Will multi-core CPU's be supported in the future.

Question

I've seen this questioned asked before, but no real answer has been given. I understand it's not supported at the moment, with that being said, will that be supported in the future? XP11 is definitely a huge improvement over past XP. For the most part, I'm happy with my purchase, not because of what it is at this point and time, but because of what it could be. At the moment though, there is no computer I'm aware that can actually utilize some of the amazing GFX updates and improvements (eye candy and realism) because we're all CPU bound on one core. I've gone through most of the guides to no real avail. As soon as I go from one to three monitors FPS tanks unless I turn off the eye candy that makes XP11 worth the purchase. What do we as consumers need to do on our side to make multi-core support a reality?

I've heard VR support will be coming in the future. Is this confirmed or still rumor? If you need a beta tester, let me know, I would be more than happy to help that development. I'm running a relatively powerful computer. (6850k, 1080, 64gb ram) I'm using the oculus rift system.

I know we're still in the beta format, and that foundation issues are still being worked out. I'm just trying figure out if XP 11 will be worth waiting for, or if I should move my resources into another platform that is keeping up with current gen technology.

 

I look forward to the response, and wish you all well,

 

Yahookingjoe

Answer 1

X-Plane has been "multi-core" since versions 8 & 9.  However X-Plane is limited to one GPU and will be for the foreseeable future. Adding more monitors will greatly increase the amount of work X-Plane has to do on both the CPU and GPU, so it is not surprising you have to turn down the ren settings with multiple monitors.

VR support is definitely a high-priority avenue for us, and will be coming as soon as we can get it. Unfortunately we're a small team and limited on dev time and resources, so we have no estimates on when that may be.

Comments

I have wondered about this also. With OpenGL, communication between the CPU and GPU is really limited to one core - this is a substantial bottleneck.

From the Developer Blog about a year ago:

        http://developer.x-plane.com/2016/03/what-vulkan-means-to-developers/.

So I guess the question is  - are there any ongoing plans to code X-Plane with the Vulkan API ?

Thanks.

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Yes, eventually we'd like to run on the newer APIs like Vulkan and Metal, but again, it's all a balancing act between all the features/changes we'd like and developer time.