I do agree

I don’t think MS is going to have a big influence on Vulkan. If I understand the architecture correctly (and I probably don’t – the information so far is very preliminary) it’s going to be an open source loader for a IHV (read: nv, AMD) DLL that talks to the device driver itself.

So what really matters is IHV buy-in. And for what it’s worth, the IHVs need to do this, because in the mobile Android space, there is no next-gen high performance low overhead API. There’s no Google-proprietary thing, and GL doesn’t scale up because it always is anchored by its threading model. So at the SigGraph announcement, to me the interesting thing was that Imagination, ARM and Qualcomm, AMD, Intel and Nvidia were all involved. That’s enough vendors to have “effectively total” coverage on both Windows, Linux and Android – that is, everywhere you can’t get Metal.

Well, that’s nice to hear. So you’re saying it all depends on the drivers and how much support MS and all the devs give to Vulkan. Both Apple and MS have now got their own APIs to develop for, that Vulkan seems like an afterthought – everyone is drooling over Metal and DX12. I’d much rather a decent cross-platform API, since I frequently switch operating systems to suit my workflows.

As for mobile device support, all the better – I can flight sim faster and smoother on the go. Here’s hoping Vulkan looks and performs well on all five platforms…

Bear with me as I’ve missed the list of alpha buils changes, but has anything be done about two crucial points:

1) Easier mesh editing (I think this is really crucial for high quality scenery development) for example months ago you talked about underway at airport…I’ve been spending weeks to create a church complex over an hill and then when I moved to HD mesh I realized heights were screwed up: if we had an easy way to define small area mesh in custom scenery we would be in heaven.

2) Particle system: I think it’s still unconfortable to set contrails or low level vapour trails for aircraft or to depict decent landing effects like tyre smoke/rain puffs.

Thanx

Even FSX Steam Edition Prepar3D v2.5 and below the level of X-Plane 10.35 and especially the upcoming X-Plane 10.40.

“””But the percentage of our users that run Linux is very small — less than 5% — so we can’t adopt a new graphics API _just_ for Linux.”””

That’s the wrong way of looking at it — it’s about 90% of the Linux flightsim enthusiasts that run X-plane, on Windows it is much less because of FSX and P3D etc! (only slightly tongue in cheek)

Since 10.40 will be a major update is possible to update de magvar data too?

Yep – it has the same problems as DX12: only new hardware, only new OS, only some hardware.

The difference between DX12 and Metal is that Vulkan may provide a -wider- coverage area on the same hardware (new GPUs on Windows).

If Apple were to support Vulkan and Metal we’d probably prefer Vulkan to keep our code unified.

The silver lining is that Metal covers iOS too.