On The Glideslope

I could not resist , so today I backed up my 11.41 install and upgraded to the Vulkan beta. It took a bit to get things working — had to update the XP files a few times to overwrite some of the custom textures I was using as part of my Ortho installs — but after having just done a brief flight my initial report is:

Total game change. With my 1080ti and now-dated quad-core i7 I’m getting 20-25 FPS sitting on the ramp at Oxnard with Ortho

One bug I have that’s already been reported has to do with my multiple screens. I have disconnected my GPS screens for now, and the problem resolved itself.

Next step will be to try VR, and to turn on hyper threading not he CPU and see how the sim does with eight virtual cores rather than four physical. But so far, this is a remarkable improvement that I can only assume will improve. Well done Laminar team.

A buddy and I went flying the other day to build a little time, and I planned a route up to Daytona, then down to Cape Canaveral so we could request a low pass of the Shuttle Landing Facility. While all of the Cape sits within a restricted area, it’s only active around launches and it was quiet the day of our flight. And while you are not allowed to land at the Shuttle Landing Facility (KTTS), it’s a Class Delta airport much like any other, and you are able to request a low pass from the tower, which they nearly always approve. So we did, and they did.

It was something else to make a radio call that begins with “NASA tower,” and it was even better to set up on the same runway that welcomed so many Shuttle missions home and fly its length at 100 feet. The runway is 15,000 feet long, so even at 130 knots it took a while. One of the remaining Shuttles sits at the field, and the fly by provides great views of the launching pads and the VAB (Vehicle Assembling Building), the giant structure in which the United States assembled rockets prior to launch from Apollo to today. Here are some shots from the day. It was a great flight.

I’m happy to say that the Tampa International I’ve been long working on has been approved by Laminar and is now part of the X-Plane Scenery Gateway. You may download it for free here

, and as it’s a Gateway scenery it requires no custom libraries. It should also be in the next update of X-Plane that includes new airports.

First, to those celebrating in the States (but really to everyone), happy Thanksgiving and thanks for your support through the past three years.

Those watching my recent VR streams know that I have struggled with performance issues. This goes back quite a time , actually — ever since I got the 1080ti, although they have been worse since I replaced the Rift with the Rift S.

The problem: after loading with great performance, as high as 50-60 FPS in VR, the graphics card after a few minutes goes to 100% load on 3D processing and the frames crater. Even more interesting is that the situation is persistent — once it begins nothing seems to fix it, including turning down sliders.

Today after some significant testing I think I’ve found the source of the problem: hyperthreading. I turned hyperthreading on my PC off

, running on the four physical cores rather than eight virtual. (Yes, I already had threading support off in the GPU). While I was at it I also upped my CPU overclock to 4.8 from 4.6, without any real negative effect. And almost instantly the GPU performance improved and stayed rock-solid , as did temps on the GPU core. This is all good news as the situation has been driving me nuts. We will see if it lasts, but so far, it seems that for whatever reason X-Plane, the Rift S, the 1080ti, and hyperthreading were not playing well together.

I’m happy to say that last week I passed my instrument rating check ride. I’m looking forward to flying in the system and building my proficiency with this new skill set. Thanks for all the encouragement along the way.

I also replaced the RAM in the sim yesterday, pulling the two 8 gig strips that shipped with the machine and replacing them with four 16 gig strips. This means the sim now has 64 gig RAM on board, and while it initially messed up my overclocking settings, with some tweaking the sim is running stable. While I have not noticed a frame rate improvement (nor did I expect to), the sim is now very smooth with little to no stutters.

I’ve been getting hard crashes, all the way to a reboot, when streaming. I thought the El Gato camera card was the problem, but the crashes continued after getting a new camera card last week. So I decided that today was the day to completely wipe the PC Windows drive and do a full and fresh install of the operating system. That drive has never been wiped since I bought the PC four years ago, and it was crammed full of legacy registry entries and other junk from years of use (and using FSX , P3D and X-Plane along the way). I very deliberately run X-Plane from a separate SD drive, so it would be unaffected by a change like this — and it’s a reason that you should probably run X-Plane from its own dedicated drive

, too. (In fact, I have X-Plane and its associated programs on one drive, and all my ORBX and ortho scenery on a different drive, just so they won’t be affected by any Windows problems or updates — in fact, I could buy a new PC, plug in those drives, and be good to go for the most part).

So far, it seems everything has turned out OK. It took a while to download some drivers, and I’ve had to update a few settings that changed with the new installation, but now I have a clean Windows drive that’s loaded only with a bare-bones install of Windows 10 , Navigraph’s data install program, Active Sky XP, Project Lasso, and the OBS streaming software. I have not noticed a significant increase in performance, but the sim seems to be running very smoothly — and no crashes so far. With any luck tomorrow I’ll get in a stream for testing.

If you’ve tuned in or watched the last few YouTube flights I’ve posted, I’ve been having problems with GPU usage in the sim. Things are great for the first 20 or 30 minutes, at which point my GPU usage goes to 100%, frames plummet, and the sim crashes (often crashing the entire PC). Nothing seems to fix the issue.

The past few flights have been in VR. I have found the Oculus software since the Rift S quite buggy , and as an experiment yesterday I disconnected the Rift S and went back to my three-screen physical cockpit setup. I ran the sim for several hours

, with clouds and over the ORBX Washington scenery, with absolutely no problems. Frames were down in the 20s at some points, but overall they held in the 30s (with the benefit of VMI Twick to limit objects some), and most important, I had no crashes and the GPU never really went above 60% utilization. I don’t believe the issue is the increased hardware requirements of the Rift S compared to the Rift, as it will run just great for a while before cratering. It must be a software issue. So I’ll be abandoning the VR for a while, at least until Oculus gets their software hammered out.