Vulkan is a band aid. Their success (or failure) will come after the implementation of Vulkan. It will be at that point that i would expect them to start talking about XP12 and a long list of features which have been ignored so far but that their new product absolutely needs to keep up with the now reinvigorated competition

I recently came back to XP after a couple of years away. I’m really impressed with the changes and improvements. 

2 hours ago, Pastaiolo said:

Vulkan is a band aid. Their success (or failure) will come after the implementation of Vulkan. It will be at that point that i would expect them to start talking about XP12 and a long list of features which have been ignored so far but that their new product absolutely needs to keep up with the now reinvigorated competition

That metaphor doesn't do the Vulkan switch justice... it's not a band aid, more a cardiac surgery.

Different point of views. For me the issue is not with the performance per se, but content. Content we'll hopefully see being introduced after Vulkan.

So no, for me Vulkan is exactly that. A band aid which is likely to increase fps you can count on a single hand on medium/high configs and increase smoothness, but once that is applied users will get back asking all the other things. Better coordination with third parties, some well deserved 3d water, better lighting, volumetric clouds (or at least better collaboration with the only ones doing them), etc etc

Vulkan is the new  canvas to paint on, so that they can (I hope) finally add the improvements that you are talking about (clouds, weather, water, seasonal depiction, ... ) .

It is another undergoing attempt in modernizing the engine.

At the same time they are blocking (3D) injections from 3rd parties, I am afraid this will stop xEvniro and UWXP (3d clouds) death in their tracks.What I want to say, it is neither a bandaid or cardiac surgery

It's a bypass surgery to clear arteries for a smooth slow 

I wanna join the metaphor bandwagon!

Ahem: With Vulkan, Laminar swaps the JT8D for a CFM56 and, once successful, proceeds to improve and add to the airframe until they end up with an untenable hodgepodge of improvements and additions that is technically sound, but flawed enough to kill the fun in using it.

Are you always this cheerful or is this a special treat for us during what remains of the festive season?

11 hours ago, Pastaiolo said:

Vulkan is a band aid. Their success (or failure) will come after the implementation of Vulkan. It will be at that point that i would expect them to start talking about XP12 and a long list of features which have been ignored so far but that their new product absolutely needs to keep up with the now reinvigorated competition

Vulcan is not a band aid, it is something they need to do to go forward. Once the issues with CPU and GPU usage is sorted, than they can concentrate on all the stuff that people keep complaining about.

3 hours ago, mjrhealth said:

Vulcan is not a band aid, it is something they need to do to go forward. Once the issues with CPU and GPU usage is sorted, than they can concentrate on all the stuff that people keep complaining about.

Agreed! Kind of a stupid metaphor. Vulcan is the heavy duty foundation that is needed for future improvements that are going to chew up FPS. + it solves the stutters supposedly!

We'll agree to disagree.

A lot of the features the sim needed should have been introduced long ago, and it wasn't the lack of performance the  main issue why they were not introduced. It's not like other simulators, which do have these features already, needed Vulkan to have said features implemented.

We also saw, from official numbers shared by Ben, how Vulkan is only going to affect low/medium config, which excludes a good chunk of the users here with computers which are definitely not in the low/medium range. I think you are still inflating the role of Vulkan by far but we'll see with our own eyes once we are running a XP11 version with it AND with addons.

Edited January 4, 20206 yr by Pastaiolo

49 minutes ago, Pastaiolo said:

We'll agree to disagree.

A lot of the features the sim needed should have been introduced long ago, and it wasn't the lack of performance the  main issue why they were not introduced. It's not like other simulators, which do have these features already, needed Vulkan to have said features implemented.

We also saw, from official numbers shared by Ben, how Vulkan is only going to affect low/medium config, which excludes a good chunk of the users here with computers which are definitely not in the low/medium range. I think you are still inflating the role of Vulkan by far but we'll see with our own eyes once we are running a XP11 version with it AND with addons.

