Hello everyone. I'm a newbie to this forum and just read the whole thing before I started this message. I'm writing because I'm sitting on the fence trying to decide about purchasing XE now or waiting until it has been patched to properly work with Vulkan. I looked at XE about 1½ years ago and thought the comments regarding the hit in performance FPS was a bit larger than I was willing to take on. Since then things have changed. I have beefed up my CPU and Video card. While not the fastest gaming PC around, it is way above average in my opinion. With X-Plane 11.50 b6 I can fly with all the graphics settings maxed out.
I am somewhat disappointed in SkyMaxPro though. While it works pretty good most of the times, it has its issues which is why I'm rethinking XE again. I have recreated Amelia Earhart's flight around the world with SkyMaxPro, but its realweather did not always update. Right now I am recreating Earnest Shackleton's Trip down to the northern tier of Antarctica and I'm currently heading towards Elephant Island. SkyMaxPro is not giving me what I believe to be the correct real weather. On weather apps on my phone, I should be flying in pretty much a whiteout snowstorm, but instead I'm getting a virtually cloud free sky. Just looking at waves on the water for hours on end is kind of - lets say - boring.
Looking at what XE can do, I'm inclined to consider purchasing it and giving it a whirl. I turned off Vulkan while giving it another try. I'm getting 70fps in chase 5view with 43 fps inside the cockpit. I just lowered my altitude from 20,000 ft to 2,000 ft and picked up rain on my windshield while still having a cloudless sky. The raindrops are not moving at all on the windshield while flying 240 Kts (this does not seem very real to me). I also just updated my SkymaxPro to ver 4.9.3 which was just recently released.
So, I don't really have a question, just some comments and thoughts while I think out loud. I feel if I purchase XE, I will lose some fps but perhaps not as many as I would have with the old PC 1½ years ago. I would gain some incredible looking clouds and hopefully its real time weather would be able to update even down just above the Antarctica. I'm thinking I have more to gain than lose. I looked at the version history and see periodic updates being released in what I would consider a timely manner So when Captain Kitten says eventually they will get around to Vulkanizing it, I believe the captain. I think the developments approach to making XE better and improve performance before chasing after Vulkan makes sense to me too. Probably trying to do both performance and address Vulkan on the same release would be difficult to troubleshoot issues that would arise (as surely they will). Being a former developer in my working days, my team always liked to address one set of issues at a time for the same reasons.
To buy or not to buy that is my dilemma going to bed tonight I did see another persons comments that it is too expensive, but not really I paid just about the same thing for SkymaxPro and the Realweather connector. Actually removing those would give me back about 2½ fps so that;s kind of a plus and minimizes fps loss that I would anticipate from XE 1.13
I do like the videos I'm seeing where there is fog, moving raindrops on the windshield, multi-layer clouds, snow effects on the ground etc. It seems I have more to gain than I have to lose. Am I missing something? I'm inclined to purchase this product this week as I continue to do some more research. The more I like what I'm seeing and then get even more exciting about the future upgrades.
Any comments from anyone are welcome - Kittster