Frame rate from 10.3 to 10.4 on an old Mac Pro 1,1 running Lion?

Question

I'm using a 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 2.26 Intel Xeon (x2) with 16GB RAM and a Radeon 5870 1GB graphics card, running Lion OS X 10.7 (maximum OS on this old Mac Pro).

Currently running X-Plane 10.3 64bit, and getting around 20FPS near airports and 30FPS in the clear, with medium/low rendering settings (around 280mb graphics used). The sim works great, and the Diamond TwinStar is my favourite plane, especially with X-Mapper on the iPad.......

Question is... will upgrading to 10.4.x improve or reduce my frame rate? 

I'm keen to take advantage of the new X-Plane build architecture but terrified the sim will  s l  o    w     d     o    w   n 

Anyone tried the latest update on old Mac hardware and seen a significant change in performance?

Thank you!

Answer 1

In my tests of X-Plane's frame rate, I haven't seen a remarkable change between 10.35 to the latest 10.45b2. However, my iMac is a few years newer, running the latest OS, etc. There have certainly been some additions that could cause you slow downs (extended DSFs comes to mind).

My recommendation would be (if you have the space on your computer): make a complete copy of your X-plane install. Rename it something so you'll know which is which easily. Then update one of them and see how it goes. If you have a large enough external storage of some kind, you could keep the 10.30 back up forever just in case any future update is unacceptable to you. This is the only way to keep older versions of X-Plane 10 around.

Comments

Thank you for your suggestion.

Having backed up 10.3 I have successfully updated to 10.4.x

No noticeable drop in frame rate, in fact it might be slightly improved.

But the real bonus is loading times which have been cut in half with this update!

Hats off the the X-Plane team for creating software that can still run on a computer as old as mine. It's proof that Macs have something special about them. I'd like to see an performance improvement on a 10 year old PC?! I doubt if the programme would even load on one?!

I'm also using the new X-Plane Control App on an old iPad 2 which adds a further dimension.

Thanks again.