answered Strange shadowing problem after upgrade to XP11.50R3 with Metal rendering

[atosser]

Hi fellow aviators,

I recently upgraded X-Plane to 11.50 from a much earlier version and ran a flight from EGKA to EGHI (Shoreham to Southampton), using the Open GL renderer first and then Metal. The screenshots show a strange shadow appearing a certain distance around the aircraft, when using Metal renderer. On the ground, objects appearing a short distance away, appear in apparent darkness. This is particularly noticeable on final approach into Southampton, and when doing an external view of the aircraft when moving camera further away (two top-down plane pics).

 

Scenery in use is Orbx EGKA, TrueEarth GB South and EGHI.

 

Has anyone any idea what this is and how to fix?

 

My system is a 2017 iMac I7 4.2, Radeon 580 Pro 8Gb video, 40GB memory, running MacOS High Sierra 10.13. I'd be ok updating to Mojave if this means a later driver, and gets rid of the problem but I'm extremely hesitant in updating anything as the sim is otherwise running nicely.

 

If I switch back to Open GL, the problem goes away. So points to the Metal driver and incompatibility?

 

Thanks for any help

[Jon Clarke]

Cannot really assist, as you correctly mention it appears to be an anomaly caused by Metal. I feel you may be better off asking the same question at the

https://forums.x-plane.org as they may have some ideas as to either the cause and/or resolution to the issue. It is not an Orbx addon compatibility issue as the addons do not influence or cause shadow effects.

[atosser]

16 hours ago, Jon Clarke said:

Cannot really assist, as you correctly mention it appears to be an anomaly caused by Metal. I feel you may be better off asking the same question at the

https://forums.x-plane.org as they may have some ideas as to either the cause and/or resolution to the issue. It is not an Orbx addon compatibility issue as the addons do not influence or cause shadow effects.

Thanks Jon, I did that before coming here. I'm pretty sure this isn't an Orbx related matter, but there's so few X-Plane people on Macs that I had to cast the net further.

 

I am hopeful that it might be to do with using one of the older version of MacOS (High Sierra) which is as of today, 3 releases behind the upcoming version. I'm just very hesitant in updating when everything else works ok. Switched to Open GL and it's working about the same as before, so nothing lost. 

 

Thanks again for the feedback.

[BobbieH]

This looks like the same thing you're seeing.

 

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/231545-strange-shadow-problem-metal-driver-x-plane-1150r3-mac-on-high-sierra/&tab=comments#comment-2077366

 

In fact looking at the screenshots you may have got your answer already as they appear to be the same shots