SkyMaxx Pro v5.1 Update Released!

[Cameron]

Hello All,

This will serve as a formal forum announcement that we have released the version 5.1 update for SkyMaxx Pro. All customers who have purchased SkyMaxx Pro v5 up till now have been sent an e-mail by X-Aviation with complete instructions on how to obtain your update. We have made this a very simple process! For those that purchase SkyMaxx Pro v5 from today forward, your purchased download will already be updated to version 5.1 for you.

What if I didn't get the update e-mail?

If you did not receive your update e-mail don't fret! X-Aviation has updated our system to allow all customers to update with ease, regardless of whether you received an e-mail for the update! Here's what to do:

1. Login to your X-Aviation account here: https://www.x-aviation.com/catalog/account_history.php

2. Find your original SkyMaxx Pro v5 download and re-download the file. It will download as the latest version!

The following is a list of additions/fixes included:
 
What's New / Changed:

• Substantial performance improvements for non-volumetric clouds, primarily under Windows
• Fix bug with storm cloud textures becoming corrupt in certain scenarios
• Changed default cloud types to non-volumetric (to encourage people to explore)
• Doubled the default cloud layer size on Windows
• Fixed precipitation on MacOS
• Various other bug fixes, memory usage improvements, and performance improvements

 

As always, thanks for purchasing from X-Aviation!

[Cam]

Hi guys,

Do the memory usage and performance improvements remove or minimise the requirement to reduce the AA settings to 2 and/or screen resolution to get decent frame rates whilst using volumetric clouds, as recommended by Sundog?

[Cameron]

At the end of the day you're asking more of your GPU from AA. You can certainly try it on your own machine.

[sundog]

On 3/21/2021 at 1:54 AM, Cam said:

Hi guys,

Do the memory usage and performance improvements remove or minimise the requirement to reduce the AA settings to 2 and/or screen resolution to get decent frame rates whilst using volumetric clouds, as recommended by Sundog?

The performance improvements in 5.1.0 are more about CPU usage, and mainly for non-volumetric clouds. There's not a lot we can do to reduce the GPU overhead of supersampled anti-aliasing with high resolutions when fragment shaders as complex as volumetric rendering are involved.

[Cam]

10 hours ago, sundog said:

The performance improvements in 5.1.0 are more about CPU usage, and mainly for non-volumetric clouds. There's not a lot we can do to reduce the GPU overhead of supersampled anti-aliasing with high resolutions when fragment shaders as complex as volumetric rendering are involved.

Ok. Thanks Sundog. I’ll stay with the non-volumetric as it gives me a better experience close to the ground. 

[FlyAgi]

Cool new update... The performance improvements are quiet significant, I wondered how the new default cloud draw area of 40000sm would work but it's indeed working pretty good, I have never used higher settings like this before so the experience was very impressive while keeping good performance.

 

@sundog@JohnMAXX@Cameron

Great job once again, thank you very much.

:-)

[Habbel]

I tried Skymaxxpro v5.1 in an area which has an uncompressed VRAM usage of around 17GB, high populated.
Custom weather, thunderstorm with moderate rain.
Volumetric clouds gave me around 25 fps, standard clouds gave me 20 fps with ZIBO Mod.
I'm CPU bound. CPU frametime 0.04 GPU frametime at 0.02. Why are the standard clouds
performing worser? My CPU is a Ryzen 3900 and GPU RTX3090 with 64GB RAM.
Clouds are looking great, AA at FXAA with 4k Resolution.

Kind regards, Jens

Edited May 2, 2021 by Habbel

[Cameron]

4 hours ago, Habbel said:

Why are the standard clouds
performing worser? My CPU is a Ryzen 3900 and GPU RTX3090 with 64GB RAM.

Mainly because the volumetric clouds rely more on the GPU. You're seeing the improvements related to that.

[alexdm]

I have got

SMP 5.1 + RWC and ASXP

Windows 10

Intel Core 3.60GHz

16GB RAM

NVidia RTX 2080 Ti - 8GB VRAM

And with airliner Zibo 738 I can't have more than 8-10,000 sqkm clouds to have about 20-23fps. If I extend to 20-30K sqkm I got 7-9 fps. With the FFA320 to have the same FPS I must reduce the cloud to 5-7K sqkm.

With volumetric clouds the FPS becomes even worse, about 50% less, hence unusable.

Without SMP I get about 50-60 fps

Thanks for any comment.

Edited May 26, 2022 by alexdm

[Cameron]

34 minutes ago, alexdm said:

Thanks for any comment.

What monitor resolution?

How about a screenshot of your X-Plane rendering settings?

[alexdm]

I have got 3 horizontal screens (is this maybe the problem?), I stretch XP window over the 3 screens.

Resolution is 1920 x 1080

and attached is the XP rendering settings.

Many thanks

[alexdm]

any suggestion please?