diamonddriller

@giaco Oh. As you said you had the same issue, I thought you were also on a Mac! I'm amazed that your very highly specified PC is only seeing 30 fps. However, you are in VR, and that's not an option on Macs yet. I'm sure that the VR setup slows things down - doesn't it? @Cameron Yes. I also think it's a GPU issue, mainly. It's largely the amount of VRAM, but will also be a driver issue. I'm now (at last) running a 2020 iMac (27"), with the Radeon Pro 5700 XT 16GB graphics card, and all my slide-show issues have gone! It will run Coop's Cirrus at 60 fps in Metal, and the PT-19 is also giving me at least 60 fps too. The machine also runs way cooler! Also, no "tearing" when I pan around. I'm even getting 60 fps in dense scenery, like FlyTampa's Las Vegas. With some planes and less dense scenery, I can see 100 fps! Ridiculous

Thanks for the explanation on how you wanted to simulate the braking system. It is a bit awkward trying to slide the lever, when (quite often) it is not in sight - but now I know how things work, I'll set up a view. Also, to be frank, it's no big deal to accept using "v" to stop the plane from running away! I agree that it's better to show how things actually were/are, and not allow "v" or "b" to incorrectly move the lever. Once one understands the logic, it's fine. Your manual did not address brakes - well, not that I could see. At the end of the day, we use brakes when taxiing, or to get off a runway, so they have no effect on the enjoyment of flying.

Steve and giaco - how old are your iMacs, and what CPUs and GPUs (VRAM especially) and RAM have you got? When I read the specs., I'll relate my experiences.

Thank you for the info. that you will give us a PT19B! As I said above, I am perfectly happy to tinker with and just bimble around in the original version, because there are no distractions! However, I would like to do some online work in this wonderful plane, now and again, which is why I asked for the facility. No chance of doing 1941 on PE - don't worry

I also can't seem to see quite what the parking brake actually does - if it is, indeed, a parking brake. The slider with, "emer brake" written on it, seems to move the toe brakes, but is not linked to either the "v" or "b" key commands - and I seem to need to use those. My toe brakes (or the keys I allotted to them) work perfectly as differential brakes or just for stopping! The control lock does work, but the joystick can still waggle the control stick completely out of the red "stop", but then it jumps back into the stop. You can see the ailerons and elevators waggle and snap back to neutral! A bit odd, but not a disaster!

Actually, I guess to really make it legal, you also would need an ELT. A landing light would be good, and anti-collision light (although, as this built before 1996, you could get away with not having one!). If you are flying around farmland, away from major areas, you don't need ADS-B either. This plane is such fun to fly and manage. Without any extras, I guess I can be happy pretending it's 1940, and fly around the countryside

Hi Yes, I know the originals didn't have any electrics, and it's fine to fly without them in the "country" areas. I'd love to fly VFR in PilotEdge, so would need a radio and transponder. Nordo in Socal is not a good idea........ I note the restored plane, seen in a few YouTube videos, has had a retro fit of some old radios, etc. - and even a starter! I don't care about the starter, as it's fun doing it the original way, but it would be nice to be able to have an option to "fit" a battery, alternator (or generator) and a basic comms radio and transponder. All of this to be as a clickable option - i.e. you load up in the default non-electric way, but just have the option to "modernise" it a bit Thanks for a wonderful plane.

OK Cameron. I'm really mystified by this, because I had no problem either till rc3, but no matter. What is a pity is that my SMP will only be used by me in OpenGL. Unfortunately, other weather plugins seem to be Windows only. I may eventually see what is happening, but we all have such a mixture of plugins and scenery, etc. that it's a minefield! I will have a go to see if it's RW, or maybe XPNOAA weather interacting badly with SMP in Metal. No problem in OpenGL. I'll mess about tomorrow. For most of the time, I get good performance in OpenGL, but there are times when the frame rate dips to a slideshow, and it is going to be interesting to how metal copes in similar situations. I have already seen some great improvement here and there, but (for example, with the SR22) on my current rig, OpenGL is actually often faster. New iMac on its way, and I am very hopeful that it will make a huge difference.

