ 1080p 60Hz TV’s | Windows 10

  21. I updated Steam-version 11.51. But I cannot launch it ever since. I’ve sent the crash report pending feedback.

  22. Just updated to XP 11.51r1 all working great, no crashes so far, but I’m using SkyMaxx Pro v4.9.6.2 and I’m not seeing cloud shadows which are switched on and strangely as I passed through a layer of high Sirus cloud it passed through the whole plane.
    Not a major problem, just thought I’d pass it on.
    Great job by all at Laminar, all the very best for 2021.

  23. Santa brought an M1 MacBook Air (entry level with 8G RAM) and I just downloaded the X-plane Demo to it. It’s amazingly fast at reasonable settings, e.g High texture resolution, HDR and Object Detail Low to Medium. Even in Low visibility conditions I got like 35-40 fps.

    And it’s still using Rosetta as I understand it? I’m looking forward to Apple Silicon version of X-plane 🙂

    1. Yep – that’s running under Rosetta and it’s quite zippy. A few reasons why:
      – The M1 macs are big steps up compared to the same slot previously (e.g. mini to mini, MBA to MBA).
      – Rosetta’s a JIT translator, not an interpreter, so it _is_ running ARM code once it cross-compiles it…I think as programmers we tend to think of emulation as a naive interpreted VM.
      – On these smaller machines the GPU may be the factor, and the GPU code runs natively because it’s not ARM or x86.

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