X-Plane's Vulkan Renderer Maturing, More Performance Optimizations Still Coming

The folks at Laminar Research published a new blog post this week detailing their latest development work on their Vulkan (and Apple Metal) renderers for the realistic X-Plane flight simulator.

Since the X-Plane 11.50 beta release in early April they have made public their Vulkan/Metal renderers as alternatives to their long-standing OpenGL rendering setup. In the weeks since they have continued advancing the new rendering code and while still in beta has shown much progress since the original beta.

Beta 9 is now available with a number of fixes especially with the Beta 7/8 releases having not been issued. Various lingering pieces of functionality are now working with Vulkan/Metal, including aspects of the flight simulator's plug-in system. Still though are some open items such as for correcting picking the correct GPU in multi-GPU setups.

Some work is underway as well in optimizing video memory usage with their new rendering code but more work is to be done. After fixing crashes/stability issues and the video memory optimizations, Laminar developers will be focusing more on the performance improvements.

More details on their current Vulkan efforts via this blog post.

As of the earlier beta are some X-Plane Vulkan vs. OpenGL benchmarks on Linux and a Radeon driver comparison. I'll have out more X-Plane benchmarks when the stable v11.50 release nears.