New to XP11 - performance question

[Jimm 437]

1 minute ago, rototom said:

Your the first that has made this statement. I don't believe everything I read, but when there is an overwhelming majority saying so, it's probably so. In fact reading most of your post makes me thing your trolling. Your statements hold no weight.

See you in the OOM threads.

You know, I really have to clear the air here about something.  Every single, solitary time I see someone making the statement "trust me, I'm an expert", I shake my head.  Anyone who is truly an expert at something doesn't need to make it known, or flaunt it around for everyone to see.  Most experts are rather humble by nature, and let their good deeds shine with helping others understand or offering words of advice in such a way that can be truly thanked for, not to mention their intelligent responses, backed up with undeniable proof.  In fact, being an expert at something really only means that they know more than the vast majority, but at the same time, they are still learning just like everyone else (we all never stop learning), so again, making this sort of statement doesn't really instill confidence on my end, just further skepticism.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

I'll take the opinion of a person with a RW rotocraft rating over a thousand flight sim users' opinions.

[rototom 198]

44 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

I'll take the opinion of a person with a RW rotocraft rating over a thousand flight sim users' opinions.

Safe bet that a lot of those simmers have rotocraft ratings. But more importantly, none of these claims can be verified, so I'll go with majority. It aligns with most internet topics.

[soaring_penguin 428]

Another one who swears with framerate, without realizing that fluidity and no blurries are more important. Framerate was maybe a sacred grail  in FSX (to stay ahead of those dreaded blurries and slow instrument updates) but that has never been true in X-Plane. But I will not start a war what framerates are visible to the human eye here :) . Just that it is not so important in X-Plane as it was in FSX.

If he is happy with FSX/P3D, I have no problem with that. I think most people here, as almost everybody at one moment was a happy Microsoft customer in his flightsim "career". But don't come here with claims like: "unacceptable performance" and "unrealistic flight dynamics". That is asking for a flame war.

[CarlosF 1,239]

55 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

I'll take the opinion of a person with a RW rotocraft rating

Even RW pilots differ with other RW pilots quite a bit.

[AoA 6]

I'm so ready to delete my 500GB of P3D and check out of the OOM forum I'm giving XP another try with XP11.  I really like Ortho4XP, this has to be the easiest way to produce photoreal scenery and the results are great.  I'm in that list that wants real scenery, not an approximation which unfortunately was and I guess still is the design goal.  The textures are good, but the layout is just rubbish.  At least Ortho4XP is a way to correct that but at the painful cost of storage Lvl 16 = 2GB, Lvl 17 = 7.5GB a tile and then there's fixed terrain shadows. If only one of these satellite providers would focus on taking shots at the same time with sun at high noon...grrr.   I've also tried the middle-ground "enhanced autogen" project but I get flashing z-buffer autogen issues with the native set.

XP11 is a great step forward, and while I can enjoy cheating with her, especially at night..LOL, I just can't divorce P3D and marry her today,  perhaps in a year, but for now this will be a remote relationship. Hopefully her family of support will continue to grow and I won't have to give up all the 3rd party home cooking I've grown to love that P3D has over XP11 currently.  

[Gavenger 18]

8 minutes ago, AoA said:

I'm so ready to delete my 500GB of P3D and check out of the OOM forum I'm giving XP another try with XP11.  I really like Ortho4XP, this has to be the easiest way to produce photoreal scenery and the results are great.  I'm in that list that wants real scenery, not an approximation which unfortunately was and I guess still is the design goal.  The textures are good, but the layout is just rubbish.  At least Ortho4XP is a way to correct that but at the painful cost of storage Lvl 16 = 2GB, Lvl 17 = 7.5GB a tile and then there's fixed terrain shadows. If only one of these satellite providers would focus on taking shots at the same time with sun at high noon...grrr.   I've also tried the middle-ground "enhanced autogen" project but I get flashing z-buffer autogen issues with the native set.

