X-Plane is currently pushing betas for version 11.3, and they’re up to beta 4. It’s actually a bit of a rollback from beta 3, which was performing really well and had given me about a 20% increase in performance from beta 2. More on that here, and as Laminar says in that post:

X-Plane 11.30 Beta 4 does not have the performance improvements we have been working on for the last week and a half; Sidney and I found a bunch of things that are slowing 11.30 down, but we didn’t want to risk yet another broken beta. This stuff should be ready for beta 5 in a few days.

That’s all well and good and the right thing for Laminar to do. That said, this morning I reconfigured the sim for virtual reality and took a VR flight for the first time in quite a while. What I found surprised me: the best VR performance I’ve had in X-Plane to date. With the new 1080ti I was running (with the Twick VR plugin set to show 88 percent of objects) maximum objects, HDR, 2xSSAA with FXAA, maximum texture quality, and — and this blew me away — shadows ON. And I had 45 FPS sitting on the ramp at KSPG, and even more on takeoff over the bay. I decided to push my luck and turned on super sampling using the Oculus debug tool, and the frames again held in the 43-45 FPS range. It was remarkable. If this is what the future of 11.3 holds, we have fun times ahead.

One other thing I noted today was that the flight model for the default 172 has regressed (at least for me). The plane falls out of the sky with full flaps and an approach throttle, and in my experience flies not at all close to the real numbers and configuration on base or final. It flies much to slow, and I have to nearly drive the thing into the ground to get 70 knots on final with flaps 40. The REP was much more like the real thing in my testing today. We’ll see how that develops in the beta 5 as well.

All said, the X-Plane platform keeps getting better and better. The curious can see the full

, and ongoing, change log for 11.3 here.