X-Plane overview
X-Plane is one of the world's most comprehensive and powerful flight simulators for personal computers. It's not a game, but an engineering tool that can be used to predict the flying qualities of fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft with incredible accuracy. X-Plane comes with 19 aircraft in the default installation spanning the aviation industry and its history, and several thousand more are freely downloadable from the internet.
- X-Plane scenery is world-wide, with scenery for the entire planet Earth between 74 degrees north to 60 degrees south latitude and includes over 34,000 airports.
- Weather is variable from clear skies and high visibility to thunderstorms with controllable wind, wind shear, turbulence, and microbursts! Rain, snow and clouds are available for an instrument flying challenge, and thermals are available for the gliders! Real weather conditions can be downloaded from the internet, allowing you to fly in the actual weather that currently exists at the location of flight!
- X-Plane also has detailed failure-modeling, with multitudes of systems that can be failed manually or randomly, when you least expect it! You can fail instruments, engines, flight controls, landing gear, or dozens of other systems at any moment.
- While X-Plane is the world's most comprehensive flight sim, your purchase also comes with Plane-Maker (to create your own airplanes) WorldEditor (WED) an open source 3D scenery and airport editor allowing you to create custom airports or scenery, customize a local airport using built-in airport elements and output scenery or airport data files which can be shared with the X-Plane community.
- X-Plane is also extremely customizable, allowing you to easily create textures, sounds, and instrument panels for your own airplanes that you design or the planes that come with the sim.
- X-Plane's accuracy (in flight model), scope (in aircraft and terrain coverage), versatility (in aircraft type and weather conditions), add-on programs (in aircraft and scenery editors), customizability, downloadable aircraft, and downloadable scenery makes it the ultimate flight simulation experience for Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms.
- Be sure to turn on the beta option in the installer before you run it to get the beta!
- The demo contains a limited scenery area to keep the download size reasonable. It will run for 15 minutes before it begins to ignore the user's input, at which point the simulator must be restarted to fly more.
What’s new in version 12.00
Updated on Sep 08 2022
- Weather, clouds, trees, wind, light, seasons - completely reimagined.
- Photometric, HDR Lighting Engine.
- The 4D Weather Engine.
- XSeven New Aircraft - A330, Citation X, SR22, RV-10, PA-18, R-22, Lancair Evolution.
- Volumetric 3D Clouds.
- Seasonal/Weather-Specific Visual Effects - Snow, Variable Vegetation, Ice and Rain.
- New 3D Forests, Water, Vegetation.
Full release notes are available here
Note: The download provided here is an installer application you could use to install the app itself
Information
App requirements
- Intel 64
- Apple Silicon
- macOS 10.15 or later
- CPU: Intel Core i3, i5, i7, or i9 CPU with 4 or more cores
- Disk space: 25 GB
- Video Card: a Vulkan 1.3-capable video card from NVIDIA or AMD with at least 2 GB VRAM.
- System Requirements page for additional requirements such as recommended hardware.
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Comments
User Ratings
Mar 31 2017
Version: 10.51r2
X-Plane 11 was released today. The price of X-Plane10 has been reduced.
Sep 28 2013
Version: 10.21
So much potential but it should come with the ability to work out of the box with various control sticks. I have a Saitek stick and have to manually configure everything...to the point where I don't want to fly with X-Plane. MSFS worked out of the box with my stick so I'll stay with them even though it's an inferior flight sim.
Feb 10 2013
Version: 10.20
It is incredible how the software developers manage to implement or even re-implement new bugs in very new version, be it beta or so-called stable.
This demo installer after heaving installed everything eats 37 % CPU on a i7 2.6GHZ doing nothing! Programming an installer is not so difficult as a flight sim...
so: tons of features, pretty much worthless for serious flying with all these annoying bugs
Jan 27 2012
Version: 10.04 Beta 1
Oh c'mon it's 2k12 give me a break with PPC Architecture.
Dec 5 2011
Version: 10.03b1
Graphic Card support:
http://wiki.x-plane.com/X-Plane_10_Graphics_Card_Support
http://www.x-plane.com/x-plane-10-system-requirements/
X-Plane 10 requires, at the *minimum*,
a 2 GHz, dual-core CPU,
2 GB of RAM, and
a DirectX 9-capable video card with 128 MB of on-board, dedicated video RAM (VRAM). See link for compatibility and graphics cards.
