In all three above cases, it was stated that Vulkan will simply execute what is already loaded in the VRAM without having to pause to retrieve more data.īut Meyer was not finished - he continued by outlining two short term and one long term target.
#WHATS BETTER OPENGL 4.5 OR VULKAN SIMULATOR#
He explained that requesting addresses and how many bytes of memory will assist in dedicating that amount of memory on the GPU, thereby speeding the simulator up. The addition of the background thread allows textures to be loaded into VRAM without having to pause, thereby reducing stutters.įinally, the process of rendering everything is now done more efficiently. " we are loading these textures before they are ever needed, on a background thread, on a multithread," said Meyer. In terms of textures, Laminar Research now has more control over what textures are loaded by the simulator, by predicting where the user is flying to. He went on to say: "We just got through every single shader load and every single shader pause before you flew frame one." Meyer described this solution by exclaiming: "I want you to compile every damn shader right NOW! And the result of that compile you fricking save it, so you are never surprised when we ask for the shader again!" Shaders are now compiled on the first start-up of X-Plane, rather than being done on the fly. Meyer described the primary idea behind Vulkan as the concept of prediction and pre-processing, and cutting out the issue of having to wait for stuff to load (i.e.
In this aspect, geometry must be copied from RAM to the GPU, which again introduces performance issues that lead OpenGL into a "constant state of shock." Vulkan Vertices and "the geometry of everything in the world" is the final puzzle the team have worked on. This process also causes the simulator to pause momentarily, further contributing to stutters in X-Plane 11.41 and earlier. Secondly are textures, which, if loaded in system memory (RAM), need to be transferred into video memory (VRAM), and other textures moved in the opposite direction. When a user pans the camera around their aircraft for the first time after loading, this can be particularly bad as many shaders must be compiled in a short space of time.
#WHATS BETTER OPENGL 4.5 OR VULKAN CODE#
In this time, X-Plane pauses to convert the shader from source code into executables - this is one such cause of stuttering. The first part of rendering he spoke about are the shaders: In OpenGL, Meyer said that the compiling of shaders after it is requested can take a twentieth or a tenth of a second. This process of asking OpenGL to do something, then fetching the resources, then processing said resources, and finally outputting the result, is what causes stuttering.