RealFlight Evolution DirectX 11 Public Beta

[Ryan Douglas]

We are pleased to announce the public beta release of our DirectX 11 update for RealFlight Evolution.

The move to DirectX 11 is a tremendous step forward for RealFlight from an underlying technology standpoint. DirectX 9 was a very stable platform that served us well for many years, but we’ve reached a point where we can’t depend on it any longer. Basing RealFlight’s rendering on DX11 now will leave us in a far better position today, and it unlocks more options for improvement going forward.

This is first and foremost a stability and compatibility upgrade. With AMD casually breaking DX9 support off and on in their recent drivers and Intel dropping it altogether for newer versions of their on-chip graphics, we need to update RealFlight to keep it running on all the latest hardware. This upgrade will accomplish that.

Things will generally look the same. We targeted the appearance of the current DX9 graphics so we could easily check our work during development and keep the focus on releasing this upgrade to our users as soon as possible.

Please give us feedback! We need your help to identify bugs. Unless you encounter a problem that prevents you from using RealFlight, we request that all Evo users switch to the DX11 beta and live in it now. We have created a dedicated forum for bug reports and general discussion. If necessary, switching back to the standard public version (10.00.059) is very easy (see directions below).

Custom content creators have an important role to play on top of the regular user testing. We’ll post more about this in the Evolution Designer’s Corner shortly.

We intend to leave the DX11 update in beta for some time in order to collect sufficient data and have time to address it. This must run on a wide variety of system configurations, far more than we can test ourselves.

How to Get the DX11 Beta Build

1. Restart your Steam client to ensure it is aware of the new version.
   1. Right-click the Steam icon in your system tray and select Exit.
   2. Once everything closes, run Steam again.
2. Right-click on RealFlight Evolution in your Steam library, then select Properties…
3. In the Properties window, select Betas on the left.
4. Click the Beta Participation dropdown control to expand the list.
5. Select “publicbeta_directx11”.
6. Close the Properties dialog.
7. Steam will now download the new version (10.00.062 as of this writing).

You can switch back and forth between the DX11 beta and the default (non-beta) distribution branch at any time. Simply perform steps 2-7 above, except in step 5 choose “None” (or "dxvk-intel-fix" if applicable) instead of “publicbeta_directx11”.

Please be aware that the DX11 beta uses a different location for user data. This is because some files are formatted differently than the DX9 version’s. Instead of "<Documents>\RealFlight Evolution", everything goes in "<Documents>\RealFlight Evolution DX11 Beta". What this means for you:

• You will start from scratch in DX11 as far as settings and custom content.
• Your DX9 data will be unaffected and waiting there if you want to copy from it or if you switch back to the DX9 version.
• If you choose, it should be safe to copy over much of the DX9 data, such as your RealFlight64.ini and challengedata.db files. Most custom vehicle content would need to either be reimported or manually migrated and edited, though.
• No files should be copied the other direction, from DX11 back to DX9.

Caution: Do not copy the entire “RealFlight Evolution” directory! The contents of the Cache subdir in particular will break DX11 RealFlight.

Thank you in advance for helping to test this important new version of RealFlight Evolution!