However, *for the best experience*, we recommend the following:
a 3 GHz, multi-core CPU (or, even better, multiple processors),
4 GB of RAM, and
a DirectX 10-capable (DX11 preferred) video card with 1 GB of on-board, dedicated VRAM.
X-Plane will take advantage of as many cores or distinct processors as you can afford. Having 16 cores split among 4 CPUs is not required by any means, but Version 10 would be able to use every one. No more than 4 GB of RAM is necessary, but the more VRAM you have, the better–X-Plane 10 can easily use 1.5 GB of VRAM at the maximum settings.
Nov 30 2011
Version: 10.0
Does X-Plane 10 still require the DVD to play? Can I install it on my laptop and then not have to lug the DVD with me everywhere I go?
Nov 28 2011
Version: 10.0
Was hoping X-Plane 10 would be released soon as the demo videos look fantastic. Unfortunately, the downloadable demo plays at such a low frame rate at the lowest settings on my MacPro (plenty of memory and an nVidia 8800GT GPU) that it's not playable. I'm curious what setup they used to play it when they made the videos. I hope the coming updates fix the slow frame rates.
Nov 27 2011
Version: 10.0
Laminar Research is now taking orders for x-plane 10. The full version costs $79.00 plus shipping. the demo cost nothing. The link is for x-plane 9. The official release date seems to be Dec 7, but you might get a pleasant surprise if you order now from Laminar Research.
Jan 9 2011
Version: 9.64
I love X-Plane. Natural feel and very extensible.
This should be labeled as a "Beta" as the X-Plane Updater only shows up to v9.62. In order for it to download 9.64, the "betas" box must be checked.
Oct 12 2009
Version: 9.4rc14
There is one Flightsim for the Mac, XP, so this is the best one. Flightgear has potential but still some way to go. hopefully they keep it up.
That said, xplane is a piece of crap. there was never a stable version, and there probably never will be one. this is the authors 14th attempt to deliver something without introducing silly new bugs over and over again. Maybe he's gone completely bananas, who knows. But for sure he has no knowledge of software development, quality management and customer care. sadly enough.
Jul 26 2009
Version: 9.31
The good, the bad, the ugly, the wacky.
It's X-Plane plainly explained, along with a healthy dose of prove-it-to-me skepticism.
Product reviews, tips and tricks, the occasional tutorial. Get an unbiased look at the flight simulator that provokes bipolar disorder in otherwise well adjusted people:
http://plainlyxplane.blogspot.com
Apr 28 2009
Version: 9.30b8
You don't really need to build airplanes to enjoy this sim. If you're already a pilot, this thing is pretty damn good.
Apr 4 2008
Version: 9.0rc3
for everybody who says that they just sit on the runway, you obviously havent given this simulator any time. i personally have never tried to make any planes, but i still have fun flying the planes that oter people make around. the controls are very simple once you know them, although i will admit that changing them is a little tricky. this game is not meant to be played with a mouse, so i recommed that you buy a cheap joystick if nothing else. i use maybe 3 or 4 buttons, and then my joystick and clicking around in the window view.
maybe if you took a little time to think about it you could actually figure it out
Dec 19 2007
Version: 9.0b11
It looks like X-Plane would be a great find for a true flight simulation enthusiast however for a newcomer who is interested in learning, it lacks guidance. You sit there on the runway wondering what to do. I would have expected a little more from a Mac app but X-Plane does not even offer a true Mac interface but some wack UI that looks like a flavor of Linux. A disappointment.
Nov 30 2007
Version: 9.0b2
People!
Download and buy X-PLane 9!!!
The realism and graphics are INCREDIBLE!!!!!!!
Nov 11 2006
Version: 8.5
Scenery is still boring, crashes as regularly as previous versions even on a G5 Quad. I still can't see a reason to want to buy it unless as people say all you want to do is twiddle the knobs for realistic flight simulation. If refunds were an option I'd take it.
Oct 13 2006
Version: 8.5rc4
For those of you who just want to get off the ground,
Take these Tips!
Press the "B" key to release brakes
Hold down F2 to take off
The "A" key is back view
The "W" key is cockpit
http://x-plane.org/
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