Laminar Research has released X-Plane 12.4.4 as a public beta, described by Laminar as the biggest expansion to the simulator’s developer toolbox in years. Alongside the SDK work, the update brings persistent snow coverage, a set of graphics performance changes, a reworked weather radar and a new enhanced airport in the UK.
As with all beta releases, Laminar warns the build can contain visual errors and may cause instability or crashes, and asks that issues be submitted through the official Bug Reporter rather than social media or forums.
Panel Graphics API
The headline addition is the new Panel Graphics API, a drawing interface built directly into X-Plane that allows plugins to render paths, shapes, text, gradients, images and clipping regions without going through OpenGL, Cairo or NanoVG. Laminar states it works across all graphics backends and runs through the same rendering path the simulator uses for its own avionics. Notably, the API is available from XLua as well as C and C++, which Laminar says allows Lua developers to build custom avionics displays for the first time.
Native rendering hooks for Dear ImGui have also been added, aimed at plugin user interfaces such as settings windows, configuration panels and debug overlays. Plugins bring their own copy of the library and X-Plane renders it natively. Separately, the Chromium Embedded Framework has been added to the SDK, allowing interfaces to be built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript with full mouse input and interaction, opening the door to EFB-style applications and flight planning frontends.
Tying the three together is XLua 2.0, which ships with support for both Panel Graphics and native Dear ImGui bindings. Laminar states Lua now has close to full parity with C and C++ across the rest of the SDK, with all but a few deprecated functions available, and that a single plugin will run both existing unchanged XLua scripts and new 2.0 scripts alongside each other. Both the new SDK and XLua 2.0 are available to download now with accompanying documentation.
Performance and Graphics
Nighttime lighting has been reworked around a new hybrid tiled system, with most lights processed through a faster tiled path and any extras handled separately rather than dropped. Laminar states this should produce better GPU performance in dense scenes, particularly at large airports and when using MSAA.
A new on-disk texture cache has also been introduced, storing pre-processed textures so they load faster on subsequent sessions, with a configurable size from 0 to 10GB. Managed buffers have been rebuilt to only make the regions actually in use resident on the GPU, which Laminar says makes a significant difference for high-detail UHD meshes that can exceed 200MB each. Sparse residency has also been added for LIT textures, meaning tiles containing nothing but opaque black no longer occupy graphics memory. This is enabled by default on Windows and Linux via the Vulkan backend, though on macOS it remains opt-in and requires Apple GPU family 6 or newer.
Elsewhere, cockpit panel and instrument blurriness has reportedly been reduced, FSR upscaling now applies AMD’s recommended texture LOD bias for a sharper image, and Zink has been updated to the version in Mesa 25.3.4. Plane Maker also gains a checkbox to exclude individual OBJs from FXAA.
Laminar has published benchmark data alongside the release, claiming an average 6.4% improvement in CPU performance across sampled CPU-limited test systems, with one reference user seeing an average 8.5% CPU and 6.5% GPU improvement across day and night testing.
Persistent Snow
Snow coverage is now persistent and regionalised, replacing the previous behaviour where snow was tied to conditions directly beneath the aircraft and applied uniformly across the whole scene. Snow now remains on the ground after snowfall has passed and varies between areas, with different regions carrying different depths at the same time.
Live weather drives a snow depth model from GRIB data, with historical weather falling back to an averaged annual snowfall model where server data is unavailable for a given date. Laminar confirms the feature works with ortho-imagery, but notes that variation is horizontal only and does not account for altitude directly, nor does it freeze bodies of water. Custom weather is not supported.
Importantly, Laminar is asking users to remove XA-Snow and disable the snow controls in Active Sky before using 12.4.4, as both override the new global snow parameters and prevent the regional placement from displaying correctly.
Weather and Weather Radar
The weather radar has seen a substantial overhaul. The default colour scale is now four colours (green, yellow, red and magenta) matching most real-world radars, with the dark green and dark yellow bands removed. Laminar states return strengths have been recalibrated so returns now spread across the full range, rather than most weather landing in the lighter end of the scale.
The sweep animation now updates only the wedge between the antenna’s position on the previous and current frame, removing shimmer around the antenna. Noise is now applied to the radar sample before colour mapping, so it manifests as pixels landing one colour band above or below their surroundings rather than as black pixels. A smear effect has also been added to reproduce the radial stretching seen on real hardware. NEXRAD has received the same calibration work, with its colour scale moving from a linear gradient to discrete bands, and on the X1000 it is now drawn as discrete blocks.
Beyond the radar, several longstanding weather issues have been addressed. Weather is no longer discarded near the 180° meridian, where a distance calculation error caused points 10nm apart across the date line to measure as 15,000nm apart, and the striped cloud pattern seen above roughly 75°N/S has been fixed by sampling forecast data over a fixed physical area. Local weather variation now ramps up gradually with distance as intended, while visibility fades to clear air over a physically derived altitude band based on temperature and dewpoint spread, cloud layers, latitude and season, meaning fog, mist and haze should now stay in a shallow surface layer rather than hazing the view up to cruise altitude.
Scenery and Aircraft
Farnborough (EGLF) joins the simulator as a new enhanced airport, chosen for its association with British aviation history and its business aviation operations. The static aircraft library has also been expanded with six new types: the Airbus A350-900 and A350-1000, Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules, Eurofighter Typhoon, Gulfstream 650 and Embraer Phenom 300, alongside 70 new liveries for existing static aircraft. New scenery library assets include overhead powerline facades, accessible passenger boarding ramps and draped letters in five colours.
The update also includes 535 refreshed airports from the X-Plane Scenery Gateway. The Van’s RV-10 gains a new livery representing The Impossible Airplane, a real aircraft belonging to the Rightfooted Foundation, founded by pilot and disability advocate Jessica Cox. The King Air C90 has also had its autofeather test fixed.
X-Plane 12.4.4 is available now as an opt-in beta through the X-Plane installer, and is a free update for existing X-Plane 12 owners. The full release notes can be read here.
