dpny

I know they don't have anything to do with Gizmo. I was telling Ben why I hadn't downloaded the new Gizmo plugin despite knowing about it. If you feel the need to continue this, PM me.

Sorry. I was just trying to tell Ben I knew about the new version of Gizmo, and tell him why I didn't download it.

Sorry: I don't understand. I thought I'd read here there was some work being done to see if it was possible to uncouple the two. Am I mistaken?

I know there's a new Gizmo update available. I'm also waiting for the next update to see if there is some progress in uncoupling SkyMaxx's draw distance from X-Plane's view distance.

This may not be very helpful, but I was having crashes with SlyMaxx, too, with both the Ramzess 777 and Peter Hager's A320s. Same flight, same flight plan, four crashes. I removed SkyMaxx and the crashes went away. My complete guess is that is was due to the Gizmo memory leak, so I'm waiting for the next release to reinstall.

Good to hear. Hate to have to choose between clouds and the 777.

There's a note in the 777 manual to deactivate Gizmo before using the 777, which is, obviously, a problem when using SkyMaxx. Anyone used them together?

Very much so. I've gone back to OS X. Figure if I'm gonna get low fps, might as well do it in an OS I like. Now, if nVidia's OS X drivers could just do hardware instancing. . .

Wow. You weren't kidding about fps improvements.

edit: I spoke too soon. I am going to continue to play with this thing. Hopefully what I find can be useful to others with similar hardware specs.

A couple of things comes to mind. First, any Mac which doesn't have an Ivy Bridge or Haswell i5/i7 is going to be CPU-limited. Second, because this is a PC 670, it runs at PCI-E 1.0 speeds, and not 2.0 speeds. I will do a non-HDR checking later on tonight, just to have that data point.

1920 x 1080 on one monitor.

1. Turned the rays completely off. 2. Didn't try with HDR off. To be honest, if I have to turn HDR off to use SkyMaxx, I'm not interested. 3. As I said above, it's a 4GB 670 SC.

Running the X-Plane installer. Rendering settings attached.

Unfortunately, I found SkyMaxx to be an absolute performance killer: on the default settings, looking up at several layers of clouds dropped by fps into the single digits, and flying through the clouds turned the sim into a slideshow. Even turning the performance choices all the way down meant fps in the mid-teens. There doesn't seem to be an uninstall option, so I moved SilverLining and Gizmo into my plugins_disabled folder. However, after restarting X-Plane, I have no clouds at all. Even manually setting three layers of thick clouds results in a clear sky.. What did you do with my clouds, guys? 2010 Mac Pro 3.33, Bootcamp, Windows 7 64, 16 GB RAM, 4GB 670 SC with the latest nVidia drivers, X-Plane 10.25.

I think he's saying it's better to simply announce the product is available then to say 'coming soon', because now you've got people clamoring for something for which there's no definite release time.

Installed v10 on my Boot Camp partition. Initial results looks like at least double the frame rate to me. I will try and run the tests this weekend to get some numbers.

Read what their benchmark consists of. It's the single most useless X-Plane benchmark on the planet.

I wouldn't go that far. It's an issue which is directly tied to the lack of Mac Pro development, and it really only affects people who either need the GPU power for rendering/editing/etc., or people who want to run X-Plane. People who need the GPU for work can install a 670 or 680 and nVidia's CUDA drivers and be okay. People, like me, who would like to run X-Plane, are at the mercy of nVidia and/or Apple. I play Windows games in a VM on my Mac Pro with no problems. The issue is that X-Plane pushes the GPU more than just about any other game I can think of, and bad drivers are readily apparent. And, I have to say, v10 has been pretty much a disaster start to finish for me. However, if I wasn't an X-Plane user I wouldn't have any complaints. Additionally, given the rapidly declining sale numbers for desktops across the computer market I wouldn't be surprised if Apple abandoned the Mac Pro altogether. Anyone who wants to run X-Plane with the highest frame rates should run it in Linux. The problem, of course, is that many add ons aren't available for Linux. If you want high performance plus lots of add ons, run it in Windows. I wouldn't advise anyone to buy a Mac for X-Plane until nVidia releases better drivers, or until I see some real-world benchmarks from the 7950.

Driver support for the latest generation of nVidia cards is incomplete. The current drivers don't support instancing among other things. Performance is far below the same cards under Windows. Yes. Mac user with a 670. The problem has also been verified by X-Plane devs. Searching the .org forums will bring up a lot of threads. Here is one in which Chris K. which shows 1) no instancing support and 2) forcing instancing results in lower frame rates.

It's an issue of GPUs and drivers. Currently the fastest officially supported GPU is the 680 MX in the big iMacs. It's a good card, just a tick behind the 7950. Problem is, nVidia's OS X drivers are very young and, at them moment, don't even support instancing. This means you're going to have to turn your object settings way, way down to avoid killing fps. The fastest supported cards in the Mac Pros is the three year-old 5870, which just doesn't have the horsepower for v10. You can do what I've done and put a PC GPU in your Mac (4GB SC 670 in my case) but then you run into the driver problem. Opening the x737 at KSEA with a lot of objects means 15 fps. A PC 7950 (or the recently announced EVGA Mac 7950) may be a good card, as AMD's OS X drivers are much better than nVidia's, but Apple's support for the 7000-series cards are very new and I would wait for someone else to test it before dropping the $300-$500 for a 7950. tl;dr: nVidia's OS X drivers are terrible, handicapping the big iMac and any high-end nVidia card. AMD's drivers are better, but support for the 7000-series cards is new. edit: I run ME3 in a Parallels Windows 7 VM and it flies.

Actually you will see considerably higher frame rates in Windows than OS X.

1 GB VRAM is definitely the minimum. Even at that you will have to turn rendering options down. The much bigger issue is the terrible state of nVidia drivers for OS X.

Expect to turn rendering settings most of the way down on a Mini.

Austin has mentioned seasonal textures for v10, but has offered no specifics.