Are there any plans to get SMP working in Metal on the Mac? Just disabling it in rc2 seemed OK, but I think it is now preventing me loading up anything in 11.50 final - although it might well be another plugin, and nothing to do with SMP at all. I see you mentioned Xjet above. Is that a known issue? To run metal, I've moved a load of plugins out, but working out which one is the culprit is so tedious, because XP takes forever to load each time So, for metal, I run with minimal plugins, which is a bit annoying but, as life is now in the Covid world, perhaps the least of my worries! UPDATE P.S. I realised that I had not updated 4.9.6 to 4.9.6.2, so installed that (knowing it was still incompatible with metal, anyway, but thought it worth doing for the OpenGL use), and the flight would not load in metal. Moved RWC and SMP out, and all worked - so it is SMP, sadly......... I'm sure I could load and just disable in earlier 11.50 betas.....

@airfighter Sorry, I didn't seee your post till today. I actually did see the autopilot video lately, because I had fallen foul of a similar a/p in another plane. This prompted me to double check on what I was doing! In the RW, so many of the old bangers I flew had inoperative autopilots, so a lot of my experience has been in sims. Of course, most of the newer planes, in X-Plane, have more modern A/Ps, and the latest digital ones are even better. RW, I fly (mostly) in G1000 equipped planes with, occasionally KAP140s, but mostly with GFC700 autopilots. So, once I realised what I was not doing properly with the A/P in the Sundowner, I was fine :-) Although I see what you are getting at with the radios, if anyone retrofits a Garmin, they will definitely assign and wire the old existing radio to be COM2. Why wouldn't any avionics installer not do that? In fact, if you think about it, how could you "mate" an old radio to the Garmin, so that the frequency in one would mirror the other? I have doubts that this is doable - and it would be pointless! As for frame rates, my new iMac is still not with me, as the first one that was built was lost by the carrier......

I didn't keep that log file. When I get a chance, I'll try and duplicate the events! Any thoughts on my wish-list?

Some odd things. and a request or two: Firstly - frame rates. On a 27" iMac running 10.15.6 (and I refer you to the frame rate thread), but I have a 4GB graphics card, rather than the 2GB one that the other poster has. I also have the top i7 and 32 GB ram. I can leave my settings pretty much as the photo he attached, but I disable parked aircraft. Load up in KSAC (ORBX TE N CA), and I'm looking at between 4 and 8fps! Hmmm... Start disabling plugins, and stuff like dataref editor, etc. make no difference. Then I disable "Nimbus Airport SASL", and the fps immediately jumps to 38! Great. Then I "shift 8" and I drop back to 8 fps. Then I go back into the cockpit, and I'm back to 38fps. "Shift 8" again - and I'm still at 38 fps! Good. Disabling RWC and Skymaxx Pro makes no difference at all, so I leave them on. I also use XP-NOAA weather, and that sometimes can affect fps if it kicks in a new weather report. Flying along, later, I'm seeing 85 fps! Pretty good! Next, I take off and head to my first waypoint. Manually flying, then kick in the AP. Adjust heading bug, and then go to NAV - on GPSS. Plane starts banking and turning right, and heads way off course. Odd. Now, still in NAV mode, I turn the heading bug towards where I should be going and the plane turns as I adjust the bug - turning past the bug, and eventually regains the correct GPS course and turns on to it. The first time I tried NAV mode, yesterday, I got so fed up, as it was always turning away from the GPS course, and I just hand flew it to the waypoint, changed to VLOC, adjusted the OBS, and it flew the VLOC course perfectly. Much later, on the second VOR I was flying to, halfway along the segment, I changed to GPSS again and it flew it perfectly. So, it works - eventually, as I found it would then fly a "Direct" by GPS, etc. and also change headings correctly as per the flight plan. Now, requests: Why does the old panel radio not act as COM2? What's the point of it mirroring the radios in the GPS? Or, am I missing something obvious? I want to monitor ATIS on COM2. Can you increase the power of the instrument lighting? A lot of the time (and this is X-Plane's lighting, to a large extent), even with reflections off, the instruments (steam gauges) are very hard to read - they look like they are muddy. The contrast between the figures and the dials (which are gray-brown, not black) is very poor. Yes, I know it's an old plane - but this is a sim, and I shouldn't have to struggle too much by zooming in to see what's going on. The ability to light them up a bit more than you currently can would probably do the trick. Thanks for an interesting plane. Way back, I flew the RG version (I think it was a Musketeer) RW. I can't remember ever flying the BE23 as modelled here. However, it seems pretty similar to a PA28 in handling in the sim, and I believe it was RW, too. BTW, this is in XP 11.41. I have got 11.50 RC1, but this iMac does not get any benefit from Metal. The older Radeon cards in the 2015 iMacs are Metal capable, but don't seem to be levering the advantages. OpenGL works better on them. The SR22 from TS is hopeless in Metal on this older iMac. New one arrives in a few days :-)

