Xplane 11 sharing my settings for best experience

Pimax 8K Series
1

Okay I appreciate there have been several threads musing on best settings for Xplane, all of which I read, but I thought I would share my experience and perhaps anyone who is still unhappy with Xplane could try these settings.

Firstly I have the Pimax 5K+. I’m running low brightness for panels and -2 brightness each eye and plus 3 contrast but this is merely preference.
My system is CPU bottlenecked for Xplane though VR evens the playing field somewhat. I have an i5 6600k clocked at 4.4Ghz and a 1080Ti overclocked to 1900Mhz with 32GB ram.

I’m not saying the below suggestion is perfect and lag free, but for me it gave the clearest visuals and was pretty smooth given the limited resources.

The tests were done at Seattle (KSEA) stock Xplane scenery, stock Cesna, flying out of the airport and turning back and staying low into Seattle to test performance.
I could read all gauges, had decent resolution to far objects and aliasing was at a minimum with nice solid display, virtually no jaggies.

Pitool settings
Render Quality = 0.75
FOV = small
refresh rate = 72hz
PP = On
SmartSmoothing = On

Steam
Supersampling 180%

Xplane
Visual effects = medium
World Objects = high
Antialiasing = X8
building shadows = off
reflections = off

Nvidia (For Xplane - all other settings are default)
Antialiasing FXAA = On
AntiAliasing Transparency = Multisample
Power management = prefer maximum performance
Texture filtering = On
Triple Buffering On

With these settings I can just maintain around the 36fps for a smooth experience and do not find the small FOV a massive disadvantage while the visual experience is the best I have managed but if you want normal FOV below is as good as I could get but I was really struggling to maintain the same smooth experience with fps dipping to 30 or just under on occasion.

Everything the same except FOV normal steam 150% Xplane AA X4

Additionally I use VMI Twick VR settings in Xplane with LOD 86% if you can’t get similar results without it.

It is interesting that the small FOV settings with Pitoll 0.75 steam 180% = 2804 X 3308 (9,275,632) gives me a crisper looking display than FOV medium Pitool 0.75 steam 150% = 3536 X 3020 (10, 678, 720) but I’m sure the maths works out that the small FOV is higher res.

Let me know if this was a good experience for you if you previously could not get a worthwhile experience in Xplane.

6 Likes
2

What controllers do you use?

3

I use a HOTAS and keyboard and mouse for Xplane.

1 Like
4

So you don’t use any vr controllers like the valve index controllers etc.?. I have the index controllers but having trouble with button and stick assignment. I also have a yoke ,throttle and rudder pedals. As you know our hobby with xplane11 is the most challenging in vr compared to the other vr programs. I tried aerofly fs2 but it’s not a real sim.
Lee

5

No just HOTAS and mouse with a bit of very occasional keyboard.
I map the 3d mouse to a joystick button so I can toggle it on off in the cockpit for switches etc but all the main aircraft functions I map to joystick buttons as well. You soon get used to the feel of which button is which so there is no need to swap in/out of VR.
Granted it isn’t full on simulation but it is a cheap and functionary way of enjoying VR flight.
I think if I got a full dashboard and flight yoke etc it would be wasted on VR unless you aligned your VR view with your real world setup which would take a lot of doing. I have seen videos of people with that best of both worlds set up but it is expensive and complicated.

6

Thanks for your reply and i will let you know how it goes with you recomended settings.
regards Lee

7

If you have G-Force card don’t forget to download the very latest drivers too.
Let me know how you get on.