Welcome to Flying-Low

The site that aims to introduce and teach you to use the X-Plane 12 Flight Simulator.

This site won’t teach you how to fly but it will help you get the most out of X-Plane

Here you’ll find the full range of my X-Plane e-book handbooks, ready to buy and download directly.

You can also browse 15 different Tip categories or search the entire growing library of weekly X-Plane 12 tips

This week’s tip:

  • Built-in Non-Synthetic Benchmark Framerate Test

    When optimizing your X-Plane settings, you need to have a more reliable way to ascertain the effectiveness of your graphics changes than just the fps display. There is a hopelessly obsolete article in the X-Plane knowledge base which does not work as written. However this test is still available for X-Plane 12 as follows:

    For Windows users:

    Open the command prompt [cmd].
    Assuming your X-Plane installation is located in C:\X-Plane 12, copy this line below and paste into the black command prompt window:

    C:\X-Plane 12\x-plane –fps_test=13 –load_smo=Output/replays/fps_test_flight_737.fps –pref:_prefs_found=0 –no_sound

    and X-Plane will load and run a test flight for a few minutes. Once it stops, open your log.txt file and search for “FRAMERATE”
    The text editor will jump to these lines

    FRAMERATE TEST: time=226.0, frames=10499, fps=46.45
    GPU LOAD: time=226.0, wait=143.3, load=63.4%

    The average frame rate (fps) for that flight is shown and the GPU load

    In the X-Plane 12\Output\Replays folder there are 7 test flights
    To test a different flight, replace fps_test_flight_737.fps with fps_test_kjfk.fps (or one of the other filenames) so that the command line appears as:

    C:\X-Plane 12\x-plane –fps_test=13 –load_smo=Output/replays/fps_test_kjfk.fps –pref:_prefs_found=0 –no_sound

    For Linux users:

    Open the terminal.
    Assuming your X-Plane installation is located in your home folder, paste in:

    ./X-Plane-x86_64 –fps_test=13 –load_smo=Output/replays/fps_test_flight_737.fps –pref:_prefs_found=0 –no_sound

    ./X-Plane-x86_64 –fps_test=13 –load_smo=Output/replays/fps_test_eddf.fps –pref:_prefs_found=0 –no_sound

    ./X-Plane-x86_64 –fps_test=13 –load_smo=Output/replays/fps_test_kjfk.fps –pref:_prefs_found=0 –no_sound