Autogen and object density and visibility distance translate directly into rendering load. This means trees, air traffic, objects, plane exterior, and forest fires.

All the scenery and eye candy goodies cost frame rate. * Objects (in Settings -> Rendering Options). When you're close to running out of VRAM there is an abrupt drop in frame rate, typically going to zero in short order.

Note higher resolution also requires more VRAM in your graphics card. This covers both screen size and texture detail. Higher resolution means more data for your graphics card to handle for each frame. * Resolution (in Settings -> Rendering Options). * Textured lights have a modest frame rate cost. * Cloud shadows and reflections (V7+) have a substantial frame rate cost. The V7+ 3D clouds (what you get with scattered or broken clouds) are build up out of a great many texture objects and cause a major frame rate hit. The scattered and broken clouds in V6 have a modest frame rate cost. * Clouds (in Settings -> Weather Atmosphere). Same deal: a wider field of view lets you see more and makes X-Plane do more work. * Field of view (in Settings -> Rendering Options). The farther you can see, the more terrain and stuff X-Plane needs to render. * Visibility (in Settings -> Weather Atmosphere). Joystick? I use Saitek but I don't think the joystick I use is made any longer.Īnd you should take note of the many ways of getting higher frame rates with what you've got.įor example, the following effect X-Plane's frame rate: The 2-cores of the MacBook will probably help it run X-Plane better also.Ĭonsider that I run X-Plane frequently.If it were me, I'd take the iMac but I would want to put 2 to 4GB of memory inside same. That 1GB of memory in the MacBook will work much better than the 512MB of memory in the iMac. X-Plane is CPU intensive as well as GPU intensive. The iMac with it's 128MB ATI X600 XT has a faster video card than the MacBook's 64MB Intel GMA 950 GPU.

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