X-Plane Flight Simulator Is Making Progress On Vulkan Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Vulkan on 6 June 2018 at 08:17 AM EDT. 4 Comments
VULKAN
The X-Plane cross-platform flight simulator has been depending upon OpenGL for nearly two decades since the program first came into existence, but a port of its rendering engine to use the Vulkan API has been a work-in-progress.

Since X-Plane began working on virtual reality (VR) support for their flight simulator, they have talked of making use of Vulkan on Windows/Linux/Android while also pursuing Metal API support for macOS. The company has previously confirmed they are going with Vulkan on supported platforms including Windows, rather than pursuing DirectX 12. It looks like their Vulkan support is getting squared away as the company has tweeted this weekend they will be talking about Vulkan integration this weekend at the Flight Sim Expo in Las Vegas.

Details though on their Vulkan integration have been scarce, but it's been brought up a few times in recent months on their blog and elsewhere. It will certainly be interesting to see how well their Vulkan integration is, especially considering the realistic flight simulator is quite CPU-heavy as it stands now, so hopefully their engine went through a nice refactoring in the process of supporting these modern graphics APIs. Benchmarks will come once the X-Plane 11 Vulkan support is available.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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