Flight simulator

Will Vulcan help X-plane 11 run better on a PC in the near future?

So if you have ever wanted to get the most out of your flight sim but feel like X-Plane is a resource hog, well then you are not alone. X-Plane is an incredibly demanding program, especially when you add VR on top of this.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel. Fortunately for us, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. This light is called Vulkan. If you haven’t heard of this, let me tell you how it will help.

To cut to the chase, vulkan is going to help you get the most out of your CPU. Most modern CPUs are not running as efficiently as they could be with X-Plane 11 and vulkan can help. Now, on the flip side, vulkan is not a cure all remedy. If you’re GPU (graphics card) is slowing down your sim, then vulkan isn’t going to do much for you. For example, if you have a very powerful CPU, but you opted for the slower GPU, then you might not see a huge performance increase. This would be because the bottleneck is probably your GPU and not the CPU.

Who is going to get the best performance from this. So in the recent Laminar Developer Presentation, Laminar stated that the biggest gains are going to be seen on the AMD. This is because AMD was struggling with the X-Plane driver’s prior to this upgrade. They also mentioned that NIVIDIA will also see an increase, however it won’t be quite as significant.

NVIDIA improvement is between 5-20% faster
AMD improvements between 20-40% faster

So, I want to make one thing clear. NVIDIA improvements is much less but it doesn’t mean NIVIDIA is not performing as well as AMD. In fact, it is the opposite. NVIDIA was already doing a great job of using X-Plane 11, however the driver didn’t play as nice with AMD, which made it tough for the AMD side of the world. This is more levelling the playing field, as well, it will give both sides a nice boost.

What else can we expect?

One of the most exciting things I heard about vulkan is the fact that it is going to help reduce stutters. So even if you don’t see a huge performance boost like in NIVIDIA, you are still going to see an amazing thing happen. Way less stutters! We all hate stutters, especially in VR. I would rather have a slower FPS and have no stutters, then a rocket fast FPS with constant stutters. So I am very excited to give this a try to see how it performs for me.

When can we expect this to happen?

Well, this is not ready yet, but it sounds like we will see at least a Beta version of this by the end of 2019. Sounds like a full version might not be ready this year. This is a huge undertaking for Laminar and I will keep following the latest updates as they roll in.

If you enjoyed this and want to keep up with the latest news, please subscribe to the newsletter and I will keep you posted!

Thanks again,
Dan