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Khronos Delays Vulkan Graphics API To 2016 Release (phoronix.com)

Posted by timothy on from the a-vulcan-is-never-late dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The Khronos Group has announced that the Vulkan specification is complete and undergoing legal review and final polishing, but it means that Vulkan will not be published this year. Khronos reports that the Vulkan 1.0 specification will be published when the first conformant implementations are confirmed. Phoronix received some more details about the state of Vulkan in that there were a lot of changes since GDC and " the gating factor for release will be availability of product-quality implementations."

26 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. What the fuck is "Vulkan"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So what the fuck is this "Vulkan" thing?

    The summary should say what it is, but doesn't.

    We shouldn't have to Google for the answer, either.

    Even if we did, it probably wouldn't help!

    The Vulkan website is very vague. It's full of buzzwords like "next generation", "open standard", "API", and "high-efficiency", without actually saying what the fuck it is!

    Can anyone tell us just what the fuck this Vulkan thing actually is and what it actually does?!

    1. Re:What the fuck is "Vulkan"? by Noble713 · · Score: 1

      GPU drivers. Like OpenGL, but.....modern. An open-source alternative to AMD/NVIDIA/Intel's closed-source proprietary drivers, but should work better than existing open-source solutions.

      At least, that's my basic understanding of it. I could be wrong.

    2. Re:What the fuck is "Vulkan"? by beelsebob · · Score: 3, Informative

      It's a graphics API that gives you lower level access to the GPU.

      There two big improvements from OpenGL that all of these APIs (D3D 12, Metal, Mantle, Vulkan, ...) are trying to achieve (plus a bunch of smaller ones)
      1) Give complete control over thread safety in accessing memory on the GPU, rather than having the API be thread safe. This lets game developers make informed decisions like "I know that frame n-2, and n-1 use part of this texture, but not all of it, during work for frame n, I can update the part they're not accessing with no thread safety primitives". That can shave a whole millisecond off a frame layout time per contended lock on some platforms. When you're trying to lay out in 8 or 16 milliseconds, that's really important.
      2) Specify more information up front, allowing earlier verification, and baking of states. OpenGL drivers do not know in what states (what vertex formats, what blend modes, what shaders etc) are going to be used when draw calls come in. That means that they need to verify the state, and recompile shaders at the last second (on many architectures, changing blend mode requires at least a re-run of the back end of the shader compiler for example). This can be mitigated by caching, but ultimately it doesn't work as well as it could. The new APIs let developers specify which of the states they're going to use up front, and therefore the system to optimise for them very early on.

    3. Re:What the fuck is "Vulkan"? by Kjella · · Score: 4, Informative

      GPU drivers. Like OpenGL, but.....modern. An open-source alternative to AMD/NVIDIA/Intel's closed-source proprietary drivers, but should work better than existing open-source solutions. At least, that's my basic understanding of it. I could be wrong.

      Vulkan is not a driver, it's the next generation OpenGL API for writing accelerated 3D graphics and compute code. AMD, nVidia, Intel etc. will have drivers implementing this interface. Like DirectX 12 and the defunct AMD Mantle, it provides a much more low level interface than traditional DirectX/OpenGL which means drivers should be simpler. Intel has an open source driver, AMD starts closed source but has promised to open it up while nVidia will probably remain closed source. The offset is of course that when the driver does less, your code must do more. Typically that would be the job of a game engine or something similar.

      This is the culmination of a process that has been going on for a very long time from fixed function hardware to programmable shaders to generic computing capability and what we call "drivers" today really being giant libraries running on top. The Vulkan API exposes that generic low-level capability directly. I don't think the high-level interface is going away though, but it's been unclear to me if that's going to stay in the 4.x series or not. At least Microsoft called it all DirectX 12, but then they control the whole platform. On open source it's likely you'll have full Vulkan support, but still OpenGL 4.x functions missing.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    4. Re:What the fuck is "Vulkan"? by Narishma · · Score: 2

      Vulkan is not a driver, it's the next generation OpenGL API for writing accelerated 3D graphics and compute code.

      I don't think calling it next gen OpenGL is right either. It has nothing in common with OpenGL except for being developed by the Khronos group.

      --
      Mada mada dane.
    5. Re:What the fuck is "Vulkan"? by Kjella · · Score: 1

      Before they announced the name they called it the "next generation OpenGL initiative" or "glNext", so it's their words not mine.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    6. Re:What the fuck is "Vulkan"? by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      Mantle was a good thing AMD made but we don't even care if it is defunct or not. Everything will either use Vulkan or DX12.

