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Nope: those games are modeling tiny worlds compared to X-Plane, which is rendering thousands, or tens of thousands, of square miles of scenery at any one time. If you like, you can search Ben Supnik's blog for the posts he's made on the subject. Nothing wrong with HDR: it's looks great. But, until X-Plane goes 64-bit I'm saving my texture budget.

Per Ben's advice for 32-bit X-Plane, I'm going for the more objects/fewer textures approach for now. Mac Pro six core 3.33 GHz (W3680) 1 GB Radeon 5870 10.7.3

1) Did you make sure you have the v10 version installed in v10?: 2) The manual states the thing flies differently from "regular" helicopters because of the lack of tail rotor. My dad, who helped design and build the thing, told me about the training helicopter pilots have to do for certification. Even in the real world synchromesh aircraft take some getting used to. You have to be very gentle with this thing at low speeds.

Make sure you report those anomalies to Laminar via the bug reporter.

I don't miss the single digit fps they caused. I will say this: the new clouds look bloody awful.

Based on a few brief flights, the advantage to the new cloud system is that you can up the number of puffs quite a bit without affecting frame rate. The downside is the new clouds don't look as good.

Doubtful. v10s weather system is completely new, and that includes clouds.

This is all about the money. It's doubtful MS ever made much money on FS: we all know the real money spent is for third party stuff. So MS has just cut the the third party people out of the loop. edit: This pretty much what I'd been predicting all along.

The clouds have never moved in v10. Austin has said this will come later.

Peter's far along on his own A320/321.

Couple random things: 1) Your CPU usage will vary depending on what the sim is doing. Sitting on the ground at KSEA means your CPU isn't doing much, so you won't see much CPU activity; Same with your GPU; 2) Every machine is different. What makes your machine grind to a halt may not effect my machine; 3) If you have eye candy turned all the way up and are still seeing less CPU/GPU activity than you think you should, the weak spot could be the PCI bus. Ben has mentioned that v10 moves enough info around to soak the PCI bus.

Posted this at the .org: So, after messing around with various settings for a while, I'm only sure of a few things. One is that, if you have a powerful enough machine, with two exceptions which I'll mention later, there isn't one setting which will bring your machine to its knees. I have a 3.33 GHz six-core W3680 and a 1GB Radeon HD5870, and with the exception of those two things, there wasn't one setting I found which made a huge difference in frame rate. Turning on and off AI planes, pushing object density up and down and playing with various HDR settings would only gain, or lose, a few fps here and there. If you have a couple fast cores and a good video card from the last generation or two of GPUs I think the process will be about finding the balance of settings you like rather than the thing to avoid. I have found that I'm not getting anywhere near the frame rates I was in v9, which I can easily run at over 100 fps, but I just think that means v10 is making much better use of my hardware than was v9. If you insist on running v10 at triple digit frames per second, be prepared to turn a lot of stuff off. Two is that v10 is definitely faster with the same settings in the same place than v9. One of my favorite things to do is to load an F-16, take off from LSZH, turn south and fly through the alps to northern Italy. In v9 I would see frame rates vacillate from over 100 to pegged at 19, and popping over the top of a tall mountain could definitely bring v9 to its knees as it had to suddenly render hundreds of miles of scenery. In v10 I didn't see the frame rate oscillation--it stayed at between 25 and 45 fps--but I flew over the alps with all the eye candy turned on near max, including HDR rendering, and 100 mile visibility, and the sim never bogged me down to 19. There's no way v9 would've been able to show me 100 miles of visibility without promptly dying. Plus, with all the candy on, v10 looks fantastic. Three, I really do think that 19 frames per second is much smoother in v10 than v9. I v9 I always know when I hit 19, as the sim turns into a slideshow. In v10, if I didn't have the frame rate displaying on the screen, I couldn't tell you when it gets low. The two things I found which can really kill a machine are clouds and HDR at night with a high object count. Clouds can just be nasty man. I don't understand the technology behind their rendering, but the only time I've seen a slideshow in v10 was in heavy cloud conditions. More experimenting will have to come. HDR at night--making the sim render all those thousands of reflective lights--is another killer, but not as bad as clouds. Flying over KSEA with HDR off gives me 20 fps versus HDR on. The other thing I've found, mentioned above, isn't really about the rendering settings, at least not directly. As v10 uses more application memory than v9, there's less RAM available for OpenGL to store textures. This means I just can't run with texture res as high as v9. It's a real issue in a place like NYC, where I have a lot of custom scenery (including converted Aerosoft FS Manhattan buildings). I can't load the custom scenery and a high texture res plane like the x737: the sim pushes past the 3GB barrier and crashes. This means, for me, that until Laminar releases a 64-but version, I can't use all of the custom scenery I use with v9. I will have to experiment some--maybe the Aerosoft Manhattan buildings will have to wait for 64-bit. And I'm not sure what will happen if I try to load the fantastic Paris scenery. This is the only real limitation I've found with v10. Ben's said he's going to release some v10 specific fps tests when he and Laminar get past the rush of bug fixes which came with the initial release. I think I will wait until then to do any more fps testing.

From what I'm seeing, HDR is turning out to be a big bag of hurt.

Sitting on the tarmac at KSEA means the sim isn't really doing anything: no flight model, no scenery loading, etc. There's nothing for the CPU to do. I did some quick tests. Load the AW139 in v9 at KSEA, with Howdy's custom scenery, and fly around Seattle gives 35-55 fps. Load the AW130 in v10 at KSEA, and fly around some, gives 25-45 fps. Looks about the same. I think I'm going to have to wait until my DVDs get here to get a real idea of the difference between the two.

One more question: This thread at the .org mentions two downloads. I only see one on my X-Aviation account. Should there be another. If the second download is included with the first then I haven't seen it, as I'm waiting for my X-Plane 10 DVDs before installing v1.3.

Thanks.

I downloaded the installer from my account, but it says v1.2.

Laminar said that XP10 would be faster than XP9 with the same settings. There are two problems with this so far. One, it's difficult to get exactly the same settings, as Laminar has changed them up. Two, I don't know if I believe that or not. I'm suspicious that instancing isn't working correctly on OS X.

I saw similar: six AI planes enabled over KSEA and CPU usage never went above 90% of one core. One of two things is happening: either the W3680 is such an amazing processor it can run multiple AI planes with no discernible increase in processor usage, or the AI planes aren't using multiple cores.

Either have anti-aliasing on or HDR with FXAA enabled, but not both. Shadowing is currently very GPU intensive. I'd set it to static for now. FWIW, I have a 3.33GHz W3680 and an HD 5870 and am seeing terrible frame rates.

All I see is an ad for the magazine.

That's not what Austin's said. Two things. 1) There will never be a computer which can max out X-Plane's specs because that's not the purpose of X-Plane's rendering options. Those options are there to give the user a large degree of control over the rendering options so that a users can tune performance on a wide range of machines, from older laptops to modern multi-core monster desktops. 2) It will not take one core to run one AI plane. Most of X-Plane's CPU cycles go towards world rendering.

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Latest from Navigraph. Then perhaps I'm using the wrong terminology. When I was doing my flight plan, had a choice of two runways--09 and 27--and a choice of several different approaches. I chose an RNAV approach to 09, but realized I had chosen wrong and wanted to choose another approach. I couldn't find a way to do that, and I couldn't seen to choose another runway.

Then I think I may have run into a bug. Planning a flight into VTSP, I was unable to get back to the list of STARs. Clicking on DEP/ARR would just being me back to the STAR I had selected.