How To Increase Fps For X Plane On Mac

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If your X-Plane is framerate low, or you want to increase your rendering quality, you might think 'time for a new graphcis card But is it?


  • Hey guys, I'm having some problems with X-Plane 11 (BETA). In the Cessna 172 I run at 20 FPS inside and 25 FPS outside. In MD-80 and Boeing 737 I run at maximum 15 FPS inside and 20 FPS outside, but with many FPS Drops. When I go in the Boeing 747, it goes at 4-5 FPS MAX inside and like 10 FPS outside, so it's UNPLAYABLE.
  • Jul 30, 2020 Open the X‑Plane folder (located by default on the Desktop) and double click on ‘X-Plane.exe’ in Windows, or ‘X-Plane.app’ on a Mac. If you have a digital download key, X‑Plane may prompt you for your key, or the field may be pre-filled if you have entered your product key before (i.e., during installation).
  • If the simulator has insufficient resources from the user’s PC, it will lag, and, if this is enough to decrease performance to below 20 FPS, X-Plane will cease to operate in real time. According to a post on the Laminar Research blog, this is due to the flight model in X-Plane requiring 20 FPS or more to operate fully in real time.
Some rendering settings actually tax the CPU more than the GPU (graphics card). Here's a simple rule of thumb: if you increase the setting (and restart X-Plane) and your frame-rate does not go down, a new graphics card isn't going to make it go up!
For example, if you have one of those new-fangled GeForce 8800s, you may have noticed that when you turn on FSAA the framerate doesn't dip at all. That's because the 8800 is insanely overpowered for X-Plane (at normal monitor resolutions) and has plenty of extra capacity that will be sitting idle on an older PC. When you turn up FSAA, you are simply wasting less of the card's excess capacity. It goes without saying that if there were a card faster than the 8800, it wouldn't improve your fps any more than the 8800, it would simply be even more bored.

X-Plane 11 at 1280x720 - Using Terminal commands, we 'relived' a 2 minute flight of the SR-71 taking off low over pine trees and making a slow turn though broken clouds before doing a barrel roll. Settings were high quality with anti-aliasing (fpstest=3) using CIRCLE view.


Here's a rough guide to which features tax the CPU vs GPU:Plane

How To Increase Fps For X Plane On Mac X


CPU-Intensive

How To Increase Fps For X Plane On Mac 2017

  • World Level of Detail
  • Number of Objects
  • Draw Cars On Roads
  • Draw Birds (not that expensive for modern machines)
  • Draw Hi Detail World
  • World Field Of View (wider view means more CPU work!)
GPU-Intensive
  • Texture Resolution (requires more VRAM)
  • Screen Resolution
  • Full Screen Anti-Aliasing (FSAA)
  • Anisotropic Filtering (most cards can do at least 4x)
  • Draw Hi-Res Planet Textures From Orbit
  • Cloud Shadows and Reflections (not that expensive)
  • Draw Hi Detailed World

