VULKAN for Prepar3D v5?

[Leen3131cs 107]

1 hour ago, GSalden said:

Would you guys be prepared to start from scratch when a V5 with a new designed engine breaks backwards compatibility ?

Looking at myself I have perhaps payed a thousend euro’s for addons in the last 3-4 years...

🤔

 

Introducing Vulcan in XP will not break backwards compatibility in general, 
There will be some issues not doubt , but, whats life without issues.
Maybe (probably?) introducing Vulcan in P3D will give more problems and yes, it might make many add-ons purchased in the past end up in the bin.

Thats simply the price of progress.
When we want progress we have to pay the price.

Being a painter I made many skins for planes in various simulators, achieving the best results in X-Plane.
A lot of them cannot be used anymore due to the changes to improve our sims.
My bin is full of them.( hundreds of paints  - thousands of hours of happy painting ) 
Still I am not complaining.

Thats simply the price of progress.
When we want progress we have to pay the price.

Besides this all , spending 250 dollars a year for add-ons is really talking money and we do not all have a tree from wich we can pick our dollars.
The everage tennis-player however spends more in the club-bar only.

 

[pmb 5,137]

I am a layman in this field, but why does everyone expect Prepar3d to switch to Vulcan? Vulcan is the natural successor of OpenGL having been used by X-Plane (as well as Aerofly) so far with the intention of making these potentially multi-platfom usable.

Prepar3d, like its predecessor FSX/ESP, has always been bound to the Windows platform. Thus, in my mind, I would rather expect it to switch to DX12, if any. (In fact I expected this already earlier on, but obvisouly market penetration of Windows 10 wasn't high enough yet, to make this feasible).

In any case, I would expect development effort for a switch from DX11 to Vulcan to be much higher than to DX12, but experts can correct me.

Thanks and kind regards, Michael

[Leen3131cs 107]

You are right there, thats why the OP of this thread placed a questionmark in the title , I think.
 

[G-RFRY 1,712]

I would say it`s unlikely LM move away from DX, the latest GPU`s need DX12 and W10.

[tonywob 4,769]

It would likely be a huge rewrite. P3D is a DirectX-based simulator, moving to Vulkan would take a lot of effort I'd imagine

[G-RFRY 1,712]

I agree plus the fact we now know Nvidia have been working with Microsoft for years to bring new APIs, and new tech whatever they use it needs the OS support to run it.

[pmb 5,137]

Thanks guys for your opinions which double my impression. 

Kind regards, Michael

[Guest]

On 7/17/2018 at 7:26 AM, Cruachan said:

Not only does Vulkan offer everything currently supported by DirectX 12

Not entirely accurate, DX12 supports multiple GPUs of different brands and types to perform rendering tasks, Vulkan does not (they have to be the exact same GPU).  But there are some other differences also such as ray tracing support isn't finalized for Vulkan but has already been deployed for DX12 via Windows 10 updates. 

P3D is DX11 based, it would make a lot more sense for future versions of P3D to move to DX12 with ray tracing support.

But to be clear, Vulkan doesn't necessarily mean higher FPS, in fact, in my testing Vulkan FPS is LOWER than OpenGL ... BUT, and it's an important BUT, the AA processing in Vulkan is considerably better ... so Vulkan has an FPS hit, but visuals are better.  The same can be said for DX12, it's not about better FPS, it's about better visuals at less of an FPS hit.

So if the expectation is Vulkan (or DX12) will increase FPS then that's probably going to lead to disappointment.  What DX12 and Vulkan bring is better hardware accelerated support for addition function/methods that improve visual quality without "as much" of an FPS hit.

It's better to look at DX12 and Vulkan APIs as tools to improve visual quality AND NOT tools to improve FPS.  With that said, multi-GPU support is really what's needed as graphics intensive features are added ... P3D already has support for multi-GPU in  SLI/NVLink performance mode, DX12 should be able to better leverage that support and scale performance even more.

Cheers, Rob.

[Cruachan 705]

54 minutes ago, Rob Ainscough said:

Not entirely accurate, DX12 supports multiple GPUs of different brands and types to perform rendering tasks, Vulkan does not (they have to be the exact same GPU).  But there are some other differences also such as ray tracing support isn't finalized for Vulkan but has already been deployed for DX12 via Windows 10 updates. 

P3D is DX11 based, it would make a lot more sense for future versions of P3D to move to DX12 with ray tracing support.

But to be clear, Vulkan doesn't necessarily mean higher FPS, in fact, in my testing Vulkan FPS is LOWER than OpenGL ... BUT, and it's an important BUT, the AA processing in Vulkan is considerably better ... so Vulkan has an FPS hit, but visuals are better.  The same can be said for DX12, it's not about better FPS, it's about better visuals at less of an FPS hit.

So if the expectation is Vulkan (or DX12) will increase FPS then that's probably going to lead to disappointment.  What DX12 and Vulkan bring is better hardware accelerated support for addition function/methods that improve visual quality without "as much" of an FPS hit.

It's better to look at DX12 and Vulkan APIs as tools to improve visual quality AND NOT tools to improve FPS.  With that said, multi-GPU support is really what's needed as graphics intensive features are added ... P3D already has support for multi-GPU in  SLI/NVLink performance mode, DX12 should be able to better leverage that support and scale performance even more.

Cheers, Rob.

Well, in a nutshell, that pretty much sums up  the current situation and the likely evolving (?actual) future scenario, at least as far as Prepar3D is concerned.

Thanks Rob...I think!

Regards,

Mike

[SteveW 1,792]

As I already mentioned, Vulcan is software only made possible by the introduction of D3D12 (DX12) GPUs.

DX12 is the successor to DX11 - it's usual to move D3D code onto that these days.

XP is Open GL based, OGL being made possible by earlier D3D capable cards.

So the Q. should be "DX12 for P3D v5?", hopefully yes..

Edited November 4, 2018 by SteveW

[Noel 4,503]

P3D has always been prone to hitting both a CPU wall and a GPU wall in a given flight scenario so Vulkan or DX12 cannot de facto 'increase FPS' unless of course in that realtime segment the GPU had been the limiter of frame rate.   But better visuals certainly matters to many.

Edited November 4, 2018 by Noel

[Guest]

Using Vulkan for P3D will be interesting because it’s compatible with MacOS and you won’t install Windows so you can use the gained space for scenerie, and Macs right now aren’t really bad in performance 

[G-RFRY 1,712]

Apple will pleased if that happens as Apple sales are dropping like a stone, my iPhone just beeped at me after typing this😁.

[Guest]

After reading this (https://www.helisimmer.com/articles/vulkan-next-big-thing-flight-sim/) Vulkan will be a great improvement for p3d

[SKEWR 364]

I'm willing to break compatibility with the older versions. With notable exceptions, not many devs weren't price gouging from the move from P3d v3 to v4. There may a good chance that you won't spend $1000s all over again.

Also there is no rule against enjoying whatever sim you prefer.

 

For me, bring all the technological advances into our flight sim hobby that we can possibly get.