If I could have a nickel for every time I get asked “should I buy X for X-Plane 10”, well, I’d at least have enough nickels to buy a new machine.  But what new machine would I buy?  What hardware will be important for X-Plane 10?

The short answer is: I don’t know, it’s too soon.  The reason it’s too soon is because we have a lot of the new technology for version 10 running, but there’s still a lot of optimization to be done.

As I have posted before, the weakest link in your rendering pipeline is what limits framerate.  But what appears to be the weakest link now in our in-development builds of X-Plane 10 might turn out not to be the weakest link once we optimize everything.  I don’t want to say “buy the fastest clocked CPU you can” if it turns out that, after optimization, CPU is not the bottleneck.

One thing is clear: X-Plane 10 will be different from X-Plane 9 in how it uses your hardware.  There has been a relatively straight line from X-Plane 6 to 7 to 8 of being bottlenecked on single-core CPU performance; GPU fill rate has stayed ahead of X-Plane pixel shaders (with the possible exception of massive multi-monitor displays on graphics cards that were never meant for this use).  X-Plane 10 introduces enough new technology (instancing, significantly more complex pixel shaders, deferred rendering) that I don’t think we can extrapolate.

To truly tune a system for X-Plane 10, I fear you may need to wait until users are running X-Plane 10 and reporting back results.  We don’t have the data yet.

I can make two baseline recommendations though, if you are putting together a new system and can’t wait:

  1. Make sure your video card is “DirectX 11 class”.  (This confuses everyone, because of course X-Plane uses OpenGL.  I am referring to its hardware capabilities.)  This means a Radeon HD 5000 or higher, or an NVidia GeForce 400 or higher.  DirectX 11 cards all do complete hardware instancing (something X-Plane 10 will use) and they have other features (like tessellation) that we hope to use in the future.  We’re far enough into DX11 that these cards can be obtained at reasonable prices.
  2. Get at least a quad-core CPU.  It won’t be a requirement, but we have been pushing to get more work onto more cores in X-Plane 10; I think we’ll start to see a utilization point where it’s worth it.  The extra cores will help you run with more autogen during flight, cut down load time, and allow you to run smoother AI aircraft with the new ATC system.

Finally, please don’t ask me what hardware you need to buy to set everything to maximum; I’ve tried to cover that here and here.

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.

28 comments on “Hardware Buying Advice (or Lack Thereof)”

  1. for the graphics I think the use of tessellation is the key to the new simulator, immersive scenarios, detailed cities and obviously the terrain

  2. First of all thank you Ben for the post, I am one of those who are going to be trading up for XP10, in most cases in the past most purchases have been for running other software (Photoshop, Final Cut Pro) which are both chip intensive, but i have noticed the specific requirements that XP requires, or really demands, and i agree that the biggest and fastest chip may not be the best as unlike in the past as we now have better software and operating systems to differentiate the loads across cores, for which fortunately helps and not hinders complex software like Xplane.

    A explanation of tessellation would be a interesting post…..

  3. Any chance of a 64-bit native version to take advantage of systems with more than 3GB of RAM?

  4. Just bought the new iMac 27″ w/ a 3.1ghz quad core i5, and with an ATI 6970 w/ 2GB VRAM and 8GB of regular RAM.

    I’m not asking if this will run XPlane, because it sure as heck will, I just gave myself one day to make everyone jealous before I go back to being a generally polite human being. So there you go :-). I think my system will rock XplaneX just fine.

  6. Useful post, thanks for that. Are we going to hear anything at all about Plane Making additions that might save time for current modellers?

  7. It would be silly to buy an expensive system now for a sim you don’t even know when it will be released. The day it actually is released, you may find that the video card you bought for $499 only costs $199 and there’s a new one at $499 that’s twice as fast…

    1. You can always wait and get more hw for less….hw deflates in value. 🙂 But…you don’t get use of it until then.

      So if the upgrade doesn’t benefit v9, I think there is some logic there. But some upgrades (particularly a faster CPU) would benefit flying now too.

      1. Too right, my GTX 275 does xp9 very nicely, so I won’t upgrade until I absolutely have to…by then the uber fast 590 that’s rare now and 4 times faster will be $200. Ooooh my precious…

  8. I’ve got several questions.

    Firstly, are the conclusions I should draw at this point such that CPU is still more important for v10, at least pending optimization, than GPU? I will be the person responsible for rolling out XP10 at our flight training organization, and the features most important for us are flight model, AI, ATC and weather plus general terrain features (no gee-whiz gizmos required, except global lighting will be nice for night flying training for our students. Thus far, I’ve used XP9 as a test platform. Can you tell me anything about how sharply the framerates will be affected if I want similar graphics quality as now, with global lighting on plus as much AI as makes sense. The system will be a core i7 990x (6 cores) with nvidia gtx590 gpu x2 with the graphics extended across 3 monitors at max resolution (I can’t post a screenie of current settings, but they produce excellent frames). I know you’re still optimizing, but is there any idea you can give me of cpu commit increase/AI flight simulated?

    1. No. The conclusion you should draw is that we don’t know yet what is most important. I think what is most important pre-optimization is of no use to you, since you will be running the sim _after_ optimization. I cannot tell you anything about how framerates will be affected if you want global lighting, and I would argue that having global lighting is _not_ similar graphics quality to what you have now.