Not agree with you,  Vulkan is not only for Low/Medium configurations but also for High End when using a 4K monitor and more important, High Res (4K) Virtual Reality. I'm a hugh fan of XP11 and on my i5-9600K with 32Gb ram and Titan XP 12Gb GPU I can achieve with all the settings high in 1080P on my monitor 40-60 fps over Orbx TE London with 8SSAA. In VR however I can't fly a default 172 in TE on a small airport with 19.99fps with only a marginal 2SSAA so stucked now in P3D.

As a comparision, I also have the Aerofly fs2 where you can switch between the old fashion OPGL and Beta Vulkan and in OpenGL a marginal 45 fps on a relative new written flysim and very big load on the hardware (in  4KVR) but with Vulkan, it's a all glory with 90fps/90hz and very low frametime on the CPU and GPU. 

I hope they can deliver the XP11/Vulkan very soon.

Just my 2 cents... Happy landings.  

Edited January 4, 20206 yr by simba_nl

9 minutes ago, simba_nl said:

Not agree with you,  Vulkan is not only for Low/Medium configurations but also for High End when using a 4K monitor and more important, High Res (4K) Virtual Reality. I am a hugh fan of XP11 and on my i5-9600K with 32Gb ram and Titan XP 12Gb GPU and can achieve with all the settings high in 1080P on my monitor doing 40-60 fps over Orbx TE London with 8SSAA. In VR however I can't fly a default 172 in TE on a small airport with 19.99fps with only a marginal 2SSAA so stucked now in P3D.

As a comparision, I also have the Aerofly fs2 where you can switch between the old fashion OPGL and Beta Vulkan and in OpenGL a marginal 45 fps on a relative new written flysim and very big load on the hardware (in  4KVR) but with Vulkan, it's a all glory with 90fps/90hz and very low frametime on the CPU and GPU. 

I hope they can deliver with XP11 for the HighRes users otherwise very soon.

Just my 2 cents... Happy landings.  

I am fine if you don't agree with me, but you need to look at the performance charts and the comment made by Ben in the dev blog too. Even tho he is not talking about VR, he posted the fps increase in his Mac with low, medium and high (XP) settings. Guess what the fps increase on high settings? 1fps. The biggest increase was on the low settings config.

"On my iMac, I went from about 45/26/21 (low, medium, high settings) to 56/32/22 fps in metal."

That is an increase of 11 fps with low graphic settings, 6 fps with medium settings, 1 fps with high settings.
We'll see what happens with our config (which are probably more powerful), but i don't expect game changing experiences regarding performance besides the reduction of stutters (which did not affect me anyway much to this day)

Edited January 4, 20206 yr by Pastaiolo

1 minute ago, Pastaiolo said:

I am fine if you don't agree with me, but you need to look at the performance charts and the comment made by Ben in the dev blog too. Even tho he is not talking about VR, he posted the fps increase in his Mac with low, medium and high (XP) settings. Guess what the fps increase on high settings? 1fps. The biggest increase was on the low settings config.

"On my iMac, I went from about 45/26/21 (low, medium, high settings) to 56/32/22 fps in metal."

That is an increase of 11 fps with low graphic settings, 6 fps with medium settings, 1 fps with high settings.
We'll see what happens with our config (which are probably more powerful), but i don't expect game changing experiences regarding performance besides the reduction of stutters (which did not affect me anyway much to this day)

I can only give a first hand experience of a "Vulkan Environment" compared to traditional OpenGL within Aerofly 2. I also have a dedicated Vulkan written Sim (Flyinside 6.x) and getting the same performance as in Aerofly.

I keep my fingers crossed...

15 minutes ago, simba_nl said:

I can only give a first hand experience of a "Vulkan Environment" compared to traditional OpenGL within Aerofly 2. I also have a dedicated Vulkan written Sim (Flyinside 6.x) and getting the same performance as in Aerofly.

I keep my fingers crossed...

Vulkan will release load from the CPU (less driver overhead) but will not reduce the load on the GPU (it still needs to draw the same things).

Conclusion: the FPS improvements will stop the moment you were already overtaxing the complete system, especially if you have an older system.

 

There is only so much juice you can get out of a lemon.