    7. Re:What the fuck is "Vulkan"? by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 1

      Yes, it's pretty simple, it just raises the question why a simple one-line statement wasn't included with the story summary for a rarely mentioned project. A search on this site for Vulkan shows only a small number of stories about it, so it's not like a regular reader would necessarily have an idea what the topic is.

    8. Re:What the fuck is "Vulkan"? by beelsebob · · Score: 1

      Apple has extensive Metal documentation and code samples here https://developer.apple.com/me...

  2. Legal review by manu0601 · · Score: 1

    It is a sad time when a technical specification has to undergo legal review.

    1. Re:Legal review by Kjella · · Score: 1

      It is a sad time when a technical specification has to undergo legal review.

      Well, there is a huge hardware market with billions of dollars in sales that will be affected by what features goes into the API, I'm sure they have conflicting interests. I would think the legal review primarily involves verifying that all relevant parties got all relevant documentation, that all decisions has been done formally correctly and so on. If you miss an implementation detail of a feature in hardware, it might be a lot harder to fix than a patch and recompile.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    2. Re: legal review by manu0601 · · Score: 1

      I am not sure that legal review is about looking for missing a feature: that looks rather technical, doesn't it?

    3. Re:Legal review by thejynxed · · Score: 1

      When something like this comes up for legal review, that is generally referring to "does it violate anyone else's patents".

      --
      @Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
  3. Composition 101 by PopeRatzo · · Score: 1

    This is the entire summary:

    The Khronos Group has announced that the Vulkan specification is complete and undergoing legal review and final polishing, but it means that Vulkan will not be published this year. Khronos reports that the Vulkan 1.0 specification will be published when the first conformant implementations are confirmed. Phoronix received some more details about the state of Vulkan in that there were a lot of changes since GDC and " the gating factor for release will be availability of product-quality implementations."

    With just six additional words, the submitter could have told us what Vulkan, Phoronix and Khronos Group are.

    Would it really have killed him?

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
    1. Re:Composition 101 by RyuuzakiTetsuya · · Score: 1

      it's slashdot. Consider your audience. I know who Khronos and Phoronix are, and what Vulkan is because I'm a tech nerd.

      It's like going to a foodie blog and asking that they clarify what kale is

      --
      Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
    2. Re:Composition 101 by PopeRatzo · · Score: 1

      I know who Khronos and Phoronix are

      Yes, I know they're Greek gods too.

      and what Vulkan is

      Of course. Everyone knows Spock.

      I'm not saying most people here don't know what these things are, but there are all kinds of tech nerds around here. Some are hardware nerds, some are software nerds and some are astronomy nerds. Some are drivers nerds. The fact that the summary was written and did not include the words "open source" or "cross platform" or even "API" is simply writing malpractice.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
  4. Re: Almost like chicken and egg problem by Entrope · · Score: 1

    Members of the Khronos "club" have copies of the final draft spec (which is apparently going through legal review, not technical revision), and have had copies of earlier drafts, and have seen the discussions about what changes should be made along the way. Most of the vendors have been working on their implementations, and obviously AMD has their Mantle drivers. Given the level of early access, it shouldn't take too long for first releases of drivers (presumably with the typical 1.0 level of bugs) to wrap up.

  5. Re:Seems all secrety for something suposedly open by Narishma · · Score: 2

    It's an open specification. It means it is (or will be, in this case) available freely for anyone to implement. It doesn't mean that it is developed publicly.

    --
    Mada mada dane.
  6. Re: Almost like chicken and egg problem by loonycyborg · · Score: 1

    Do Mesa devs have early access too and do they take a part in development?

  7. Re:Almost like chicken and egg problem by Fragnet · · Score: 1

    What are you on about? Microsoft has already release their "Vulkan" (DirectX 12). Apple have their Metal API. Intel, NVIDIA and AMD are on the standards committee for Vulkan and doing most of the work for it. People in the industry were playing with AMD's Mantle before, upon which this is all based.

    So you know, whatever.

  8. Re:Oh look.. by Fragnet · · Score: 1

    Funny, there are a billion mobile phones out there running OpenGL graphics APIs.

  9. Re:I love how by Fragnet · · Score: 1

    They're not though are they. Vulkan will run on feature level of most current cards and many previous ones (DirectX 11 capable is probably the baseline). Put it this way, if your current hardware is DX 11 compatible, it will run DX 12 and Vulkan.

  10. Re:I love how by Fragnet · · Score: 1

    I have an Oculus Rift DKII sitting on my desk.

  11. Re:I love how by nnull · · Score: 2

    Me too! It's sitting on my desk not being used for months!

  12. Re:I love how by Fragnet · · Score: 1

    Elite Dangerous is good with it except... don't put it on if you plan to go planetside. Two minutes of that and I was sick for hours.

  13. Need for development by JamesHolliberg · · Score: 1

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