Poor Performance, Almost Unplayable

[mrlizard]

Hello Everyone,

I bought Xplane 11 not to long ago as a replacement for FSX. I had bought the hardcopy of FSX many years ago but lost the DVD's and key for it, and when looking on steam Xplane had more positive reviews and seemed more modern. But I am beginning to regret purchasing this and i'm hoping someone has had experience with this already and has a solution. I have a decent gaming rig, i'll put the specs below, but when running xplane I get absolutely horrible framerates. The CPU utilization is low (30 percent or so) and the GPU utilization is low as well, peaking at 30 or so, but hovering around 15 to 25 percent. Its like that no matter what settings I have it on. Drivers are up to date as well as BIOS and all the basic technical stuff is setup properly, so the only thing really left is quirks with the game itself. One thing to note is that the FPS drops the longer the game is open, typically it will start out at around 24 and progressively drop until it hovers around 9 or 10 FPS, and at that point its not even any fun anymore, trying to land a 747 as hopping across the sky at 9 FPS is not exactly what I would call a realistic simulation and I don't think the passengers are very happy with me at this point lol.

Hopefully it can be fixed, otherwise maybe Steam will give a refund.....I have heard that the Vulkan update will fix this but that isn't supposed to come out until later this year and honestly I would rather spend my money on something that works at this point and come back to it when they've brought the game out of the stone age. Anyways thanks for any help.

My rig:
Gigabyte X79-UP4
Intel Core i7 4820K (4C @ 3.7 Ghz)
16 GB RAM (Not sure of model at the moment, only that its DDR3)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
2 TB 7.2k HDD, has OS and game installed on it

[DRAGSTRIP16]

The loading screen should be at 60 FPS if you have V-Sync on. Did you try to adjust your graphics? Load into your aircraft and make sure its a heavy airliner like the 747 or 737 and open your settings. The texture quality will show you how much V-Ram its using from your card. If your card has 4GB of V-Ram, and the texture quality shows that youre using more than 4000 mb of V-Ram, then thats your problem, so youll have to adjust your texture quality one down. Also make sure visual quality is at HDR or 2nd from last and put your Anti-Aliasing to 2nd line. If it doesnt work, then go to your xplane 11 folder and search for prefrences and delete all of preferences. If it doesnt help, try to unistall the game and reinstall.

[mrlizard]

There is no FPS display at the loading screen as far as i know. As stated in the original post it does not matter what settings I'm at, there is only a slight variation in FPS between different levels. Texture quality is fine, last run it was using only about 850 MB. Visual quality is sitting at medium right now, lowering it to minimal seems to help the frame rate just slightly, but honestly there is no reason my rig shouldn't be able run this game at 60 FPS easily at the current settings, i am able to run GTAV on high, Doom completely maxed, and they all sit around 60 FPS. I haven't tried the preferences thing, but I don't really see how that will help. This seems almost like a flaw in the game's design and its not able to properly utilize the GPU and CPU, takes me back to the days of making sure DMA is on if you are getting crap performance, although nowadays thats obviously not applicable. Uninstalling and re-installing the game sounds like a good last ditch effort though, i suppose its possible there is some corruption somewhere, but its been like this since i first ran it, I'll give that a try on Sunday when I get back into town if I get a chance to hop on. Thank you for the reply.

[harryorlsen]

Do not waste your time with a reinstallation. XP is a beast of a software and requires "power" in a non vanilla version (base plus addons, new aircraft, new sceneries, plugins.... ). Keep in mind: Your cpu clock speed is low and your gpu is also not the fastest. Check this guide and learn how to find your balance in XP. Take your time. I wish you success, fun and welcome to your XP world. :-)

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=897182305

[Kosmozuikis]

Lower your settings to low-medium. Your PC isn't enough to run xplane on high settings. Vulkan won't help if you have low-end hardware. If you can't make it to run on at least 30fps then ask for a refund before it's too late.

[Aerodyne]

Best to get a refund and try again when they finally release Vulkan. It runs like ♥♥♥♥ even if you have the best system, no amount of tweaking will fix it, only the dev's can.

[mrlizard]

harryorlsen - I know my rig isn't top of the line, i don't have the money to drop 3 or 4 grand on a top end computer, however despite this the game is only utilizing only 30 percent of the CPU and GPU max during game play no matter what settings its at. For example, in GTAV i am running it at high, not very or ultra, and my CPU and GPU along with VRAM is completely maxed out, so i know the reason i can't go higher is because my hardware is maxed out

Kosmozuikis - I believe I stated in the original post that no matter what settings i put it at it does this, the frame rate increases slightly but not that much if i turn the settings. Again, the game is only utilizing about 30 percent of the hardware, and the VRAM is no where close to maxed out. My rig meets the recommended specifications on the Xplane website, obviously these are guidelines, but having the hardware i do the game should at least be playable or run at a constant 30 FPS at medium settings and it does not

Aerodyne - From what i've seen I am pretty sure you're correct, I love sims but this game needs some serious work, it reminds of a product thats rushed to production before its fully ready. Guess i'll go back to Elite Dangerous until they've finished this game.

Thank you to all that replied.

[Burning Bridges]

30% CPU utilization is normal with a multicore CPU.

[PoorOldSpike]

Originally posted by mrlizard:

Hello Everyone,

I bought Xplane 11 not to long ago as a replacement for FSX....

Me too, my FSX works fine and I bought XP11 purely for a change but I'm not impressed because among other things I'm getting slow XP11 frame rates like you, for example I've just flown above London for the first time and the game kept stopping dead for about 12 seconds, presumably as all the buidilngs graphics had to keep being fed in as I flew around.....I'll try a few things to cure it, otherwise I'll go back to FSX..:)

[Burning Bridges]

Turn reflections all the way down, disable ground shadows and set scene complexity low or medium. These are the fps killers, especially reflections.

There are also scripts that will give you 10-20 extra fps, but that can come later. I had to do a lot for it but my X-Plane runs 50-60 fps and looks great too.

[LongHaulKai]

Try downloading a 4GB patch if you have a 64gb system

[grandafam1]

What you must remember is X-Plane does not make use of DirectX. Since X-Plane is written with MacOS and made for multiple platforms, it uses OpenGL instead. Try to optimize your setup for OpenGL (i.e. use the GPU driver with the best OpenGL performance)