After many, many, MANY beta releases, Laminar Research has finally made X-Plane 11.50 final and official. The months of testing helped the team ensure that the move from OpenGL to Vulkan/Metal was as stable as possible. This is a huge change to the way in which X-Plane 11 runs and as such meant that it took a long time to finally get here. That said, Laminar Research is now confident that this release is stable enough to call it an official release.
Whilst X-Plane 11.50 focuses heavily on the new API engine, there was also a range of other changes that benefit customers of the platform. This includes an additional 498 airports across the world, improvements to plane maker and numerous other improvements to the core of the flight simulator.
Over the course of the numerous beta releases, we have provided you with an overview on what to expect. You can catch up on some of those in our past articles or by checking out the full release notes on X-Plane’s official website.
To find out more about what exactly Vulkan and metal do to provide greater performance and utilisation of your hardware, you should listen to our podcast with Ben Supnik who goes into a lot of detail about it all.
Downloading the update is easy regardless of which platform you’re on. Instructions are provided here.
X-Plane 11 is available to buy now for $59.99 USD on the official website and also on Steam.
