Laminar Research, the team behind X-Plane 11, has advanced their current 11.50 build from Beta to Release Candidate with version 11.50RC1.
The Development has been battling many different issues throughout the beta phase, but it seems that there is light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to the implementation of Vulkan/Metal for X-Plane. Vulkan/Metal is a new way of utilising the way your computer and its systems utilise the hardware of the GPU. This results in a much smoother experience with fewer stutters and in most cases, a higher frame rate.
Ben Supnik, a lead developer for X-Plane states that this is not a final build but the next logical step in reaching a stable release for X-Plane. The changes made in this relatively small step are said to not be too invasive and that the team are trying to make calculated tweaks rather than drastic changes that jeopardise the stability overall. Ben also advises that those users that have a heavy additional modification to X-Plane, in the way of third party plugins, airports and aircraft, may see a benefit of slimming their sim down or even rebuilding it from the ground up, which will help isolate any unsupported scripts or plugins. Those users that run FlyWithLua to make alterations in texture artwork such as clouds or environment are also advised to remove these and isolate any scripts that are no longer needed or those that may harm the performance leading to crashes.
Finally, Ben made comments regarding the roll-out of the stable release will happen in an incremental fashion. That means that when the official stable build is pushed to X-Plane users, it will appear at different times to help ease the pressure on the technical support team, giving them time to isolate any issues as soon as possible. Those users that do not see the auto-update prompt when the release is pushed to users, you will still be able to obtain the update but through the manual installer. Be sure to check the ‘Get Betas’ box.
Changelog Release Candidate 1
- XPD-10231 Crash to desktop after closing Oculus app.
- XPD-10601 Turned off pref saving of NMEA since use affects perf.
- XPD-10805 Crash with deleted DSF in background work
- XPD-10883, XPD-10884 Metal driver crash.
- XPD-10909 Thrustmaster A320 joystick configs.
- XPD-10925 Video Record Crash – Linux+Nvidia.
- XPD-10954 Updated airport EGLL – London Heathrow.
- XPD-10963 Fixed V-Sync on macOS.
- XPD-10970 V-sync causing drop in performance on Vulkan.
- XPD-10976 Fix missing pipelines on 2-d generic instrument panels with legacy lighting.
- XPD-10977 Fix flickering terrain by using double precision culling.
- XPD-10978 Out of order video frame record.
- XPD-10979 Fix pauses due to Steam DRM check.
- XPD-10980 Lock re-entrancy with memory pressure warning.
- XPD-10983 Fixed broken earth_astro.dat files leading to terrible performance on Vulkan/Metal.
- XPD-10984 Fixed cutoff near shadows in Metal. Again.
- XPD-10985 Hang when recording video from replay.
- XPD-10986 Dataref for MSAA for plugins.
- XPD-10987 Missing pipeline with non-OBJ based chute and weather.
- XPD-10988 Fix race condition with settings load and SAM.xpl.
- XPD-10994 Don’t mess with cloud shadows from reflection renders.
- XPD-10996 Command line option to hand-pick IP.
- XPD-10997 Work around Mesa not having instance ID.
- XPD-10999 Sync debug DRM lock failure causes hard crash.
