Updated 4/8/2020 8:25 PM: Beta 2 is…not our best work. It crashes on start on Linux and crashes on load for a wide variety of third party aircraft (but not LR ones). We are cutting a beta 3 with these two issues fixed; it should be live in the next twenty four hours. We are holding with Beta 1 on Steam until Beta 3 is available.

X-Plane 11.50 Beta 2 is now available. (Steam users: it’s on the servers and we’ll hit go in a few hours if we don’t hear reports of massive crashing and pain.)

We received a lot of bug reports from X-Plane 11.50 beta 1. This is good! I’d much rather have multiple reports of a bug than no reports. Every now and then someone tells us about something and we go “how long has this been going on” and they so “oh for a year now” and we’re, like “why didn’t you file a bug???” Don’t assume someone else will file it!

So with beta two, here’s what we need:

Read the release notes – Jennifer puts real effort into documenting everything that is fixed to save you time.

If your bug is listed as fixed and you still see it, please file a new bug. If you mention the bug number that we listed as fixed in your “it’s still broken” report, this is really helpful for us.

If your bug is not listed as fixed, please do not re-file it. If we didn’t say it was fixed in the release notes, we already know it is still broken, and a re-file of the bug just takes time away from other bug reports.

Beta 2 does not fix all bugs – it doesn’t even come close, so most bugs do not need to be refiled.

With that in mind, there are a few high profile bug fixes in beta 2:

The sky colors dialog box does not crash! We are actually astonished at how many people reported this – we didn’t think it was a heavily used feature, but … who knew.

dialog box does not crash! We are actually astonished at how many people reported this – we didn’t think it was a heavily used feature, but … who knew. VR – the right eye is fixed! It turns out this was broken twice; we have fixed both bugs.

– the right eye is fixed! It turns out this was broken twice; we have fixed both bugs. Plugins : object drawing in OpenGL for legacy plugins turns out to have been massively borked; this could cause wrong drawing and crashes in all of the pilot clients, ground traffic, push back add-ons, etc. So a large swathe of popular add-ons should work better in OpenGL mode.

: object drawing in OpenGL for legacy plugins turns out to have been massively borked; this could cause wrong drawing and crashes in all of the pilot clients, ground traffic, push back add-ons, etc. So a large swathe of popular add-ons should work better in OpenGL mode. Older NVidia cards should now work and not have a black screen. This covers the 600, 700, 800, and some 900 NVidia cards.

cards should now work and not have a black screen. This covers the 600, 700, 800, and some 900 NVidia cards. Mac users who were getting “out of memory” – this should be a lot better now.

who were getting “out of memory” – this should be a lot better now. Users with multiple GPUs and SLI should be able to launch without disabling things.

Here are the complete release notes.

Probably the most common and annoying bug report we get that is not fixed here is blurry textures. Basically if X-Plane thinks it is running out of VRAM, it will lower the resolution on textures where it is allowed to lower the resolution. We have seen cases of this code behaving very poorly and turning texture resolution all the way down.

First, just to state the obvious, this is a bug. You do not need more VRAM to run with Vulkan than OpenGL, we just need to fix the pager. If you have less than 8 GB of VRAM, do not panic.

I am not surprised that we have seen this bug – texture paging is very much about tuning our decisions to match real-world use, and we have shipped with something that works decently in our test cases and sometimes quite badly in real-world use cases that are very different from our test cases. So we will adapt the algorithm over time based on data we collect, and it will take a few betas to get better.