Ben Supnik over at Laminar Research has provided a brief update on progress in porting X-Plane 11 over to the Vulkan API. This is one of the main goals with the next few X-Plane versions, and is tipped as a major drawcard for simmers in the future.

Supnik, speaking through a blog post on the Laminar website, reveals that both of X-Plane's developer applications, Plane-Maker and Airfoil Maker now run in Vulkan and Metal (Metal being a similar tool for MacOS platforms).

X-Plane itself isn't quite so far along though, but can still run up to the main menu on both platforms (Vulkan & Metal), with the capability to fly not available yet.

In more minor news, the Vulkan/Metal code has been tested on all three X-Plane platforms, Windows, MacOS and Linux, and is working at this stage. He goes on to say that Vulkan code also works on Nvidia, AMD and Intel (Integrated Graphics) drivers.

No performance numbers are available yet. Supnik says that only once the team can sit in the sim running either Vulkan or Metal will performance comparisons be made.

To find out more about Laminar's plans for the next versions of X-Plane, see our recap of their recent livestream here. For the release notes of the latest update, see our earlier article on it here.