Its not just winter white, summer green, but there’s a whole range of experiences in between which is nice to see. There’s a whole new tree rendering system and a new season rendering system. X-Plane has finally offloaded a lot of things that were being done on the CPU and moved them over to the GPU which should improve performance while letting the team do more with just about everything. The clouds make the jump from very primitive billboard style visual effects to a now common, industry standard, volumetric ray marched effect. X-Plane 12 takes it deeper with revised rendering for lights, the environment, shadows, the sky and clouds. That update was transformative and also a necessary stepping stone to what came next and with 12 we’re beginning to really see the payoff. That process started with X-Plane 11 and the 11.50 release which introduced Vulkan for graphics rendering. The biggest changes to X-Plane start with a relatively substantial under the hood makeover of the core technologies. None of the features shipping at this point with X-Plane 12 are necessarily final, if there is such a thing in flight sims, and so a future review when the title emerges from early access will undoubtedly happen and it will focus on what’s happened between now and that point. This first public release is out and that means that we should and will evaluate it for what it is right at this point.Ĭritiquing features now also doesn’t mean that things won’t change in the future.

I’ve seen some suggest that we can’t adequately critique X-Plane 12 at this stage because its in early access. Visual glitches, crashes, bugs, and general improvements are all likely to see tweaks and improvements. A lot can change during the early access period and I have confidence that we’ll see a lot of the rough edges smoothed out. Early accessĮvery single word of this early access review is written with the understanding that X-Plane 12 is in an early access state.

Let’s dig into the latest X-Plane and put down some first impressions. But is it everything that we hoped for? That might depend on what features are most important. Sporting new features, enhancements from the previous version, and a relatively substantial overhaul of some of the core features, X-Plane 12 brings a lot to the table. Laminar Research have unleashed the latest version of X-Plane into the public spotlight.

How to install aircraft into x plane 11