X-Plane 12 uses Vulkan/Metal as its renderer, always, so it uses our Vulkan/Metal memory management strategy: we dynamically bring the resolution of textures down to fit within your available VRAM, with some guessing as to which textures are most important. What we didn’t optimize was VRAM use, and this is why blurry textures is a common problem with the first beta. (I do suspect there is a huge gulf between the haves and have-nots for GPU power – because there’s a huge range of hardware performance amongst our users. User with high end hardware have been pleasantly surprised to see production-level FPS in beta 1, and a common request is “I have 60 fps and blurry clouds, can I get a higher max setting.” We still have a lot of GPU optimization left to do, but we also spent some time before beta 1 working on performance, particularly at intermediate settings. “You’re gonna use more GPU power? I can’t buy a 3080, I’d have to sell my kidney!” When we discussed this before Early Access, there was a lot of teeth gnashing. X-Plane 12 moves some work that used to be on the CPU to the GPU (looking at you, ocean waves!), and virtually all new computing work in X-Plane 12 is on the GPU. The elephant in the room is third party access to the weather system. Third party interfaces – we have a few new SDK and authoring features that are mostly completed that will ship during early access.Philipp is working on an airbus MCDU, which we expect to ship during early access.Lighting – there are quite a few lighting and atmospheric scattering bugs that affect the sim, as well as work to do improving auto-exposure and tone mapping.Clouds are probably the single most expensive part of the renderer, so they are a constant tug-of-war between quality and speed. Clouds – we are working on the shaping and quality of clouds, improving resolution, fixing artifacts, and improving performance.Here are some of the major areas of work ahead of us: (We can also finally open up our developer relations program to a wider audience.) Major Areas of Work With X-Plane 12.0 in early access, we don’t have to say ‘no’ to users and devs who want to get started with 12, and third parties can get their entire teams using the new sim and run their own test programs. X-Plane 12 is in Early Access so that the entire X-Plane community can be involved in X-Plane 12’s growth, not just a limited number of testers. So why Early Access now? Not because X-Plane 12.0 is done – we still have over two hundred open bugs and a lot of things we want to do. The alpha program included completion of major features, lots of debugging, and changing the product in response to early alpha feedback. During that time we built 38 (!) official alpha builds, recut the global scenery five times, and committed over 4000 checkins to X-Plane’s source code (plus more to the aircraft, scenery tools and art libraries). X-Plane 12 has been in a private alpha test program with third parties since December (!) – almost nine months. For today, here are just a few notes on some issues that have come up over the last few days. Over the next few weeks we will post more about ongoing development and get into some of the new features in depth – there’s a ton to talk about in X-Plane 12. X-Plane 12.00 is now available for Early Access – in other words, everyone can get X-Plane 12. Well, this has been a crazy couple of weeks.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |