All news 15 October 2020

New rendering options

New rendering options

If your game is up to date and have started Liftoff: FPV Drone Racing in the last few days, you may have noticed something new. Before the game starts from Steam, you'll see one of these little dialogs.

Rendering APIs Dialogs

What's that all about? Read on to find out.

What are rendering APIs?

Much as we'd like it, stuff doesn't just magically get drawn onto your screen. To make things show up, a game talks to specialized software calling a rendering API. There's many different rendering APIs, some tied to specific operating systems, some very generic, some old, some new.

Our strategy with Liftoff: FPV Drone Racing was always to support the lowest common denominator: rendering APIs that are well established and widely supported. Unfortunately, that meant many of you were missing out on some more modern rendering techniques that could benefit game performance.

The newly added dialog at startup means we can have our cake and eat it too. The default selected option will give you the exact same behavior as before. If you have a reasonably modern system, you can try out the new rendering options (see below) and potentially enjoy performance benefits. If it doesn't work out or you encounter issues, you can simply exit the game and switch right back.

Windows and Linux: Vulkan rendering

For the Windows and Linux versions of the game, Vulkan has been added as a new rendering option. Vulkan is a new generation graphics API that was originally conceptualized as a successor to the well-established OpenGL. Our initial tests indicate moderate to noticeable performance gains for Liftoff: FPV Drone Racing.

Mac: Metal rendering

For the Mac version of the game, Metal is a low-overhead graphics API developed by Apple for their platforms. Our initial tests indicate moderate performance gains for Liftoff: FPV Drone Racing.