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Khronos Group Announces Release of Vulkan 1.0 (phoronix.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Vulkan 1.0 was released this morning as a surprise for those looking towards a high-performance, cross-platform (everyone but Apple) API. In a lengthy overview of Vulkan 1.0, the stage is set for making Vulkan what it's been talked up to be, but it's not there yet for end-users to fully enjoy: NVIDIA has conformant drivers out for major platforms, AMD doesn't have any conformant driver yet, and Intel only has a conformant Linux driver. The lone launch title for Vulkan 1.0 is Talos Principle, but don't expect it to perform better than the OpenGL port at this time. While it's easy for many game developers to port to Vulkan, it will require significant investment to make the engines really much faster than their OpenGL/DirectX11-geared code-bases while new games should be much better from the start when designed around this lower-level API. The spec will be available at Khronos.org and the Vulkan SDK is available from LunarG.com.

4 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. OpenGL is dead. Long live OpenGL! by jfbilodeau · · Score: 3, Insightful

    As a developer working with OpenGL, I think that Vulcan is what OpenGL 3/4 should have been.

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  2. Re:It's not always necessary to invent new words by kbonin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I feel that performant embiggens our language...

  3. Re:Hard to develop, though by Xest · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Isn't that the case anyway? 99% of games that come out nowadays seem to be based on things like Unreal, Unity, or the big publishers own in house engines like Frostbite.

    The amount of people actually doing low level stuff seems to have diminished rapidly over the last decade as engines have become more flexible and it's really just turned into a battle over who has the best toolset and content pipeline now.

    So even the big engineering teams don't seem to be expending much effort into engine development - publishers like Ubisoft and EA seem to have many tens of development teams and yet only seem to be using a few different engines across all those teams - certainly the days of every team building their game up from scratch engine and all are long long gone.

  4. Re:Who? What? Huh? by pjt33 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The point of summaries is to summarise. If you have to read the article in order to understand the summary, then why not eliminate the summary entirely?