Laminar Research recently released a major update to X-Plane 12, which brings massive improvements to cloud rendering, lighting, environmental effects, and graphics performance.

Their graphics team has been working to mitigate the famed dark cockpit issue, bringing significantly improved interior rendering quality. The light coming into the cockpit correctly follows the aircraft's contours and structural details.

Furthermore, the graphics engine's exposure handling has also been improved, bringing exposure fusion—a familiar feature on most modern smartphones—to the virtual realm of X-Plane 12. It consists of taking multiple photos at various levels of exposure and then automatically stitching them together, yielding a potentially impressive-looking result. 

The sky brightness has also been tweaked to ensure it's more natural and doesn't burn people's retinas. Ground object brightness values have also been tweaked to ensure they are not overly bright.

Their graphics engine as a whole has also undergone changes, with an upgrade to their shader compiler, which manages resources more efficiently and thus brings smoother performance figures. Texture handling has also been tweaked to ensure faster loading times and more efficient rendering.

Their VRAM management method has also been tweaked, ensuring it prioritizes smaller memory requests before large ones, aiding total memory allocation. Additionally, it makes multiple attempts to allocate memory before giving up, allowing the system to free up space when needed and ultimately reduce the chances of blurry textures or slow performance overall.

The cloud rendering system has also been changed, with a small radius surrounding the camera's viewport sporting high-quality clouds, nearly eliminating cloud pixelation effects around the airplane. They hint at it being a stepping stone to other cool rendering effects in the future.

Last but not least, they have also changed how their light rendering system works by breaking them into tiles, yielding better performance in demanding environments such as large airports and cities.

In addition, they have also made minor changes to colors, bringing more realistic color accuracy, improved sky rendering, better cloud shadows, cloud shadows on clouds, cloud-aware ambient light, and more realistic shadows overall.

Detail has also been enhanced on surface textures around airports, and weather effects now also show outside of the airport's area, accumulating on main roads, as suggested by the community.

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The complete changelog follows below:

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Known Issues

• Sky Colors still require adjustments.

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Fixes and Enhancements

General

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• Included an updated version of our Gateway Airport.
• Fixed an issue where popups couldn’t be acknowledged when using Valve Index controllers in VR (XPD-16693).
• Fixed an issue of the cloud rendering in the right eye when using VR (XPD-16712).

Graphics

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• Fixed an issue in the cloud rendering where black holes were visible (XPD-16321).
• Improved the interaction of skyscrapers with clouds (XPD-16689).
• Improved the interaction of clouds with mountains (XPD-16699).

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Scenery

• Fixed some minor issues with various landmarks.

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The update is currently available on the public_beta branch on Steam. Laminar customers can get the update by toggling “Check for new betas as well as updates”.

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