Drivers and Builds To Try

For those who posted comments, sorry it took so long to moderate them - for some reason my spam filter decided that notifications of comments are, well, spam, so I just found them now. I should have known people would have jumped into a Vista-bashing thread. :-)

There is an X-Plane 9.02 beta 1 posted - like 901 we've been pretty quiet about this, but you can get it by enabling "get betas" and running the X-Plane updater. Please give it a try. Like 901 it is a small change for the purpose of localization, but it actually has an interesting feature pair:

• True-type fonts and
• Unicode-aware.

This is part of some rework we did to provide better language support. So...you should be able to run X-Plane no matter what weird characters* are in your folder names, name your airplanes funny things, and see diacritical marks. 902 uses a font that provides all of the Latin and Greek/Cyrillic code pages.

Also I have heard reports of improvements based on drivers:

• nVidia has 175.16 drivers out and they apparently address "stuttering" issues. The stuttering issue has been on my list to investigate because it happens under Windows but not Linux. If you have stuttering performance on high-end NV hardware, particularly with forests and Windows, please try 175.16 and let me know how it goes.
• ATI has released Catalyst 8-5. Catalyst 8-3 and 8-4 were causing "incomplete framebuffer" errors for some users, but I was unable to reproduce it (after spending a good day trying to jam Windows XP onto an iMac already crammed with Windows and Linux....yet another episode of a Tale of Three Operating Sytstems). Anyway, at least one user reported the issue as fixed in Cat 8-5, so if you are having problems, please try the new driver set.

As always, bugs in the X-Plane beta should go to our bug report form, on the X-Plane contacts page.

* You might accuse me of being American-centric in decrying diacritical and greek letters weird - but the truth is I am computer-centric...anything that is not in the original ASCII set is weird. :-)