XP11 is a great step forward, and while I can enjoy cheating with her, especially at night..LOL, I just can't divorce P3D and marry her today,  perhaps in a year, but for now this will be a remote relationship. Hopefully her family of support will continue to grow and I won't have to give up all the 3rd party home cooking I've grown to love that P3D has over XP11 currently.  

I believe you owe me a new keyboard ;)

[vortex681 806]

4 hours ago, Gavenger said:

But how much better is the vanilla X-Plane from a vanilla FSX?  How many frames are you getting in your modded FSX.  Since that info was not listed above I do not know what your are trying to compare it to.

Vanilla X-Plane is much better than vanilla FSX, I'm not denying that. But I don't have vanilla FSX. I was comparing X-Plane to what I already have to see if there's enough incentive to make me want to change. My personal opinion is that my installation of FSX is currently much better than X-Plane. That may well change in the future and I'm keeping an open mind. If I was starting from scratch I'd almost certainly go for X-Plane. As far as frame rates go, I get about 35-40 FPS with all the add-ons in FSX if I leave it set to "unlimited" but normally I cap it at 30.

4 hours ago, MarioDonick said:

Well, yes. When you already state this by yourself, WHY did you really expect that a default sim could ever compete with a heavily modded sim? Where did this expectation come from??

As I said above, I never expected the default X-Plane would be better than my installation of FSX. I just hoped it would be impressive enough to make me want to change. Sadly, for me at least, that's not the case.

4 hours ago, Paraffin said:

In this case, I think it's not so much X-Plane's fault as the video card you're using at that screen resolution. You'd do better with a higher-end video card. 

The "I don't need to in FSX" argument assumes you're comparing apples to apples, and that isn't the case. You might not be aware of some of things X-plane does that requires more horsepower. Take LOD for example. One of the things I love about X-Plane is that I can zoom out into the far horizon and still see tons of detail. That's important for picking out tiny airfields with the kind of bush flying I do.

But as I explained earlier, I'm not using all of the VRAM (it tops out at about 3.3GB), the GPU is below 90% and the worst CPU core is at about 65% so nothing appears to be limiting performance. In FSX, which by any standards is old software, with plenty of add-ons I can get 35-40 FPS at the same resolution. I don't understand why that should be which is why I asked the original question.

I know I'm not comparing apples with apples. I'm comparing X-Plane with what I already have to see if there's some killer feature which would make me drop my existing big investment in FSX. The LOD in the distance may be much higher in X-Plane but I try to do nothing in the sim that I wouldn't do in the real world so I would never zoom in to find a distant object - I'd just keep going until I became visual so the extra LOD would never be a factor.

3 hours ago, rototom said:

Your the first that has made this statement. I don't believe everything I read, but when there is an overwhelming majority saying so, it's probably so. In fact reading most of your post makes me thing your trolling. Your statements hold no weight.

I was basing my comments on the default S-76. If that's not typical of helicopters in X-Plane then I stand corrected as I have nothing else to compare it with. As far as my comments holding no weight, I think that 32 years as a professional, real world, helicopter pilot means that I really do know what I'm talking about. I think that it's sad that just because someone disagrees with the concensus opinion he's automatically considered a troll. I'm not trying to be provocative, I just know what I'm talking about in this case.

[rototom 198]

22 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

I was basing my comments on the default S-76. If that's not typical of helicopters in X-Plane then I stand corrected as I have nothing else to compare it with. As far as my comments holding no weight, I think that 32 years as a professional, real world, helicopter pilot means that I really do know what I'm talking about. I think that it's sad that just because someone disagrees with the concensus opinion he's automatically considered a troll. I'm not trying to be provocative, I just know what I'm talking about in this case.

Disagree on consensus is one thing, disagreeing on an overwhelming consensus based on the experience of one default helo is not going to hold any weight in any corner of the world. There are lots of RW helo pilots flying sims.

