chris k

I just re-read my original posting.. hehehe.. It does appear that my technical knowledge appears to be at a 'George Bush-eqsue' level at best..! All good.

PilotEdge has all those features working in Xplane -- to underscore bens post above. It's not a limitation of XP10.

/duplicate.

You do realise I prefaced the entire discussion stating this was a simplification. See the post. The caveat is there. It is by definition Inexact -- as it was targeted to a very specific and nontechnical audience. (The O.P.). For its intent, it is effective to show why single threaded core speed is important to xplane, and not the number of cores. I had no idea if the OP. Understands multi-threading, or even what a thread is; privileged execution modes, the role of an MMU, what a scheduler does, what an affinity is, what a program counter and registers are, and so on. Hence, I chose a method of explanation, although Inexact, correctly conveys the meaning. Start with the absolutely most basic way of trying to get somewhere close without resorting to a full gdb dump and stack pointers here. I agree it's a gross oversimplification. Apologies if it was Inexact. I will simply refrain from providing any analogies or simplifications of deep technical issues to users who have questions, as the resulting backlash by those who did NOT offer to help the OP are startling. The OpenGL stack is indeed single threaded, hence xplane'a major bottleneck. Scenery loads, AI aircraft, etc are indeed multi threaded in XP10, however the elephant in the room is the graphics processing -- which is an order of magnitude larger than all the other threads combined. Hence, 4 cores, 8 cores etc will simply not help when it comes to the all important FPS figure. The OPs original post tells it all. 25-30% CPU load across his entire system..... ...and I didn't even start talking about hyper threading. It would serve no purpose for the sakes of Answering the OPs question -- which was the entire point of this thread.

Not really. i7-3000 series CPUs are a medium-range these days at best. In fact, thats a low-power mobile/laptop CPU variant you describe; on the low-end of performance in the i7-3000 series. That chip is designed to conserve battery power running at 2.4 Ghz and uses 45 Watts of power. The desktop CPUs from that series run 50% faster and consume double the power (95Watts or so) and get much better performance. RAM is space, not speed. Computer Programs only use the memory that they need. Using MORE RAM than they need doesn't make things faster. ​Your CPU is actually 4 x CPUs. The way an i7 is built is actually 4 CPUs on the physical silicon die. X-Plane uses ONE of those four processing units on that i7 die. Meaning if your "CPU Usage" is 25%, then ONE of your CPUs is running at 100% which is expected behaviour; and the other 3 cores are left for other programs. Simple Explanation: a Multi-core CPU (like you have) allows you to run multiple programs simultaneously on the same physical die. It means you can run FOUR programs all at the same speed -- i.e for a silly example: you can run X-Plane, PowerPoint, Excel, and Microsoft WORD all at full speed at the same time. Thats what the i7 lets you do. It does NOT mean you can run one program four times faster. Sorry, but thats how computers and software generally work. One program -- one core. (X-Plane's rendering code is effectively single-threaded) As Frank said -- a K1000M is a LAPTOP MOBILE video chip. It is *not* a powerful video chip. It is a power-reduced NOTEBOOK GPU from 2012 for use in 2D/3D CAD programs. See how it stacks up -- in fact, it's lower than the first 1000 video cards out there: http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Quadro+K1000M it is nowhere in the same league as anything actually designed to do high-speed 3D Graphics. $200 Video cards from 2008 which would run circles around that. That card was developed to do detailed double-precision mathematics for 3D modelling. Its made for high-precision CAD/CAM work, not gaming/3D frames per second. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news... but the laptop you describe is simply not cut out to run X-Plane at all. - CK.

A 15" monitor? Whats wrong with your existing monitor? thats really really small... circa 1980s screens. Oh, the finger print reader is not relevant, unless John has written FingerMAXX for activation of skymaxx. the 960M is unremarkable. You will be disappointed... _______________ EDIT: after looking at it for a while, I just realised, this is a LAPTOP computer. No, a laptop is never a good setup for X-plane. You are thermally throttled most of the time, have low-power and thus low-performance components (battery life and heat trumps power and performance), and generally are paying *more* than if you built a desktop system, since the form factor is what you're paying for vs. an equivalent desktop system. If you want a computer for X-Plane, you should build a system designed for x-plane... i.e. full desktop system, i5/i7 at 3.5 Ghz or better, GTX 970, etc... Not a laptop.

You have selected a very low texture resolution on your x-plane install -- There should be no wonder why all your texture resolutions are low. Rendering Settings > Texture Resolution > Very High (or Extreme) -- Then restart X-Plane. The *only* reason you should be running such a low texture resolution is if you have a PC from the 1980s and only have 32 Megabytes of video ram. (In fact, it behooves me to know why Laminar even allows the user to select such a low texture resolution).

I think You Qualify.

There is another airport you've installed which is writing Taxilinies at KSAN, (but it's not the KSAN airport). Something in the area is placing a taxi line or pavement there, coupled with 'flatten' results in what you see. It also appears the offending airport is lower in elevation? It's not a "simulator problem". It's actually doing what it was told to do... there's a 3d party airport installed or terrain which is telling x-palne to do that.

Haha. True. =). Win7 isn't going to make anything faster. ​BTW, the HiDPI Library DLL is actually an x-plane problem now in 10.40. Laminar added code to help for HiDPI 4k monitor scaling -- however WinXP does not, and never will have, such a DLL call... (i.e to support a technology 10 years before it existed =)). I think that this really spells the end for WinXP support as of 10.40, unless Ben pushes a patch in 10.41. - Ck.

Take my money!! That's some really nice work you guys have done Frank, John. You've really raised the bar again for flight sim clouds. I take great enjoyment poking in and out of the clouds in SMPv2, and look forward to the update. Glad to support you guys. Thanks as well to Cameron for doing a 50% discount to existing owners. I'm more than happy to put my funding to those who I know work very hard on bringing great addons to XP10.

You really need Win7 64 bit or better. (Win8/Win8.1/Win10 etc....) WinXP isn't going to cut it anymore. XPlane10 is written to take advantage of newer OSs and 64 bit processing. WinXP crashes out due to lack of a proper IPv6 Networking stack too, but I think there's a hack/workaround somewhere for that. Go grab an old cheap copy of Windows 7 64-bit. You'll thank yourself:)

at no time does Ben do a speed test, so I stand by my speed increase assertion. He says his crashing is due so his retina mbp which he admits isn't fully baked for these drivers. Those of you with a full size PC Card GTX 670 GRX 970) or the 650m in the mbp 2013 model (the above are they confgigs I have personally tested and know work 100%) should see the increase.

Yep. I did some stats -- Saw a 15% increase across the board. Theory is these new drivers are now less CPU-intensive; not necessarily any better GPU usage per se. However, "a win is a win" =)