Mac Studio Hardware requirement to run Xplane 12 simulator

Yes, both the demo and the program work on my Studio Ultra M1.

Best place to check is at > https://www.x-plane.com/kb/x-plane-12-system-requirements/

Recommended Hardware Requirements: 

• CPU: Intel Core intel i5-12600K or Ryzen 5 3500 or better, "or Apple Silicon"
• Memory: 16-24 GB RAM or more
• Video Card: a DirectX 12-capable video card from NVIDIA or AMD with at least 4-8 GB VRAM (GeForce RTX 2070 or better, or similar from AMD)

Note: Intel GPUs are not supported by X-Plane 12. 

If your system is borderline, we encourage you to try the demo first. The full version of the simulator will perform exactly the same as the demo—neither better nor worse.

siamless wrote:

Thank you for your reply.

As you probably can guess I have visited the mentioned site before opening this discussion.

The requirement "Apple Silicon" is of no correlation to the Mac Studio specs

Before investing CHF 5'000.- + I need to be sure that the Mac Studio* can handle the requirements

* M2 Ultra with 24-core CPU, 76-core GPU, and 32-core Neural Engine

Hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, ProRes, and ProRes RAW

Two video decode engines

Four video encode engines

Four ProRes encode and decode engines

You're welcome.

Have you tested the Demo version?

Note: We encourage you to try the demo first. The full version of the simulator will perform exactly the same as the demo—neither better nor worse.

My only question was the DirectX 12 support...

But buried in the keynote was a macOS feature that Apple should have called out with more fanfare: DirectX 12 support for macOS. As PC gamers already know, this software support means the floodgates are open for some real games — not that casual Apple Arcade stuff — on Mac. Maybe, just maybe, this is the beginning of the end to the old joke that Macs can't play AAA games.

It turns out that Apple added DirectX 12 support via something it is calling the Game Porting Toolkit, a tool Apple is offering to developers to see how their existing x86 DirectX 12 games work on Macs powered by Apple silicon. That toolkit largely takes place as a 20,000 line of code patch to Wine, a compatibility layer designed to bring support for Windows games to platforms such as Linux, BSD, and macOS. Wine, which is primarily supported by the company CodeWeavers (which also makes a commercial version called CrossOver), works by converting system calls made to Windows APIs into calls that can be used by other operating systems. It isn’t emulation, but translation (an important semantic difference).

Although Wine (and CrossOver) have existed as a way to bring PC games to the Mac for quite some time, the Apple silicon transition has been difficult on the project. Rosetta 2, the compatibility layer built into macOS to seamlessly convert x86 macOS APIs (Intel) into ARM64 macOS APIs (Apple silicon), works with Wine/CrossOver, but the performance impact of translating one system call to another on top of a compatibility layer that is designed to translate one architecture type to another is not insignificant.

Read more...

https://www.inverse.com/tech/mac-directx-12-game-porting-toolkit-pc-games

The program works on my Studio Ultra M1.

It wasn't clear if you owned an M2 Ultra Mac Studio or not.