@Attitude I'm never going to rant at anyone who is trying to give me things that I will enjoy! Today, in a fit of "Let's find something to do-itis", I decided to finally get this iMac running in Catalina. I figured that it would be better to know the devil now, rather than spend time wrestling on a new machine. As always, Apple makes an upgrade easy, and I lost a few old programs - but they were old! Getting all the X-Plane permissions sorted did take a while, and a bit of fiddling, but it's done. Maybe the OpenGL in 11.41 is working a bit better, because my frame rate is excellent. Maybe imagination.... ? The SR22 in 11.50 and Metal was running at between 15 and 18 fps on the ground. I also made a VM of Mojave, so I could still run a couple of favourites. It's amazing what you can get up to, when you are not having a "normal" life!

Thanks Cameron. That's really reassuring. I'll report back after it is up and running. Apple have told me it could be another couple of weeks. I resisted Catalina, because I have a few 32 bit programs left that are useful. Maybe I'll run those few in Mojave as a virtual machine in Parallels for a while. It's a thought.

@Attitude I obviously went about the resizing in the wrong way , so I did what you suggested instead. The appearance was not bad (after all, a lot of developers offer so-called lo-res liveries), but it made absolutely no difference whatsoever to the frame rate. It merely depleted the size of the loaded textures a bit. Your point about different developers is, naturally, appreciated. Variety is the spice of life! I'm on an iMac, which was top of the line (27", 4GHz i7, 32GB ram, 4GB graphics), but it's almost certainly the graphics card that is the weak link in the chain. Newer cards will surely perform better in Metal , and the latest iMacs have several other areas of improvement. I'll see when my new one arrives. It doesn't matter how much I dial down the settings in b17, running in Metal. The frame rate is still poor. For this setup, OpenGL works better. It's also quite likely that Vulkan will run faster, and I could try this in Boot Camp.......... For me, it's mainly just curiosity, and it's not a complaint. Sometimes, these inconsistencies can easily be ironed out, but I think horsepower is the answer here. X-Plane is very resource hungry, and it makes Macs run quite hot. It will be interesting to learn how MSFS 2020 runs on modest rigs, as nearly every tester seems to have been equipped with top of the line CPUs, and similarly expensive 11GB 2080Ti graphics cards! Thanks for your interest and support.

"If this is the case, something more is at play here. Have you tried manually sizing down the files yourself to see if it even helps?" I resized all the png files in one of the liveries (I duplicated it for the experiment) in Photoshop, by lowering the resolution from 72 to 36. I saved them, using the smallest file option, and loaded up that livery. The funny thing is that it looked barely different from its parent! What was even more surprising was that it made virtually no difference to the frame rate. Maybe a 1or 2 fps change, maybe not. Perhaps I didn't "do" it correctly....? On the ramp at John Wayne (OrbxTE), I was getting between 4 and 7 fps. I'm still using Mojave and perhaps Catalina has a better AMD driver, but I'm waiting till I get my replacement computer - which will come with Catalina anyway. At that point, I'll see if things do get better, but it is surprising that this plane is uniquely slow. For example, Thranda's Marchetti (which has the G1000 and a very detailed cockpit) has a better frame rate in Metal. It's very odd, but as I can fly the SR22 nicely in OpenGl, the problem is not going to keep me awake It's just that (particularly in this crazy time) the tinkerer in me is getting more free reign!

