X-Plane Flight Simulator Continues Advancing Its Renderer With Vulkan

[phoronix]

Phoronix: X-Plane Flight Simulator Continues Advancing Its Renderer With Vulkan

X-Plane is not only the most realistic flight simulator that has long offered native Linux support but it's the only instance of a Vulkan-powered flight simulator I am aware of. While long tied to OpenGL, the company behind X-Plane is making it clear that the graphics rendering future is with Vulkan (and Metal when talking about Apple platforms)...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X-Plane-More-Vulkan-Future

[tildearrow]

I wonder, why not MoltenVK instead of effort duplication?
Sure, if you want maximum performance you can go Metal, but seriously how many people run military-grade flight simulators on Macs anyway?

[intelfx]

I'm not sure what this got to do with Linux or hardware on Linux (X-Plane's Linux support or Vulkan renderer is not exactly news), but hey, free publicity to my niche hobby is always appreciated

[bug77]

I'm not sure what this got to do with Linux or hardware on Linux (X-Plane's Linux support or Vulkan renderer is not exactly news), but hey, free publicity to my niche hobby is always appreciated

One of the most advanced flight sims offers first class Linux support. That's something Phoronix has always tracked.

[M@GOid]

I believe that for some developers, Vulkan/DX12 will lessen the optimization gap that exists between consoles and PC. Up till now you needed a lot more horsepower to achieve the same results, but some games are starting to show advancements on that front.

X-Plane at last is doing their job while trying to achieve more with less hardware resources. Flight simulator developers are historically notorious bad in this. I remember years ago when Matt Wagner from DCS, once stating that his game wouldn't benefit from a multi-threaded engine, when asked by players... MS new FS also launched with shameful CPU utilization, something they only fixed because (I imagine) they were yelled by angry Xbox people, before it was launched in the console.

[drake23]

The beginning looked a bit like the first operation flashpoint

[Yoshi]

The beginning looked a bit like the first operation flashpoint

Yeah, I felt that nostalgia, too ;-)

[Alex88]

Aerofly 2 also supports Vulkan and Linux and is much less buggy.

[JustSid]

I wonder, why not MoltenVK instead of effort duplication?
Sure, if you want maximum performance you can go Metal, but seriously how many people run military-grade flight simulators on Macs anyway?

Three reasons, actually. The first one is that when we started the Vulkan/Metal port, MoltenVK was way less mature than it is now. Secondly, we still rely on features that aren't directly exposed by MoltenVK and would have to be added to it in some way at which point we'd have to then maintain a fork of MoltenVK. In particular, to make OpenGL plugins work, we need to be able to share a MTLTexture object with OpenGL, which requires us to create the MTLTexture object backed by an IOSurface and some specific flags (so we can import it into OpenGL through CGL). There is nothing in MoltenVK to make this work.

But thirdly, it just isn't that much extra effort to maintain the Metal backend. Metal just isn't as complex as Vulkan, so there is a lot less Metal code. Cross compiling our shaders to Metal isn't very complicated either. All in all, it's much less headache than tying us to MoltenVK. Plus, it makes sure that our generic backend layer is actually nice and generic, and that we can add new rendering backends in the future if we want to.

[quaz0r]

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