Over on the X-Plane Developer website, Ben Supnik has posted a brief update regarding X-Plane’s new graphics engines.
The key points addressed in this post state what the Laminar team have currently been able to get working in X-Plane with these two new engines:
- Plane-Maker and Airfoil Maker run in Vulkan and Metal.
- X-Plane runs in Vulkan and Metal up to the main menu (e.g. the app starts) but can’t yet fly or show scenery.
- The Vulkan and Metal code runs on Mac, Windows and Linux.
- The Vulkan code runs on Nvidia, AMD and Intel drivers.
- All shaders are ported.
- All of the zoo animals (abstractions around part of the graphics engine) are now complete. We killed off the last 2 or 3 since the live feed.
Ben states that over the last couple of weeks himself and Sidney have been working to port all rendering passes to the new code. This means that they don’t have to go through OpenGL to fly the aircraft.
An important point made at the end of the post states that at this stage they aren’t currently able to give a measure on what performance will be like with these new engines. However, they state that once they’re able to sit down in the sim with aircraft they should be able to give an idea of what kind of performance can be expected with Metal and Vulkan.
