X-Plane 11 multi-core usage?

Question

Bought X-Plane 11 when it first was available. It's understood that it is still in beta, but it's close to four months now and there seem to be no updates that address CPU usage. I have a three monitor setup that I expected to use with X-Plane; but, at this time, I haven't realized a really usable frame rate even with a single monitor. Both GPU and CPU usage is in the 15 - 25 % range, somewhat irregardless of program settings. Further, when flying I see only 1-1/2 cores really being used, this with an i7-6850K (6 cores/12 threads). Only during initial loading do all 12 threads run - CPU at 70 - 80%.

Answer 1

It sounds like your rendering settings are not correctly adjusted. I would recommend you review the process for optimizing the rendering options here. Keep in mind that 25-30fps is considered a "good" frame rate for X-Plane due to how much work it has to do to render the entire world in 360°. You should not expect to get 60 fps like you might in a game where what is rendered is tightly controlled. Indeed, if your FPS is that high it indicates you are not maximizing the scenery or rendering settings.

In addition, please know we are always working to make x-plane faster, but let’s be very clear: our goal is to improve your framerate, not to make sure the little graphs on your monitor tools indicate ‘maxed out’.

The % GPU power is probably because they are measuring the total MATH capacity (shader core utilization, which is basically whether you are ALU bound for the nerds) of your GPU, but your GPU can be limited by other stuff, like fetching textures from VRAM or internal bus bandwidth from the framebuffer.