I definitely think that you can get great aircraft in any sim and that may be true for helicopters too. I have 5 simulators installed (XPX, XP11, FSX, DCS. Aerofly) so I'm no fan'boy. However, I would bet that a developer is faced with a lot more work to make a helicopter fly right in FSX vs the same in X-plane. You can also tell that Laminar puts focus on it since the simulator has an axis for collective. So as a result, you'll end up with more good helicopters in X-plane because it's supported and provides a good base to work from.  And we've all heard many developers talk about how they bypassed the FSX FDE because it just limited them. So any type of aircraft that flies good in FSX/P3D, probably has nothing to do with FSX/P3D.

Curious, have you tried any helicopters in DCS? There are some in there that are highly regarded more so than X-plane.

[vortex681 806]

4 hours ago, Jimm said:

Every single, solitary time I see someone making the statement "trust me, I'm an expert", I shake my head.  Anyone who is truly an expert at something doesn't need to make it known, or flaunt it around for everyone to see.  Most experts are rather humble by nature, and let their good deeds shine with helping others understand or offering words of advice in such a way that can be truly thanked for, not to mention their intelligent responses, backed up with undeniable proof.

I retired 5 years ago and rarely talk about my career, particularly on forums. The only reason I said that I'm an expert this time (see my post above for details) was that I knew that if I didn't I'd get flamed by all of the armchair helicopter sim pilots who think they know how helicopters fly. Short of sending you the last page of my fifth log book, there's no way to provide you with the undeniable proof you want.

4 hours ago, jabloomf1230 said:

I'll take the opinion of a person with a RW rotocraft rating over a thousand flight sim users' opinions.

Then I rest my case.

3 hours ago, jh71 said:

But don't come here with claims like: "unacceptable performance" and "unrealistic flight dynamics". That is asking for a flame war.

I don't think that I actually used the words "unacceptable performance" or "unrealistic flight dynamics". As far as the fixed wing aircraft go, I said that I didn't think the X-Plane was any better than A2A or RealAir - it's obviously subjective and you have the right to disagree. It was the default S-76 that I found disappointing.

[Paraffin 2,197]

34 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

I was basing my comments on the default S-76. If that's not typical of helicopters in X-Plane then I stand corrected as I have nothing else to compare it with. As far as my comments holding no weight, I think that 32 years as a professional, real world, helicopter pilot means that I really do know what I'm talking about. I think that it's sad that just because someone disagrees with the concensus opinion he's automatically considered a troll. I'm not trying to be provocative, I just know what I'm talking about in this case.

The S-76 isn't a great example for evaluating the world of helicopters in X-Plane. It has a sexy exterior model, but almost none of the cockpit switches work, and it lacks things like force trim release and autopilot features that you'd expect in something of that class. I've read comments from real world S-76 pilots indicating the flight model isn't exactly accurate.

What I'd consider the two "gold standard" models right now are the payware X-Aviation Bell 412 and the DreamFoil Bell 407, both developed with the input of RW pilots.

It's been too long since I've flown a helicopter in FSX to make a comparison, but one thing I can say is that Laminar treats helicopter flight models seriously, not just a side thing from fixed wing modeling. We already have a few features like modeling of VRS (although it may be a little too easy to trigger) and retreating blade stall. Austin has been working on a much improved PT-6 model for XP11 which should improve the accuracy for those helos that use it, along with turboshaft engines in general. In XP11 we're supposed to be getting mast bump modeled for teetering twin blades, which I think has only been done so far in the DCS Huey. 

[strider1 575]

On 4/4/2017 at 7:34 AM, vortex681 said:

I'm an experienced FSX user but new to X-Plane and I've installed the XP11 demo. I have a pretty good system (see signature below) which runs FSX well with a lot of commercial add-ons. I have a question about performance in XP11 as it doesn't see that impressive. I'm running X-Plane exactly as installed with no plugins and using the default Cessna 172. These are my graphics settings:

Visual effects - High (HDR)
Texture Quality - High
Antialiasing - FXAA
Number of World Objects - Medium
Reflection Detail - Maximum (tried different levels with no significant change in FPS)
Draw Parked Aircraft - ticked
Allow windshield effects - ticked
Lateral field of view - 70 degrees
Use vsync - ticked
User interface size - 100%

On the runway at KSEA in the Cessna 172, looking straight ahead with the weather set to clear, I get about 28 FPS (from the x-plane internal data). When I check my RAM, I'm using about 7 - 8GB out of 16GB. Looking at CPU utilisation (hyperthreading on) the average is about 25-30% with core 4 (counting from core 0 as the first core) using about 65% and core 6 using about 45% - so plenty of headroom. GPU usage is around 40% (monitored using Afterburner).

