Did some X-Plane 11 testing today.
First a couple things - these pictures were taken through the lens of my O+ with an iPhone 6+…they are not fantastic, I was hurrying along pretty quickly. I have a lot of light behind me from windows and doors which resulted in quite a few stray light ray artifacts, and the dark stripes you might see are from the refresh rate of the headset and iPhone rolling shutter effect. It is really hard to get the lens of the iPhone in close enough to the lens of the O+ to properly get both the sweet spot and full FOV, so these images are quite a bit blurrier in all aspects. As well, I have custom prescription inserts that I’m not bothering to take in and out for this process, so keep in mind you are looking through a prescription lens, so I’m guessing that distorts things slightly. And finally, the original images are around 6MB each, but these are all resized and reduced in quality to get them down in the 1.2MB area each just for bandwidth purposes.
Tl;dr that part - these images don’t really showcase well the clarity, FOV, and picture quality of the real thing.
I started out with the default X-Plane MD82. The reason for this is that it is a fairly complex aircraft with not so simple graphics, but it is VR ready and made by Laminar, so one would think it should be pretty VR compliant and optimized. I personally love this airplane and think it is probably one of the best “free” aircraft included with X-Plane.
I’ve also set the situation to Salt Lake City, for which I have a fairly complex payware scenery add-on by ShortFinal, which is the payware product of MisterX. It is awesome scenery and I highly recommend it. I wanted something that would tax the system beyond the default scenery. Weather is set to realistic and I run SkyMaxx Pro 4 and Real Weather connector. The real weather today was just some high scattered cumulus, so not very hard on graphics.
Settings were set to VR friendly mid-levels. Visual Effects and Number of World Objects probably have the greatest effect on X-Plane performance. Anything over Medium for Visual Effects turns on HDR, which tanks FPS in X-Plane. Anti-aliasing was 16x, World Objects medium, and reflection detail medium. These values present a very nice VR world. Steam was set to 200% global super-sampling (SS). In doing some exploring today I learned that Steam VR settings were set to automatic, and that setting automatically gives me 200% based on my GPU (2080Ti).
Performance with these settings was very good. In my tests, I found that anything better than 30 FPS was very, very smooth. 20-25 was OK, and once you get down around 18, it would not be a good VR experience in my opinion. I think the reason these settings feel fine at such relatively low FPS when we see 45 and 90 held out as the standard is that not much is happening very fast in X-Plane. If this were a combat sim, perhaps the roll rates would cause discomfort at lower FPS, but that is just not the case in X-Plane.
37-ish FPS:
I flew around for quite a while at those previous settings, doing some patterns and landings at KSLC and loved every second of it. Cockpit clarity is good, FPS is good, everything is very smooth.
Next I ran the sliders up to their maximums - Visual Effects went full right which turns on HDR and SSAO (or something), World Objects went to max, and reflection detail. As expected, the combination of HDR and object density sent FPS down to 18. This was not playable, and really doesn’t even look better. Sort of similar to DCS World in that the very highest settings, at least in VR, sometimes make the picture look worse than better.
Just moving the Visual Effects slider and leaving the objects at max still results in a boost, giving 30FPS, very playable and smooth, and providing a great overall experience.
Retaining the VR type medium settings, I then loaded a less complex aircraft (the default C-172) and found FPS to remain the same-ish…at least with default planes the complexity didn’t seem to factor into any kind of performance difference. It is interesting to see just how much GPU X-Plane uses, while CPU is still down around 11%…
Again, for comparison purposes, I wanted to see what a non-complex scenery area would do, so I kept the same graphics settings and moved to Jacksons Int’l, Papua New Guinea and observed an increase of maybe 7 or 8 FPS with far less complex scenery.
Next I went to a very dense scenery area, Washington DC using Dzerwhiskytangofoxtrot’s complex scenery to see how that would do. To my surprise, running at the medium VR graphics settings I was getting 30 or so, very smooth, looking very nice…
Now back to Salt Lake and I went into SteamVR and manually set the Global SS to 100% (no super-sampling) and confirmed that setting with fpsVR. The verdict was pretty straightforward, I got about a 10 to 12 FPS bump, which is a not statistically insignificant 40% or so bump, but the experience at 40FPS vs. 30FPS was not significantly difference with regards to performance…both are very smooth. But what was clearly evident was that the instruments were blurrier, and scenery out the window had more shimmer. Super-sampling is worth giving up the frames.
In a somewhat vain attempt to show the difference with 100% or 200% super-sampling, here are two screens of the JAR A320 with 100% on top and 200% on the bottom. It is more evident in the actually headset…but the MFDs and avionics are much more readable with the super-sampling turned up. You can see there was about a 6FPS penalty but I was still impressed that even a very complex plane like the JAR A320 was maintaining 30FPS with very complex scenery as well.
The experience is…well…superb. I’ve never been happier simming, and never been happier in VR…it just looks spectacular. Enough so that I’m anxious about the HP Reverb and whether it will be “better enough” to upgrade so shortly after I went to the O+. It probably will be because at the Reverb type resolutions, super-sampling may not be required.
A couple night images. Lots of backround reflections from my windows at this point…but X-Plane in the dark is superb. Feels like I’m back at SimuFlite…
So there ya’ have it. I’ll be happy to take requests or tweak some things. Not a totally scientific approach, but I hope I showed the gist of how VR is performing with the 2080Ti and i9 combo. To my untrained eye, it looks like X-Plane is using as much of the GPU as it can, but doesn’t use much processor…so perhaps upgrading your GPU is way more bang for the buck than CPU at this point (?).
Really curious how XP11 is on that PC, as I am happy enough with DCS but X-Plane is a whole hog on its own, especially in VR.
