X-Plane 11.35 feedback

[Henties]

After much more than a decade+ of immersing myself into FSX I have finally decided to move on to something more current and chose X-Plane for macOS to replace my ageing 32 bit Windows based FSX installation. It basically means that I have to accept that my FSX addons, which I have gathered over the years, and paid for dearly, have now become redundant. I have downloaded the X-Plane trial version and found that that actually runs quite well on my Skylake rig as per my signature, oh no I upgraded to 64 Gig mem some time ago, need to update my signature I am now just wandering if the "real thing, X-Plane 11.35 that is" will run just as well, or is the trial version just an advertising gimmic. Feedback from anyone using X-Plane on macOS will be appreciated.

Greetings
Henties

 

[jaymonkey]

@Henties,

My Dad is a big X-plane 11 user running on a Hackingtosh system that I built for him some time ago, hardware is old but still manages 50-60 FPS using on an old GTX 980 GPU of mine. X-Plane -11 is constantly in development and will soon be getting a big boost from Metal API in MacOS ..

Its uses OpenGL on all platfroms (windows, Linux & Mac) and as we all know MacOS + AMD = Best OpenGL performance.

See my post here for news and links :-

x-plane Frame rates much higher under Mojave compared to Windows 10?

My Saphire Nitro+ Vega 64 performs better if I run x-plane in Mojave than in Windows 10. With exactly the same settings, the frames per second are about 10 to 15 higher in Mojave. Windows 10 reaches 20 to 25, Mojave 40 to 43fps. Same settings, same scene, same weather conditions, same hardware...

www.tonymacx86.com

Cheers
Jay

 

[Henties]

@Henties,

My Dad is a big X-plane 11 user running on a Hackingtosh system that I built for him some time ago, hardware is old but still manages 50-60 FPS using on an old GTX 980 GPU of mine. X-Plane -11 is constantly in development and will soon be getting a big boost from Metal API in MacOS ..

See my post here for news and links :-

x-plane Frame rates much higher under Mojave compared to Windows 10?

My Saphire Nitro+ Vega 64 performs better if I run x-plane in Mojave than in Windows 10. With exactly the same settings, the frames per second are about 10 to 15 higher in Mojave. Windows 10 reaches 20 to 25, Mojave 40 to 43fps. Same settings, same scene, same weather conditions, same hardware...

www.tonymacx86.com

Cheers
Jay

@jaymonkey
Thank you for your prompt feedback which indeed provides me with the peace of mind that I was looking for, especially considering that you are and have always been one of the heavyweights on this forum.

Greeings
Henties

 

[Henties]

@jaymonkey
X-Plane 11.35 has been installed and running better than I ever dreamed about on my Skylake build with the following hardware:

Mobo GA-Z170X-UD3 Bios 23g
64 Gig DDR4 memory Kingston - Latency 12 14 14 35 per Profile #1
Graphics ASUS RX 580 Strix
2 x LG Ultra HD displays - 3840x2160 4K UHD -Ultra High Definition, each driven from a display port of the GPU.
1 x Sony Bravia 40" FHD TV receiving it's HDMI signal from a HDMI port of the GPU extended by 2 x Black Magic Micro HDMI -> SGI -> HDMI extenders.
Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB
Logitech Freedom 2.4 joystick
Cooling: Corsair Hydro Series H100i V2 liquid cooler.
Audio: MAYA44e add on card.
Opsys: macOS Mojave 10.14.6
That wraps it up.

Just realized that at present I do not need Catalina, placed it on the back burner for consideration sometime in the distant future, jacking up my flying skills again being my priority for now

Greetings
Henties

 

[jaymonkey]

X-Plane 11.35 has been installed and running better than I ever dreamed about on my Skylake build...

@Henties,

Yes X-Plane 11 does seem to run well on MacOS, the only issue can be getting some 3rd party hardware working which only ships with Windoze drivers (eg: some yokes/controllers and external radio boxes .. etc) there are some community mac drivers available ... best place to look for support is in the X-Plane.org forums.

Just realized that at present I do not need Catalina, placed it on the back burner for consideration sometime in the distant future, jacking up my flying skills again being my priority for now

I wont be updating to Catalina on any of my Hacks for a while, I got too many 32Bit apps that I use daily and of course if Apple really do completely drop OpenGl/CL in favour of Metal then many games and sims are going to be affected.

I think many users will stick with Mojave for quite a while since it supports the new Metal 2 API but still offers 32Bit application support and OpenGL/CL.

Cheers
Jay

 

[Henties]

@jaymonkey
I echo your sentiments regarding not upgrading to Catalina NOW, although 32 bit apps are not my concern, weened my hacks of those some time ago. My philosophy has always been NOT to chase what others consider the latest and the greatest. In my scheme of things I will only upgrade when I determine that I desperately need NEW functionality that new hardware/software promises to deliver. With Catalina I perceive that not to be the case right now.
Just to make my point, I am still running a pentium machine which starts up as a linux headless server by default. Once started up I can control that server from any one of my macOS hacks to toggle it into a Linux graphics desktop and back to headless if I want to. The Linux graphics environment is "cube" configured, which is fun to say the least. That particular, as well as my other more "modern" linux server, I start on demand when required from any one of my macOS hacks. My Linux machines serve as data stores each configured with 4 x 2TB HDDs arranged in raid 5 disk arrays. The old pentium also serves as
a TV server. It sports 3 Hauppauge 16 bit pci TV "cards" for which Hauppauge refused to provide 32 bit updated drivers, making them generally useless in a straight Windows environment. I can however control these 3 x pci TV cards via Linux and distribute their output to any machine, Windows or macOS, I desire. The TV output quality on a macOS desktop is just incredible. For all this flexibility, and more, I have written a "control center" for macOS with which I can control "computing peripherals" in my network wherever they are. I call this armchair computing, but in modern terms it could be called "DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING" with NFS, which is what I use, and nothing else being used throughout my network. SAMBA as well as CIFS I consider the pariah of networking protocols which obviously includes NETBEUI over TCP/IP as well.

I have attached 2 screenshots which depict how my Linux servers are controlled from within my hacks. The control elements of the Linux servers are integrated into the "Dock" of the respective hack and popup when one clicks the dock control icon element.

Enjoy or destroy

Regards

Henties

 

[jaymonkey]

I echo your sentiments regarding not upgrading to Catalina NOW, although 32 bit apps are not my concern, weened my hacks of those some time ago.

@Henties,

I would if i could but many of the apps/utilities I use have not yet had a 64Bit release, some are in development some are not. A few are utilities that I wrote myself but haven't found the time or the incentive to rebuild them for 64bit.

My philosophy has always been NOT to chase what others consider the latest and the greatest. In my scheme of things I will only upgrade when I determine that I desperately need NEW functionality that new hardware/software promises to deliver. With Catalina I perceive that not to be the case right now.

Completely agree with that philosophy, Catalina has no new features that I actually want or need, most of the new features are just gimmicks and do not help with workflow or productivity, sure it would be nice to not have to use iTunes for iPhone management but its not a big deal for me at the end of the day. I suspect that Catalina will be a very controversial release of MacOS due to the dropping of OpenGL/CL + lack of support for 32Bit apps. I think Apple with be bug and performance fixing it for some time due to all the new gimmicks they have put in it.

My only concern is that they lock the next release of FCPX and Motion into Catalina like they did with the last few versions on Mojave.

Nice Job with the Linux setup

Cheers
Jay