A few specific framerate-optimization warnings:More
  • FSAA is equivalent to a higher screen resolution - that is, running at 2048x2048 and no FSA is similar to running at 1024x1024 and 4x FSAA. Both of these tax the video card with virtually no CPU increase. This is probably the only setting that can be helped only with a video-card upgrade.
  • Texture resolution: do not worry if the total size of all textures loaded is larger than the VRAM of your card. To find out if more VRAM would help, measure frame-rate with your normal settings, with texture resolution down a notch, and with anisotropic filtering down a notch. If turning texture resolution down increases fps more than turning down anisotropic filtering, more VRAM may help. Machines with faster graphics busses (like PCIe x16) will be less sensitive to VRAM.
  • Most Important: do not ever turn 'World Detail Distance' beyond the default setting - you will simply destroy your fps and chew up your CPU for no benefit. I strongly recommend trying 'low' for this setting - if you like a lot of objects, this setting can make a big difference in performance.
  • The number of objects is virtually always a factor of how fast your CPU is, not your GPU -- that is, most GPUs can draw about a gajillion objects if the CPU could only get through them fast enough. If you are unhappy with the number of objects you can draw, do not expect a new graphics card to help - it probably won't.
  • Cars on roads hurt fps on machines that don't have the fastest CPU.
  • Draw Hi detail World is doubly dangerous - it uses both the CPU and GPU. Quite literally this is where we stash 'luxurious' options. Everything this checkbox does chews up framerate. (If these options didn't, we'd leave them on all the time!) So you should not use this option if you aren't happy with fps, if you don't have a fast CPU, or if your graphics card isn't that modern. (HINT: if your nVidia card has 'FX' in the title, don't use this!)
Start with the default settings and experiment - turn a setting up one notch, then restart, then turn it down and try another. Different machines will be faster for some things and slower for others.
EDIT: one user correctly determined (by observing CPU utilization relative to settings) that puff-style 3-d clouds bottleneck the GPU, not the CPU! This was not what I expected - when Austin originally wrote that code, our measurement indicating that sorting the puffs from far to near taxed the CPU a lot, making this CPU-intesive. At the time the old Rage 128s would also get bogged down by filling in translucent puffs as you flew right into the thick of the cloud.
Times have changed and neither the sorting nor the alpha-drawing is even remotely expensive on a modern machine. So I was surprised to see the CPU not being used. After some investigation, it turns out that while the CPU and GPU have gotten a lot faster over time, the communciations channel between them has not. The result is that they both do their jobs really quickly, and as a result clog up the communications channel..the CPU simply can't talk to the GPU fast enough to get the clouds out.
This is a great find by this user, as this is something that didn't matter on old machines, but can be optimized in the future for new ones.

I want to share with you a solution I found to help with low FPS rates in the X-Plane 11 beta software. First, remember that X-Plane 11 is still very much in beta. It will likely be considered beta for some time. When a software product is considered to be in beta, it means there will be bugs. There will be issues and most importantly…what you see is NOT what the final product will resemble. I’ve spent approx. 2-3 hours in X-Plane 11 beta and initially I was a bit disappointed when I fired up Fraps to check my frame rates or FPS. Now keep in mind that I’ve learned a long time ago that FPS is not the end all, be all. In my P3D setup when flying PMDG 737 NGX my max FPS is about 30 FPS on average. As you can see from my hardware setup, that I have a fairly beefy machine. Well…at least it was considered beefy a few years ago. But as you might can imagine, when I initially launched XP11 and noticed I was getting less than 30 FPS in the default Cessna, I was sort of disappointed. But then I remembered what beta meant and I also remembered my thoughts on FPS. Mac os x mountain lion iso image download.

However, all was not OK. Mickey mouse clubhouse season 2 episode. I was experiencing some serious lag when flying around KSEA and in the various preview videos I had watched on YouTube I didn’t see this same behavior and also worth nothing I didn’t hear these YouTubers mention this behavior. So I started to do a little research to see if others had experienced this and what (if anything) they have done to work around it. Again, while X-Plane 11 is very much beta…the stuttering I experienced really was a game changer. I couldn’t play like that. Period!

Thankfully, there is a very active community within the X-Plane world and everyone is very helpful. A quick search and read through gave me something to try, and once I applied this little fix my FPS increased just slightly…but more importantly the stuttering was gone. As I’ve said before, I really don’t care what FPS number is displayed…as long as I have a smooth visual experience….I’m happy.

Here’s the info regarding the fix. From what I can tell this only applies to Nvidia GPU’s. But basically the fix is to turn off “Threaded Optimization” in the Nvidia control panel. When I first launched my Nvidia Control Panel my setting was set to “Auto”. I switched it to “Off” as recommended in this Avsim thread. See image below….

How To Increase Fps For X Plane On Mac Pc

Again, just to reiterate. X-Plane 11 is in beta. There are bugs, there will be many more bugs found and perhaps most important to remember is X-Plane 11 hasn’t been fully optimized. Additionally, this low FPS Fix is not going to give you double your FPS. I was getting (on average) of 25-30 FPS (but with bad stuttering) before I applied the fix and afterwards my FPS has increased to 30-35 FPS with NO STUTTERING! I’m a happy camper.

I hope this helps you. Until next time….

How To Increase Fps For X Plane On Mac Free

Happy Flying!!!

Jerry