Salut ,
depuis XP 11.30 , ça debug sévère chez Laminar mais ils prennent quand même le temps de fournir des explications détaillées :
11.31 and Bug Squashing
Inevitably after a large update to X-Plane like 11.30, new bugs go undetected during the beta process. We do a quick update to try to kill off these bugs as quickly as we can, e.g. X-Plane 11.11, 11.26, 11.31.
Yesterday we shipped 11.31. Unfortunately this isnt the end of X-Plane 11.30 bugs, and in two cases, 11.31 appears to have introduced new problems.
We are working now on X-Plane 11.32, and our rough plan is:
Fix all the really serious bugs (crashes, performance so bad you cant fly) and ship that ASAP.
Fix the rest of the lingering 11.30 bugs.
Take a moment to question life choices.
If you are seeing crashes in X-Plane 11.30 or 11.31, the most useful thing you can do is to auto-report them, preferably with your email address in the report, so that we can contact you to run special builds.
The rest of this post is an update on the state of some of these bugs.
Driver Bugs
Older Intel OpenGL drivers cont'ained a bug in their pre-processor that caused them to reject our HDR shadowing shaders. I rewrote the shaders to work around this bug for 11.31, and the rewrite has exposed a bug in OS X OpenGL drivers from 10.10.5. I have already fixed this and confirmed the fix with users who still run 10.10.5, so this bug fix will ship in 11.32 for sure. In the meantime, turn off HDR to work around the problem.
Also, if you are a Mac user running 10.10.5, consider updating to a newer Mac OS!
Weather Crash
The most m'ysterious crash we see is new to 11.31 a m'ysterious crash in the weather code. This crash is m'ysterious to us because nothing changed an'ywhere near this code from 11.30 to 11.31. The crash reports also dont make a ton of sense Sidney and I spent a few hours last night staring at disassembly and being baffled.
I have been contacting users who auto-reported this crash, and fortunately the response to running some test builds for this has been quite positive. Im hoping to narrow down the change that caused this so that we can wrap our heads around what went wrong.
This weather crash is the one I am most concerned about because it is both unrelated to an'ything we changed and introduced in 11.31 a tin'y release designed to stabilize, not destabilize the sim. I dont have a work-around at the time because I dont have an'ything like causal steps to reproduce.
Please do not contact me with œI have a crash, can I help if we havent seen your crash report, theres no way for you to know if the crash you have is this one or something else. If your email address is in your auto-reports, we can ping you.
Running Out of Mapped GPU Memory
The largest source of instabilit'y weve seen recently comes from 11.30, and its the GPU not being able to provide X-Plane with mapped memory. Since we radically changed the rendering engine in 11.30 (as part of our port toward Vulkan) I am not surprised to see a major GPU problem, but it is still a top priorit'y to fix it. This bug is equally common in 11.30 and 11.31, appears to affect AMD and NVidia windows users (but perhaps AMD more were not sure), but isnt something we see on our lab machines. Sidney and I have some ideas on how to at least work around the problem so that people can fly.
Performance Problems
Weve heard a lot of chatter about performance problems and complaints about performance loss, and we are collecting detailed performance reports from users so we can see whats going on. Since the performance tests are automated, its relatively quick for us to gather this data.
So far, while we have seen a lot of mediocre performance (and mediocre hardware!), we have not yet measured via tests the kind of œcat'astrophic performance problems that one might expect from the amount of complaining on forums, etc. That dsnt mean there isnt a serious problem out there, it just means we havent seen it.
For performance, m'y view is: if we find something truly awful (e.g. the sim used to run at 25 fps and now runs at 5 fps after the update), well go fix it. I dont want to make an'yones copy of X-Plane impossible to use.
But if someone is seeing a 5-10% loss of performance, at this point its better to ignore it, because the same engineers who would analyze and fix the performance problems (Sidney and m'yself) are the ones who are doing the Vulkan port, and the Vulkan port gives us a better shot at fixing performance than trying to beat more performance out of the OpenGL driver stack. In fact, even analyzing the problem is more possible with Vulkan, because the OpenGL drivers do a number of expensive things that they give us no visibilit'y into.
To give you an example of what I mean: we captured performance data from a user with an older Ryzen 16-core CPU and a GeForce 1080 GTX. Our analysis showed: 20-30 fps in the highest fps test (basically everything maxed out), 50-60 fps in medium settings, and 60-70 fps at the lowest settings. At all times, the GeForce 1080 was not maxed out and the CPU was the bottleneck.
Heres the thing: the older Ryzen CPU has a single-core Geekbench score about as good as m'y 2014 iMac that is, its not a top tier CPU, its old, and it was never optimized for single threaded performance. The users s'ystem is unbalanced for X-Plane (a lot more GPU than needed for that CPU), and 20-30 fps with everything maxed out is all I would expect from a CPU of that performance level.
So theres no sign that the machine is underperforming our expectations. And the obvious thing to do to make the s'ystem faster is to be more multi-core (since the machine has 16 cores). And that means: focus on Vulkan.
So when it comes to performance, Im going to beg patience and try to not lose momentum on the Vulkan/Metal port. In the long term its a better way to help everyone go faster. If we find something truly bad though, we will go and investigate more.
I dont know what the ETA is for 11.32, but m'y plan is days, not weeks. The crash bugs are our top priorit'y right now.
