- X PLANE 11 VIDEO RENDERING OPTIONS SOFTWARE
- X PLANE 11 VIDEO RENDERING OPTIONS PC
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- X PLANE 11 VIDEO RENDERING OPTIONS FREE
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In addition, X Plane has been certified by the FAA (PCATD, Basic ATD and Advanced ATD certifications) and is used on various military contracts. According to X-Plane, the result is so accurate that Boeing, NASA, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, McDonnell Douglas and Sikorsky all use it to conduct preliminary design analyses. They even consider where on the wing the lift from the ailerons, elevators, rudder and flaps is distributed to determine the effective aspect ratio, tip losses and angle-of-attack changes caused by deflections and resultant lift coefficient changes. The aerodynamics of each control surface are programmed individually with the applicable forces and physics, including downwash and propwash, altitude and temperature. We havent asked the others, but X-Plane claims all other programs use tables of variables to control flight characteristics, while they utilize something called blade element theory. X-Plane is justifiably proud of its flight dynamics, which we felt to be the best of the bunch. There are even Piper and Cessna fleet packs available for $10 or so.
X PLANE 11 VIDEO RENDERING OPTIONS FREE
Some are free most can be downloaded for a modest fee. Over 300 aircraft are available, including lots of prop singles and a good selection of twins. Unlike Microsoft FS, however, makes available a huge variety of other modules specifically designed for X-Plane. There are only two piston GA aircraft, a Cessna 172 and a PA-46 Piper Malibu. Like Microsoft flight sim, X-Planes 29 embedded aircraft include a variety of funky metal (or composites) such as gliders, helicopters and the Concorde and Mach 3 XB 70 Valkyrie. In their defense, the designers at X-Plane are aware that the lesser geeks need better documentation and they say theyre working on it. For example, during initial set-up, we thought we understood the effect of one of the yoke control buttons and wound up falling down a flight-control rabbit hole that took a couple of days and e-mail guidance to back out of. In many instances, its not a good idea to punch buttons and see what happens in X-Plane, which is the way we normally figure out a program.
X PLANE 11 VIDEO RENDERING OPTIONS PC
Were not PC tyros, but we were clueless about the labels and purposes of some of the configuration and preferences, some of which werent covered in the manual. There are also at least seven different newsgroups or chat room/message boards devoted entirely to various aspects of X-Plane. The largest and most comprehensive appears to be with online tutorials and FAQs, downloadable scenarios, aircraft skins, sounds and more other stuff than youll ever need. Plan on spending quality time with the internal menus and the X-Plane website ( as well as the large online community resources which have grown around X-Plane. This is not pop-it-into-the-drive-and-yell-clear software, taking more than two minutes to load on a fairly high-end machine. Even with a good system, its likely that youll need to do some tinkering with the rendering options.Īny program this large and complex takes serious time to explore, configure and, frankly, just to load. Required video memory is a minimum of 32 MB and youll need more if you want to use optimal refresh rates without any stuttering. The video card must be 3D accelerated in OpenGL language. Load everything and youll chew up nearly 60 GB. X-Plane 8 requires a minimum of a 1 GB chip (all platforms and hard disk space including navdata for the lower 48 will consume a whopping 10 GB without loading any of the additional six worldwide scenery dual-layered DVDs.
X PLANE 11 VIDEO RENDERING OPTIONS WINDOWS
Dont even bother with X-Plane if youre still pounding away on a Windows 98 machine with 10-year-old graphics and sound cards.
X PLANE 11 VIDEO RENDERING OPTIONS SOFTWARE
For Windows, its not surprising that the software with the most features and capabilities would require the most computer resources. X-Plane is the only option among the four programs weve reviewed for Linux (x86 and PPC) and Macintosh (G4 and 5) users. But we think youll be happier with it in the long run if youre a bit of a geek. Although the intervening years have yielded enhanced weather modeling among the remaining PC-sim survivors, X-Plane remains a serious and extraordinarily capable program. When we last examined this software, we regarded X-Plane as the winner among the IFR trainer programs, at least for people with high-end computer systems.
X PLANE 11 VIDEO RENDERING OPTIONS SERIES
As our series on IFR training programs has shown, this software has improved considerably during the past five years. Although the state of airframe design is relatively stagnant, the same cant be said of avionics and software development, especially the latter.