sundog

That's pretty weird actually. Is there anything unusual about your setups (multi-monitors, VR, etc?) Might help me to reproduce this. It is likely that both disabling cloud shadows and turning the cloud/terrain blending slider to 0 will work around it for now.

Sounds like you may have crashed at just the wrong time. Try running the X-Plane installer to recover any missing files, and for good measure delete the contents of the Resources/plugins/SilverLining/skyColors/Default Sky Colors folder before starting X-Plane again.

The headshake plugin may cause the same issue, if you have that installed. Or if your aircraft has its own headshake features it might cause the same thing.

We have a good idea of what is causing the problem with XPRealistic. (Warning: technical developer stuff follows!) Internally we check the following datarefs from X-Plane to identify different monitors you might have in a multi-monitor setup (oddly there is no dataref that tells us which monitor is being drawn, so we have to guess): sim/graphics/view/field_of_view_vertical_deg sim/graphics/view/field_of_view_horizontal_deg sim/graphics/view/field_of_view_roll_deg sim/graphics/view/field_of_view_horizontal_ratio sim/graphics/view/field_of_view_vertical_ratio XPRealistic appears to be changing one or more of these values every frame, to simulate motion and shaking. As a result, we think we're being thrown a new monitor to render to every frame, causing us to allocate resources for that new monitor, which quickly causes memory use to go through the roof. For now, disabling features in XPRealistic that may affect these datarefs (such as natural motion and ground shaking) should work around the issue. You'll need to restart X-Plane after disabling them for it to help. I would expect other "head shake" plugins might have similar issues. I'm not sure how to resolve this without giving up multi-monitor compatibility in SkyMaxx Pro, but we're working with the XPRealistic developer to come up with something.

We have a better understanding of what is causing the incompatibility with XPRealistic. I would expect the same issue with other add-ons that implement "head shake" of some sort. If you have anything like that installed, try disabling it.

FWIW I just installed XPRealistic here and it causes exactly the behavior you describe - RAM fills up and performance tanks. I wonder if you didn't fully disable it when you were testing its removal before, somehow.

Have you tried disabling *all* other plugins? I'm testing right now and I'm holding at a steady 10.6GB of RAM usage sitting at KSEA (and 60 FPS)

Have you tried disabling the volumetric option in cumulus and overcast? Just trying to narrow it down.

Please try Cameron's suggestion above of creating a new plugins directory with just XPLM, Gizmo, and SMP. It's possible some other add-on you have is also causing whatever interaction XPRealistic is causing. I see you modified some of our texture files, so you might want to try re-installing a stock version of SMP 5, disabling XPRealistic, and trying again.

The volumetric clouds do use more GPU memory than the non-volumetric clouds. You may need to reduce the "cloud draw area" setting in SMP. We increased the default setting for this in SMP5 which may be causing some confusion.

It is just a copy of the files of the default sky color files made when SkyMaxx Pro starts up, so it can restore them when you shut down. If things seem to be in a bad state (and if X-Plane crashed at just the right time, I could see that happening), deleting the contents of this directory after running the X-Plane installer to ensure you have the correct default sky files in place wouldn't hurt. That would prevent SkyMaxx Pro from trying to restore a copy of the wrong files.

To be clear, the "shadow wander" problem in VR is a LOT better than it was in v4, at least in my tests. I'm just being transparent that it's not perfect. It's possible it's as good as the other product; I don't know as I haven't used it.

I spent a lot of time trying to reproduce this issue you reported awhile ago. The new volumetric clouds are not based on billboards at all so I don't think they could have convergence issues like what you're describing, but it is entirely possible there is some strange issue on the Index that I'm just not seeing on my Vive Pro. It may be prudent for you to wait to hear reports from other Index users to be sure.

If 4.9.6 is working for you then I expect 5.0 will as well. I can't think of any changes that might affect multi-monitors.

That's usually a timing issue where ASXP has sent new METAR after RWC has already built up the scene around you. It should check again in 30 seconds or so, or you can use the "force weather reload" option to make it happen sooner. Be sure "never change visible weather" is off in RWC or it won't pick up the new METAR automatically unless you leave the area and fly back into it.

Yes, although you will see a frame or two delay between movement of the shadows and movement of the viewpoint in VR. This seems to be due to some sort of internal buffering that we can't control. Normally it's not an issue but if you have the shadow intensity turned up and move your head quickly you can notice it.

In general I would say that the new volumetric clouds in V5 are usually GPU-bound instead of CPU-bound. So if CPU is what was maxing out your performance in V4, it's likely that V5 will perform better. That's the case on my system and the others we used to test it. We can't guarantee performance will be better though, as everyone has a different system and add-ons installed which can change the equation. But the odds are good.

If you also have Real Weather Connector installed, it has an option called "never change visible weather" you can enable. This will cause new METAR data to only affect new weather you are flying into, rather than redrawing everything around you.

It's hard to make promises about performance, because everyone's system and set of add-ons are different. But I can tell you that the new volumetric clouds in version 5 do perform better than the clouds in version 4 on my own system, especially under heavy weather conditions. GPU ray-casted is a more specific way of describing how "volumetric" clouds are drawn (technically, the version 4 clouds are also "volumetric" but that's not what most people in the flight sim world mean by it.) The way it works is that your GPU casts a ray from your viewpoint through every pixel on your screen that might contain clouds, and as this ray "marches" toward the horizon, it computes how many clouds it passes through and how they are lit at each point, to produce the final result at each pixel. An even more specific term is GPU ray-marching. But, in the flight sim world, you can just think of it as a synonym for volumetric.

It's not possible, certainly not while following the rules Laminar establishes for plugins. How bright the clouds should be has been the subject of a lot of internal debate! Making it adjustable without hacking config files is a good idea, but it'll have to wait for a later update... we're kind of locked into what is shipping for v5.0 at this point.

I'm afraid our hands are tied on this one. The plugin API Laminar offers under Vulkan does not give us access to the water reflection pass.

It would depend a lot on how efficient your GPU is at parallelizing fragment shader operations across the pixels on your screen. I would expect resolution to have an impact on performance, but I can't say how much as there are many other factors at play. I don't personally have a 4K monitor so it's not something I've been able to benchmark yet.

Not when using the new volumetric option for overcast clouds. You can always switch this back to one of the other options if that feature is important to you. The reason is kind of technical, but it boils down to there not being a good way to do this without really affecting performance - it's a tradeoff that's not worth it in our opinion.

As Cameron said we're not taking anything away. As always, SkyMaxx Pro will represent cirrus, cumulonimbus, towering cumulus, stratiform, and cumulus clouds. Users of FSGRW may also see the occasional cirrocumulus as well. The new "volumetric" clouds are only an option for cumulus and overcast cloud types, but we have tuned them to look consistent with the other particle-based clouds when they appear together.

I was testing some stuff out yesterday under the latest release and SoundMaxx seemed to be working OK. It has no connection to Vulkan at all so I can't think of how that could affect it. Might want to try re-installing it.