  9. I´m building a new machine. Just need you to tell me, go for 4GB DDR3 or 8GB? Will it make a difference in X-Plane? You can always get faster memory going 4GB

      1. Yesterday’s sweet spot becomes today’s bare minimum and then it becomes too low even for that. I’ve always doubled the amount of RAM between my system builds. My single-core machine had 1GB, then I built a new one around a dual-core CPU and 2GB RAM, and now my Quad core system has 4GB. My next system will be 6 or 8 cores with 6 or 8GB of RAM. Looks like the pattern of 1GB per core has been holding true for a while.

  10. Will X-Plane 10 run on the new ARM-processors, that the future Macs will have and will it be available in the Mac-App-Store;-))))

    I know, tough questions….

    1. Ha! I’ll dust off the “My G5 never goes out of style” question:

      Will X-Plane 10 work on my ancient PowePC G4/G5 running the same ATI Radeon 9600 Pro/Nvidia 5700fx if I upgrade the RAM?

      2. Wow, Ben… coming from a Mac developer, that’s saying something! I’m liking Laminar research more and more. 😉

        Blessings, Patrick

        P.S. Please wish your Mom a happy Mother’s Day for me!

  13. I’m a hard-core X-Plane user. I use X-Plane for IFR flights around the world in as real a procedure as I can get. As I seek the highest amount of realism and fps possible with X-Plane, it’s important that I can optimize X-Plane to run the best considering both realistic visuals and fps. This leaves me with a few questions. My system specs are relatively new. I have a NVIDIA GeForce graphics card with over 1024 MB dedicated video memory, hundreds of GBs of free disk space, 4 GB of RAM, and an Intel Dual-Core CPU clocked at 2.26 Ghz. I can almost run X-Plane at max setings, but frame rate suffers.
    Based on what I have read on xplane.org, some people say X-Plane is still not as integrated in with hardware as is possible, e.g. it uses resources more wastefully and produces less graphic output than some other software out there which have a smaller resource footprint and better graphic output. (I’m talking about XP9, of course.)
    Example, by rules of OpenGL, (i’m not a programmer so I’m not sure, but I’m citing other people’s posts), X-plane is coded a little by the “this is not recommended but you can do it” in OpenGL. Clean and efficient code by standards, in other words.
    My personal setup, in my opinion, is limited by my CPU, all else is actually under utilized.
    So, before I close, I have one burning question. Will XP10, or any general future 10.xx or 11 release, be using such technology as the NVIDIA PhysX or CUDA portion of the graphics card for more accurate physics, thereby reducing CPU stress? Maybe ATI cards have a similar technology. I could be wrong in case this is not supported by OpenGL. I was just thinking so because if the code was more “green” considering resources, and utilizing such technologies if possible, then X-Plane would be able to run better on more limited systems, instead of needing a super computer for top results. I think this would be an interesting questing to bring up amongst the developers. X-plane cleaner, faster and more efficient. Add x64 support and X-plane really takes off! Thanks for the time and sorry for the long post, just trying to throw out some possible ideas I think are crucial. 😉

    1. Hi,

      I don’t know who exactly says X-Plane 9 “uses resources more wastefully and produces less graphic output than some other software out there which have a smaller resource footprint and better graphic output”. If you or someone else has a specific, quantifiable claim about graphics throughput or tech, we can discuss it; without real data it’s just speculation and rumors.

      I will try to write a post later about GPGPU/OpenCL. I think it would not help X-Plane to adopt these technologies, but the explanation is a bit long. NVidia PhysX is not particularly interesting to us..a number of other game developers have written criticisms of PhysX, but the bottom line is that PhysX as an idea (e.g. we will all have physics DSP accelerators just like we have graphics accelerators) is over – the most likely acceleration of PhysX is on the same hw that can run CUDA, and PhysX was bought by NVidia. So there is no advantage of PhysX over CUDA/OpenCL.

      It is _always_ a goal to make X-Plane’s rendering engine cleaner, faster, and more efficient. But utilizing CUDA or OpenCL isn’t going to help people with low-end systems run X-Plane. CUDA and OpenCL require a high-end GPU (E.g. a DirectX 11 GPU) – if you have one of those, by definition you don’t have a low end system! No one is sitting around with a computer that can’t run X-plane but _can_ run a powerful CUDA app.

      In the end, to support lower end systems, we can only do two things, both of which we are trying to do in X-Plane 10:
      1. Make the rendering engine as _efficient_ as possible.
      2. Make the “expensive” rendering settings be optional so that users can pick their trade-off of quality vs framerate.

      1. I see your point here. It actually highlights what I said. By my experience, it’s not the GPU or any other component on my PC. It _maybe_ seems to be the CPU. This fact is supported by the fact that when I aim the camera directly at an airport without scenery, e.g. just runways and ground, fps increase 3X! Yet when I aim it at the surrounding landscape it bogges down fps. just interested what causes this fact if I already have a very powerful system. Does this mean X-Plane with max settings was designed beyond the specs of any current computer? Even with some settings reduced it runs so.

        1. Max specs….
          http://www.x-plane.com/blog/2006/12/this-one-goes-to-11/
          It’s not a question of max specs. Since different machines have different capability AND users can select different levels of quality for different parts of the scenery AND different regions have different rendering load, clamping max scenery load to ensure a minimum fps anywhere in the world at max settings would mean mediocre scenery for a lot of people a lot of the time.

  14. How come x-plane will only use 4GB of RAM , seems like a low amount compared to what people can have/ other programs utilize.

      1. Ahh ok, did not know that. Thanks , will x-plane move to a higher bit configuration

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