Surely my PC is fast enough - poor graphics/framrate

Question

I have built my son a Dell T5600 with an Intel Xeon processor (8 physical/16 logical cores), with 32GB RAM and a Radeon RX480 GPU (8GB).  Windows 10x64 installed.

For Christmas I brought him Xplane 11 and installed the whole app - all CD's.

However the graphics are awful, just moving around the cockpit is jerky and it's almost unusable.

MS flight simulator works brilliantly but doesn't give the same level of details and realism as XP11.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You're not really doing anything wrong - X-Plane is OpenGL based as far as graphics are concerned. Essentially this means that only one core will be writing to the GPU pipeline. Have to fiddle with the graphics (scenery) settings until you get a frame rate that seems acceptable. I have much the same issue here, a legacy "monster" machine with the CPU and GPU mostly coasting when running X-Plane.

There's been some blogging about moving to the Vulkan API (multiple core usage). No timetable of which I'm aware - most of the effort at Laminar seems geared towards VR.

Comments

Thanks for the reply.  Only way I can get it to work well is to set everything to low but then it looks awful and dated.

I can't get the frame rate above 20fps.

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We are all running it off of one core, I'm wondering if it is his gpu??