X-Plane 11.50 Beta 16: Less Weird, Slightly Faster

X-Plane 11.50 beta 16 is now out. Probably the most important bugfix is the set of fixes for broken plugin drawing–this affectedSkyMaxx Pro and a number of add-ons in pop-out windows.

At this point we think we are good in terms of plugin compatibilityAPIs – if your add-on still acts funny in beta 16, please let us knowASAP.

Performance Investigations

Sidney and I spent a bunch of time over the last week looking atperformance. Here’s what we have found so far:

1. X-Plane 11.50 beta 14 made cloud performance significantly worseon the GPU. I accidentally turned off optimized off-screenclouds. This is fixed as of beta 15.
2. X-Plane 11.50 beta 15 made CPU performance worse on AMD cards onWindows during panel drawing – the same bugs that caused the incorrectplugin drawing hit performance as well. This is fixed as of beta16. (XPD-10943)
3. X-Plane 11.50 beta 15 leaks VRAM when scenery or the aircraft getsloaded. That doesn’t necessarily hurt performance but it’s definitelynot good. This is fixed in beta 16 (XPD-10941). If you had blurrytextures, definitely re-test now.
4. NVidia cards are losing about 1.5 ms of GPU time as a result ofthe bug fix for wrong reflections in Vulkan. We found the cause of theperformance loss but we have not fixed it yet. This was introduced inbeta 12 when we fixed the reflections. (XPD-10953)
5. Temporary slow frame rate or stutters when turning your head withVulkan. If your frame rate is smooth and good when flying and thentemporarily slows down only when your view changes as lot (e.gcircling, turning your head, etc.), that’s this bug. The cause isslower draw time when we draw 3-d scenery out of system memory whilewe wait for the DMA to VRAM to finish. (XPD-10898)

From what we can tell, a huge percentage of the blog commentcomplaints about performance are all XPD-10898.

At this point, with beta 16, we do not want any additionalperformance bug reports. Given that we have two performance issuesfully diagnosed but not fixed, there’s no point in collecting moredata – the two existing problems would mask other ones. We are alsodrowning in performance bug reports at this point; we don’t havebandwidth to triage additional ones right now.

Ben Supnik
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