X-Plane 11.50 Flight Simulator Preparing For Public Beta With Vulkan Rendering

One of the engine upgrades to Vulkan we have been looking forward to the most has been usage by the X-Plane flight simulator to ultimately succeed their long-standing OpenGL pipeline. Laminar Research shared on Christmas day that the X-Plane 11.50 release with Vulkan support is currently in private beta and will soon be available publicly.

As we roll into 2020, the X-Plane 11.50 public beta should be available soon for more widespread testing and ironing out any remaining issues. Vulkan'ized X-Plane should allow for better performance and more long-term potentials as well thanks to the back-end re-architecting for this mature and realistic flight simulator.

On the Apple side, Laminar is also adding Metal API support due to the OpenGL deprecation on iOS/macOS.

Those wanting to learn more about the upcoming X-Plane 11.50 public beta with Vulkan/Metal support can do so via this X-Plane blog post. Benchmarks of X-Plane 11.50 once available will be coming on Phoronix.