As nothing seems to be working hard, why is my FPS not higher? Is there some setting that I'm missing?

With your default settings except reflections set to low, I am seeing 37 FPS looking down the runway at KSEA. In the air 37 to 50 depending on view inside or outside of the cockpit. I can set number of objects to high and Antialiasing to2x SSAA+FXAA with very little FPS impact. The extra 2GB of vram probably makes a big difference ! Setting reflection to max kills some of my FPS.

Ryzen 4.2ghz, 780 GTX, 6gb vram.

EDIT:  If I set Texture Quality to max, I am looking at 40FPS down the runways at KSEA, and thats after I set my CPU clock back to stock.

[MarioDonick 752]

56 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

My personal opinion is that my installation of FSX is currently much better than X-Plane.

You should better phrase it this way:

"My installation of FSX + addons is much better than default X-Plane. If I want X-Plane to be similar to my current install, I'd need to spend lots of time and money, and I don't want to do that, because in the end the result may not be better than what I currently have."

This is much clearer.

[vortex681 806]

53 minutes ago, rototom said:

Curious, have you tried any helicopters in DCS? There are some in there that are highly regarded more so than X-plane.

Yes, just the Gazelle as I have many real-world hours in it. It's very good - certainly better than any other helicopter I've tried on a PC. The problem with helicopters is that there's just so much more going on aerodynamically than there is with a fixed wing aircraft and it's almost impossible to model it all. There simply isn't the processing power available in a desktop computer. I worked in the developement cell of a full-size, 6-degrees-of-freedom helipcopter sim for 3 years and at the end of my time there we were still finding things that didn't happen in the same way as with the real aircraft because they were just too complex to simulate.

42 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

In XP11 we're supposed to be getting mast bump modeled for teetering twin blades, which I think has only been done so far in the DCS Huey. 

That sounds like a step in the right direction.

42 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

What I'd consider the two "gold standard" models right now are the payware X-Aviation Bell 412 and the DreamFoil Bell 407, both developed with the input of RW pilots.

First a newbie question. Can you install add-on aircraft into the demo version of X-Plane 11? If that's possible, can you recommend a freeware helicopter which would give me a better idea of what X-Plane's capable of? As I'm leaning towards uninstalling the demo at the moment I can't really justify paying for add-ons.

13 minutes ago, strider1 said:

With your default settings except reflections set to low, I am seeing 37 FPS looking down the runway at KSEA. In the air 37 to 50 depending on view inside or outside of the cockpit. I can set number of objects to high and Antialiasing to2x SSAA+FXAA with very little FPS impact.

Interesting. Could it be the Ryzen that's making the difference? How well does XP11 use the extra cores? Increasing the objects kills my frame rates but reflections to maximum hardly seems to affect me at all.

8 minutes ago, MarioDonick said:

You should better phrase it this way:

"My installation of FSX + addons is much better than default X-Plane. If I want X-Plane to be similar to my current install, I'd need to spend lots of time and money, and I don't want to do that, because in the end the result may not be better than what I currently have."

This is much clearer.

Thanks for that. That was exactly what I intended to say but, clearly, not nearly as well as you've put it!

[MarioDonick 752]

2 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

Can you install add-on aircraft into the demo version of X-Plane 11? If that's possible, can you recommend a freeware helicopter which would give me a better idea of what X-Plane's capable of?

Yes, you can install anything in the demo.

Problem with aircraft at the moment is that many of them do not yet work correctly under X-Plane 11, because too many flight model changes have been made between 10 and 11.

There is a freeware EC 135 which was very good until X-Plane 10.50 changed something in the flight model (at least what I've read in this developer's forum):

https://www.rotorsim.de/en/ec-135/features.html