XP 11.30 Beta

[Bjoern]

H/U:
Apparently, 11.30 beta is available now.


Might give it a whirl after doing a backup of 11.26.

[Boss86001]

I'm going to hold off for a bit. I heard the new particle system is causing a FPS loss for a lot of folks.

[Bjoern]

Beta 3 is out!

Gonna give it a whirl tomorrow.

[warchild]

I just updated to beta3 this morning.. No comments yet, but only because i havent fiddled with it enough to have formed any opinions..

[Daube]

Is anybody here using VR in the current beta ? (beta 4)
It's the first time for me to try VR in XPlane (I use P3D normally), and while I get pretty good performance in non-VR mode (more than 50 FPS), I get terrible performance in the same place in VR mode (around 20 FPS).

I experimented a bit with the settings, and realized the main impact comes from the antialiasing settings. No AA is smooth. AA level 1 (FXAA) is already showing a big impact on FPS, and AA level 2 (FXAA+2xMSAA) bring the FPS down to 20. Is that normal ?

My computer is a i7 8700k with a GTX1070ti. VR helmet is a Lenovo Explorer.

[Daube]

Things got much better after I regenerated the shaders.
Performance is still not top notch, but at least I could reactivate some AA.
Pretty pleased with the experience so far.

That being said, I realized something strange: when starting a flight in Seattle, the amount of memory consumed by my computer goes up to 16 GB of used RAM.
I had to drastically increase the size of my virtual memory to 16 GB (in addition to the 16 GB of RAM I currently have on the motherboard) to avoid an out-of-memory crash to desktop... Is that normal ?

[txnetcop]

Daube, I have not experienced that yet. I don't own XP11 but I put it on systems I build and I have not seen it happen yet. I will keep looking for it...you might ask that question at Austin's XP site.
Ted

[Daube]

Thanks for checking
However, I realized one thing: contrary to what I thought, I am NOT using the default scenery around Seattle.
I am, in fact, using the HD Mesh v4.
That might explain the size in the memory, I suppose.

I have dowloaded/installed very few sceneries so far in XP11. I think I installed the sim with the default Hawaii islands and then I added a few HD Mesh v4 areas for France, Japan and the area around Seattle (more or less the same coverage as OrbX PNW).

Anyways, now that I increased the virtual memory, everything seems to work fine without crashes. I made a few flights just for comparing the HD Mesh v4 with OrbX PNW in P3D. Of course PNW has more details (and a few photorealistic coverages here and there, for volcanos for example), but I'm quite pleased with the result so far.

[Bjoern]

Set your page file to a fixed size of at least 16 GB with 8 GB physical RAM. With 16 GB, a page file of 8 to 10 GB will suffice. That way, XP may reserve as much memory as it needs, despite never fully using it as the actual memory used by a typical session with HD Mesh and without extended DSFs amounts to 6 GB or so. Total size (actual+reserved) is around 12 GB and it's those extra reserved GBs that will kill an improperly configured system.

[Daube]

Thanks Bjoern, that's precisely what I did: minimum size = maximum size = 16 GB.
I set the virtual memory on one of my oldest SSD disks, an old 80 Gb from Intel I bought many years ago. I know it's not recommended to create paging files on SSDs, but I have no choice, since the heat fans are the only rotating things left in my computer

[Bjoern]

Even when using a page file, you're never going to attain the amount of read/write operations that are required for a premature failure. Therefor, I consider the "no page file" rule outdated BS.

[AussieMan]

How do I get the beta version? I followed some instructions on the X-Plane help site but i got the X-Plane 11.25 installer.

[Daube]

The option is located in the installer program (XPlane installer).
There is a small checkbox at the botton of one of the screens, to tell you want to receive beta versions. By default, it's unchecked.
Just relaunch your installer program and take a close look to find it