X-Plane 11.50 no longer allows for uncompressed textures – if a DDS is present on disk, we will use it. It’s an area where we just need to collect use-case data to better tune the algorithm. This new “on the fly paging” is…well, it’s completely new, and I suspect it will need a lot of debugging during beta. You can still lower the overall texture resolution to better fit your card’s budget. The result should be smoother and generally less disruptive. When running with Metal and Vulkan, X-Plane will reduce the resolution of your textures while you fly, in the background, without stutters, preferring to reduce resolution on textures that are not being used right now. With the OpenGL driver, when VRAM is exhausted, textures are moved to system memory, and the application stutters while the driver makes this mad last-minute shuffle. The Vulkan and Metal back-ends change their approach to running out of VRAM. Full scenery shadows are still available and are helped by the Vulkan and Metal driver a decent machine should be able to run full autogen + scenery shadows at 30 fps. Now that we have Vulkan and Metal running, we can make some judgments about what will and won’t be real-time. While I have in the past dismissively claimed that they are doing it wrong (“don’t put every topping on your pizza”) the inevitable truth is that we are violating an industry UI norm by having the highest possible settings run beyond the scope of the fastest possible computers our users can get their hands on. What we have found over the last few years is that users will drag every slider all the way to the right, and then be surprised that the sim has poor performance. (If you really like flying at 5 fps, you can re-enable this in settings.txt – the underlying tech has not been removed.) I should also mention that we’ve changed what the reflections slider does – it’s now like X-Plane 10 and does not attempt to update the environment cubemaps in real-time. There are also command line overrides to control the driver for people running performance testing scenarios. before the main menu) it will revert to OpenGL to keep you from getting “locked out” but random crashes while flying won’t do this. In X-Plane 11.50, there is a check-box in the rendering settings that enables Vulkan or Metal you’ll have to restart for the change to take effect. When that is will depend on the bug reports I’m crossing my fingers. Our plan is to move to an open public beta soon once we have some feedback on how well the build is working. Last week we sent out our first build of the Vulkan/Metal ready X-Plane (which will be version 11.50) to an external sight, and last night we sent out the first private beta.
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