A pipeline is a Vulkan/Metal term – it is all of the shaders + all of the configuration on the GPU to draw something. (So “shaders and some crud” is a good description.). The new drivers have the apps use pipelines because once we create a pipeline there is _no_ further steps before you can use it – batteries are included.

Austin once told Sergio (twenty years ago while we were in Italy talking about X-Plane…7 probably) that drawing with the hardware was like drawing with a big box of crayons, and changing crayons was slow, so it pays to draw more with one crayon…that’s why we tell people to put lots of images on one texture (atlasing). Changing the shader, configuration, textures, etc., this is the “Crayon change” of the GPU and it is as much a perf problem now as it was 20 years ago. Everything is faster, and while we can change crayons faster, we can draw more too so less change is better.

Pipelines are a way for Vulkan and Metal to let us “change crayons” faster – because the pipeline is fully built in advance and has no further configuration, changing to use it is quick and requires no complex computation. And it does work – pipeline changes are very fast!

Compare this to OpenGL: when you go to draw, X-Plane has to look at all of these things to decide what to do:
– The shader
– The blending and depth fixed function state
– The vertex format
– The FBO format
– What kind of thing you are drawing
and it has to combine them all together to make a pipeline when you go to draw (or see if it can find an already existing pipeline it saved). That mixing and matching is a cost OpenGL pays on _every_ time we draw. The GL drivers do this pretty fast – the driver writers really tuned the hell out of that code, but it is a cost Metal and Vulkan entirely skip.

Missing pipeline means X-Plane did not build the pipeline we need in advance during loading, resulting in us not being able to draw. It’s pretty much always a dumb bug in the loading code we have to fix.

Maybe it’s a dumb question but …. What is a pipeline on X-Plane?

Please file a bug. Posting to a forum does not get any info into our bug tracking system!

I’m seeing this as well. Zibo 737 at Aerosoft EGSS with Orbx Great Britain South, for example. Load time is now > 10 minutes. Aware that’s a lot of non-stock stuff being loaded but the same used to consistently be 11.50b10) rather than a sudden jump now. I think it’s the Zibo that takes the time as the stock Cessna for example is quite a bit faster. But when time per week for X-Plane is tight, this is a bit frustrating 🙂

I would assume it’s a real big, it happened again a few times. I have no idea what art hacking is or how to do it. If you need more data, please see below
Thanks.

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/217712-2-beta-crashes-today/&tab=comments#comment-1960457

I want the betas (have had good and bad results, currently for me b10 is fine) but if I did have problems, I wouldn’t complain and ask questions, I would just roll back. 🙂

I also have very slow loading times like 8 to 9 minutes just installed my i7 10700k @ 5.3GHz so I know it is not my cpu

If it is a real bug and not caused by art control hacking, then yes. We are not going to leave known pipeline crashes in the sim.

Couldn’t have put it any better.