Does X-Plane HAVE to run full-tilt ALL the time?

[Kaphias]

So I'm sitting here doing a flight MHTG-KMIA out over the gulf, with little to no land in sight. X-Plane is showing 370fps. Activity monitor is showing 95% CPU usage, and I know my GPU is getting run up as well because of the temps and the way my MacBook Pro sounds like it's about to lift off and fly away from my desk. Doing a little bit of research it seems that this behavior is typical for X-Plane: it likes to run your hardware 100% at all times, even if it clearly doesn't need to. I've heard stories about MBPs going kaput from constantly running hot.

Is there any way I can limit how much of my computer's resources X-Plane uses? Because frankly I don't need 370fps for the 2 hours I'm over the ocean with X-Plane hidden. Or for the 18 hour KEWR-WSSS flight I'm looking at.

[chris k]

Lock referesh rate to the monitor?

forces it to be an even multiple of 60, or a power-by-2-divisor.

[Kaphias]

From reading this topic, it seems that the purpose of that setting is to help the sync on CRT screens, not slow down the sim itself. Besides that, it doesn't seems to have any effect on my computer, which is backed up by other reports of the setting doing nothing on LCD screens.

[chris k]

Heh. Was worth a shot...

Other than that - No idea.

unix users: Nice +20 ?

Still wont Yield the CPU tho.

- CK.

[Ben Russell]

Gizmo has an API that lets you yield the CPU.

function main()

gizmo.sleep(10)

end

...will sleep for 10ms every frame.

This can be used to tune X-Plane easily on demand and is used internally a lot during development to allow better use of the entire content tool chain.