You did some 2K textures for the Mooneys. Any chance of one (don't need 20!) for either or both SR22s? I still can't understand why, in Metal (iMac), I'm getting such low frame rates (14/15 fps) with this plane. It's better in OpenGl. Upgrading the iMac shortly, so we'll see what happens then.

I took a flight just now (with my wonderful new "black" G1000 screens - thanks again!), and set the altimeter at 6000' on the correct setting of 30.03 for where I was flying. I hadn't touched the standby altimeter, and it also registered 6000'. Good, I thought. It syncs - but then I looked closely. The standby setting was 30.20 - quite a way off. Of course, when I set that to the read the same altimeter setting as the G1000, the two instruments differed considerably. I haven't tried it since, and it may have been a one off. Anyone else noticed this?

WOW! I also noticed there was not any noticeable difference when I applied the disable pixel effect tweak (which I have done - and presumably do leave at "1"), but this new .obj file makes it look fantastic! Haven't noticed the "bluish" MFD on my computer, and the iPad screen is nothing I worry about. Perfect. Thanks. The screens look just right now.

Thanks Coop. I'll give it a try later.

A little disappointed that v1.01 does not appear to show any improvement in the G1000 contrast. I thought we were to have a toggle in settings. I tried looking at the G1000 screens at dawn, midday and night, and they look exactly the same. This is not a sun or glare issue. Sorry, but the background should be black, unless the whole screen has the sun straight on it. Anyway, thanks for all the other corrections. Especially grateful for no CTDs

@robder I had already. No difference, sadly.

I get pretty good performance, but I'm currently on my older iMac, which has the 4GHz i7, 32GB (DDR3) and the 4GB m395 graphics card. Not a slouch, but the weak spot is the graphics card. However, if I dial the textures down a bit, I still have enough VRAM, so quite why the SR22 is running so slowly in metal, I'm not sure. As it's very flyable in OpenGL, I'll soldier on! Metal is OK with other stuff, but not so much faster that it's a game changer for me. This iMac is due for replacement, so I'm waiting to see what Apple come up with in the next week or two (or three!). It will probably be the last of the Intel line, but I would rather stick with that, than be a beta tester and run a lot of my software in an emulation mode, when they go ARM.

Hi Coop. I experienced this situation yesterday, and reported it to Keith Smith of PE - who was equally mystified. I just told him you had sorted this out, but he'd love to hear from you about what the problem exactly was. Your post was a bit ambiguous, in that maybe you meant that the CTD issue was fixed but, anyway, Keith would appreciate your findings. So, would you tell him, please at: info@pilotedge.net (which you probably knew anyway!) Thanks.

Sadly, no difference after new .prf!. Frame rate is over double in OpenGL(35-38 fps). Even your Islander only manages 22 fps or so in Metal, but no problem in OpenGL. In 11.41, I can get 48 or so in the Islander. I get a better frame rate (in Metal) with other complex planes, but none of them performs nearly as well in Metal as in OpenGL (11.41 or 11.50). This has to be an LR problem. The SR22 definitely is a frame rate killer for me (no offence!), as, for example the TBM900 will run at 50 fps in OpenGL, as will Carenado's PA46 Meridian, and they both have a lot of G1000 hardware. 35fps is plenty, so no worries. Metal is a non-starter at the moment, for me. Maybe the 2020 iMac will be a better bet - we'll see in a few weeks, I believe. This could simply be the current Apple AMD driver not getting the best out of LR's efforts, of course! It's easy to blame LR