X-plane on a Mac

[Comanche 417]

Ive always been a PC person. However, my company just got me a new 27" Imac with 5k Retina display for work.

Its a beautiful looking computer and seems plenty fast. The display is amazing and makes the 1920*1080 27" on my PC look like garbage in comparison. (and I use to think it was awesome). I would love to install the the X-plane demo on it just to see how it would look, but I think they might frown at that, so Ill refrain. I dont think X-plane would run well at this resolution, but curious if it would look better or worse.

 

Looking at the specs of this computer, its an i5 with a 2GB radeon card. I just upgraded my PC video card to a 4GB and saw a huge difference. Im thinking with the slower processor and slower video card, X-plane will not run as good as on the PC.  Just curious if anyone here is using an Imac for X-plane 10 and if it runs well?  I would love to move to a mac someday, and I know these come with i7 processors now as well (but very expensive).  Also, I know there are some addons for X-plane that dont support Linux.  Is that true for the MAC as well? Ive been into XP for a while, but never paid attention to that.

 

Rob

 

[whoispankaj 51]

4k tv + gtx 770 + xplane sucks..thats what i have and its a little better than slide show

With settings to little less than moderate

to be honest it would be cheaper to build your own than just buy a mac for xp

[alpha12125 213]

Ive always been a PC person. However, my company just got me a new 27" Imac with 5k Retina display for work.

Its a beautiful looking computer and seems plenty fast. The display is amazing and makes the 1920*1080 27" on my PC look like garbage in comparison. (and I use to think it was awesome). I would love to install the the X-plane demo on it just to see how it would look, but I think they might frown at that, so Ill refrain. I dont think X-plane would run well at this resolution, but curious if it would look better or worse.

 

Looking at the specs of this computer, its an i5 with a 2GB radeon card. I just upgraded my PC video card to a 4GB and saw a huge difference. Im thinking with the slower processor and slower video card, X-plane will not run as good as on the PC.  Just curious if anyone here is using an Imac for X-plane 10 and if it runs well?  I would love to move to a mac someday, and I know these come with i7 processors now as well (but very expensive).  Also, I know there are some addons for X-plane that dont support Linux.  Is that true for the MAC as well? Ive been into XP for a while, but never paid attention to that.

 

Rob

In my personal opinion: Mac used to "sort of keep up" with pc. You usually had around 20ish percent less performance than a PC but for that you got a great design and all the other apple things. However i get the feeling that in the last two years they went "screw the gaming market they dont buy it anyways". With them starting to solder RAM into the Motherboard and going 4K without offering any sort of gpu that is capable of running it they show the way. Don't get me wrong i still adore the imac and contemplate all the time about buying one for the job as the display is top notch and the design is breathtaking. However for Flightsim there are way better alternatives. If you just fly 1h a week and dont care much for high settings then sure, go ahead. But if you really want to crank up the settings then you need raw power that you dont get in a mac. Just overclocking brings significant boosts and doing that in a MAC is almost impossible.

 

So stay strong enjoy the mac in an environment where it is suited for and just buy a 4k monitor at home, a 6gb 980 gtx ti and be astounded how good x-plane looks in 4k at more than 10fps

[nanosour 9]

I've been running XP on a 2009 iMac i7 with 512MB VRAM and it's playable at medium settings with pretty good frame rates.  It takes a lot of tweaking (sometimes during flight), but I find that part of the joy of XP.

 

XP will run pretty decent on that 4K iMac if you smack the resolution down to 1900 x 1080.  If I played a lot of XP I wouldn't bother with the iMac.  And yes I agree it's an awesome productivity machine.  Just horrible for gaming.  

 

After 6 years of XP on my iMac, I'm ready to build a 4790K/GTX 980 Ti as an XP only rig.  Probably within the next month.

[brucek 38]

I have the 5k iMac (Retina), although with the i7 CPU and a 4GB GPU, and 32G Ram. Performance is OK at 1440p res and 2X FSAA, but sometimes down to 20-ish fps. I agree that going back to my 1080p PC monitor looks like something that's almost low-res.... but between the lower res and my home-built water-cooled PC with a 780 GPU, the perf is miles better.....

 

Bruce.

[tonywob 4,769]

An interesting thing I just read over on x-plane.org is that the OpenGL drivers for Mac OS X and the GTX 770 don't support hardware instancing, only software. This means that things like autogen or repeated objects such as parked cars or World2XPlane scenery don't perform as well as it would on Windows.

 

How much truth is in this I don't know, but if it is the case, it will be time for me to move away from Mac OS X. Is anyone able to test this out? i.e. Is running bootcamp on the same Mac and able to do a performance comparison

[Til19031986 4]

Hey everyone, 

Maybe I'll quickly just explain the whole situation and what I would like to do with X Plane: 
so first of all, I kinda wanna stick with Mac. For me in a way it is, ever since I have been using a Macbook Pro I never really wanted to change. Also me and my girlfriend and me are buying this Mac together so she also has a say in this  Additionally, I am still a student so 2000 Euros is kinda the max price I would pay and I know that when I buy a Mac plus a decent PC that can play X Plane the price will go past the 2000 Euro mark. 

The two possible machines for buying I researched are (including the student discount): 

1. 21" iMac Retina 4k late 2017; 3,6 GHz Quad‑Core Intel Core i7 7th Generation (Turbo Boost up to 4,2 GHz); 16 GB 2400 MHz DDR4; 1 TB Fusion Drive; Radeon Pro 560 with 4 GB video memory

or 2. 27" Retina 5k late 2017; 3,4 GHz Quad‑Core Intel Core i5 7th Generation (Turbo Boost up to 3,8 GHz); 8 GB 2400 MHz DDR4; 1 TB Fusion Drive; Radeon Pro 570 with 4 GB video memory -> with the option of getting more RAM but that would take time 

So this is what I would like to achieve in X Plane: i would like to use some of XPFR.org 's sceneries (especially those of the Toulouse and South of France Region). And then I would love to take the new Flightfactor A320 (once it is released / word on the street is that its fps are similar to those of the other FF planes) or maybe the JAR 320/330 (but I would prefer the FF A320) on test flight spins in the South of France area. I wouldn't mind having decent graphics with this package

-> So you think this is in no way possible? 

-> How many fps do you think I could get? Are 20-30fps realistic on medium to high settings?

[alpha12125 213]

20-30 fps with medium / highish settings are reasonable. however not with the native retina resolution probably only full hd

[Til19031986 4]

Thank you for your answer @alpha12125 Which one of the iMacs would be the better option for this?

[alpha12125 213]

to be honest its either 27 or 21", i wouldnt base that desicion on x-plane but on what you mainly plan to use the mac for. as far as productivity goes 27" is far superior i wouldn´t want to work with 21" anymore. x-plane will run on both but will be handicapped one way or the other so it doesnt really matter.

Personally if it has to be a mac, i would get the cheapest one that fits my needs for mac and get a PC from the savings dedicated for x-plane ;)

[SamYeager 244]

Is using Bootcamp not an option?

[Jayjay 62]

53 minutes ago, SamYeager said:

Is using Bootcamp not an option?

Yes! I have a bootcamp partition on a 1TB thunderbolt SSD with Win7 and all my flight simulators.

Jean-Jacques