What's New in VirtualGeo 9.0
The latest release of VirtualGeo brings you many enhancements and technical innovations:
- New renderer and Unreal Plugin !
- Massive performance improvements
- Improved 3D Tiles support.
- Web and multi-thread
- Server and dynamic data
Please check the changelogs of our components to find all the fixes and improvements !
New renderer and Unreal Plugin !
VirtualGeo 9.0 introduces a lot of changes internally in the engine to push forward with modern technology and brings two exciting new features: a new renderer which supports modern graphics back-end such as DirectX 12, Vulkan or Metal, and a plugin for Unreal Engine to integrate VirtualGeo technology into an Unreal Engine project! More news and information about the plugin will comes very soon.
To enable these new features, VirtualGeo SDK is now split between a core which manages import of various formats, data management (including LOD selection from a viewport), and query and computation on imported data and export various formats, and a rendering module which manages visualization, interactive tools to create and edit data, etc.
The legacy renderer based on OpenGL is still available for compatibility reasons, because some less-used features have been deprecated and are not available in the new renderer.
Massive performance improvements
With the new renderer, a huge refactor has been done on the internals of the engine which brings impressive improvements for performance.
On our different tests, we measure from 50% to 700% improvements depending on the context and the data (from terrain rendering to complex 3D Mesh, or just displaying many dynamic elements with complex decorations).
| Tests | 8.1 (µs) | 9.1 (µs) | Factor |
| Performance Terrain | 768 | 245 | 3,13 |
| Performance Terrain 3 | 2838 | 2144 | 1,32 |
| Performance Terrain Intervisibility | 1759 | 572 | 3,08 |
| Performance Surfaces | 14454 | 2038 | 7,09 |
| Performance Instancing | 3206 | 2357 | 1,36 |
| Performance Declutter | 62403 | 33861 | 1,84 |
| Performance Terrain + Mesh | 3437 | 1572 | 2,19 |
| Many Entities Performance | 13717 | 3201 | 4,29 |
Improved 3D Tiles support
At CSGROUP, we consider OGC 3DTiles as an important standard for the 3D cartographic world.
In this new version, we can now import 3D-Tiles with GLTF 2.0 support or instancing data to bring our support closer to 3DTiles Next specification.
Also, the improved support allows us to now integrate 3D data directly from Google Maps ! Google has opened its 3D data, based on the 3D Tiles format. VirtualGeo 9.0 now supports loading directly these data into your application. Please check Google page to find more information on how to include Google data.
Web and multi-thread
VirtualGeo is available to develop a Web application thanks to WebAssembly technology which enables to integrate code in native language such as VirtualGeo and enables to brings high performance rendering to the Web.
For version 9.0, VirtualGeo now supports using multi-thread on its WebAssembly version to brings performance closer to native version.
Multi-thread is supported on major browsers (Chrome >= 74, Firefox >= 79, Safari >= 14.1) but need for security concerns must be explicitly activated on the Web page.
Server and dynamic data
With VirtualGeo Server it is now possible to dynamically import and optimise data on the fly coming from data collected in real-time on the field. For example, data can include real-time lidar point cloud from robot scanning an are.
The real-time data is dynamically updated in VirtualGeo clients, taking into account data updates on the server, while still minimizing data transfer according to changes. VirtualGeo Server use Web Socket internally to provides real-time and smart update.