X-Plane11 & Vulkan. Rest van die blogpost is ook interessant uiteraard! O.a. de nieuwe physics en particle system.I presented a progress report on our port to Vulkan. For the last year, Sidney and I have been rewriting the rendering engine to run on Vulkan and Metal as well as OpenGL. This is going to get us faster performance, reduce stuttering, and enable us to run the engine on multiple cores for better hardware utilization.
After a year of banging on the code, we’re at what is roughly perhaps a half-way point. We have several parts of the underlying code ported to Vulkan, and we can run Airfoil-Maker natively on Vulkan on Windows. While Airfoil-Maker on Vulkan isn’t useful to anyone and it’s a far cry from all of X-Plane, it’s a useful check-point for us, demonstrating that the code we’ve written so far is on the right track. It’s still too soon to say what performance will be like under Vulkan, but the Vulkan implementation of Airfoil-Maker makes 69% less driver calls than the OpenGL one; we thought that was a good sign.
We don’t have a release date or version for Vulkan other than to say that we will ship Vulkan in the v11 run and it won’t be in 11.30. We are hoping to have a beta this year, but that’s a hope, not a hard date.
To answer a question we’ve received since the talk, we are also working on a Metal port for OS X. The Vulkan and Metal port are not separate efforts; we are making a single engine that can use either graphics API as a back-end. We don’t have Airfoil-Maker running on Metal yet but I am hopeful that we get there soon.
Ik bespeur hier een zekere mate van onethische logica.