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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.
As a developer working with OpenGL, I think that Vulcan is what OpenGL 3/4 should have been.
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
Khronos Group is responsible for the OpenGL and OpenCL standards.
They've had a lot of internal fighting over the future of OpenGL for many years. Real-time 3d engine developers (ie games) wanted to remove a lot of cruft and expose the hardware more, while CAD and other groups were happy with how things were. For years nothing much happened. This is the same fight which made OpenGL 2 so delayed.
Then AMD released their proprietary Mantle API a few years ago, which amongst other things was much lower level than OpenGL or DirectX at the time, allowing 3d engine developers to extract much more from the hardware.
AMD offered Mantle to Khronos which picked it up, polished it and named it Vulkan.
Now CAD folks can keep their OpenGL, while real-time 3d folks can enjoy extracting the maximum from the hardware with Vulkan.
At least that's how I remember it.
Intel has already published open source Vulkan support in a new Mesa branch: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/m...
Nvidia also has Linux Vulkan support in its newest beta driver.
AMD... uh... has a beta driver for Windows. Not even an announcement of Linux support. Yeah, so much for AMD having an insurmountable lead or anything.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
I feel that performant embiggens our language...
Vulkan gives the programmer more control over the graphics pipeline, but the downside is that there is even more work to do than in OpenGL or DirectX, which already are extremely difficult APIs. Well, I guess smaller studios can always use a game engine or graphics engine as a higher level basis, and then big engineering teams can make engines ground up around Vulkan.
Neither "conformant" or "performant" are made up words, nor are they new words.
I think you might actually be stupid. Go get yourself checked out, buddy.
> It's nVidia that has no drivers actually
What? https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver
That is kind of evil. Apple was all about standards like OpenGL back when they were at risk of being destroyed by whitebox PCs, but now that they are a big dog, they want to use their weight for vendor lock-in and trying to drive a wedge into the ecosystem. They will force developers to use Metal on their platforms.
So we had a chance to finally have a single, NON-vendor-controlled graphics API, that all game engines could concentrate on and applications could write to, and the tool ecosystem could get on board with. Instead, it will be fractured, there will be less portability, and things will be harder for smaller software shops with more testing required if they want cross platform.
Way to go, Apple. Standards were good enough for you when you needed them.
More or less, the group responsible for OpenGL (Khronos) has announced the release of their graphics API (Vulkan) that competes more directly with modern graphics APIs such as Microsoft's DirectX 12 and Apple's Metal.
Previously, OpenGL and DirectX (11 and earlier) provided very high-level APIs with decades of legacy cruft attached that bogged things down. Developers of graphics-intensive applications (e.g. games, VR, etc.) have been clamoring for lower-level APIs that allow them to circumvent the cruft by giving them more direct access to the hardware, since the hardware is capable of much more than what those high-level APIs were allowing. AMD's Mantle, Apple's Metal, and Microsoft's DirectX 12 were APIs in that vein, all of which were released last year. For various reasons, AMD donated Mantle to Khronos last year. After a bit of refinement and retuning so that it could operate in a cross-platform capacity (rather than being restricted to AMD hardware) Khronos has released Mantle today under its new name of Vulkan.
The reason this is big news is because it's the last of the major graphics APIs we're expecting to see released this generation. Vulkan is effectively serving as the successor to OpenGL, and it'll likely soon become the go-to graphics API for Linux app development, displacing OpenGL. The release of Vulkan allows Linux graphics to stay competitive in terms of performance with Windows and OS X. Without Vulkan, Linux apps would be stuck with OpenGL, which is quickly falling behind the modern APIs.
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?
PHAH.
Like I'm going to blindly click some bogus link from some place calling themselves "phoronix".
Give us a link to the story from some source of reputable technical reporting, like Forbes.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Neither "conformant" or "performant" are made up words, nor are they new words.
Actually, "conformant" is a word. It's not a word I like or would normally ever use, but yeah, it's a word.
The etymology of "performant" seems a little less clear, but I'll allow it.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
If you had clicked the link, the very first major heading is, "What Is Vulkan 1.0".
Lol, where's the sport in that??
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Absolutely irrelevant xkcd. Vulkan isn't a competing standard. Vulkan is a mirror to Direct X, which, as you may have fucking noticed, is not available outside of goddamned Windows. Pretend there was no USB, but there was Lightning, and Androids all had a giant power cable hookup and a massive serial port on the back and you had to configure your RS232 port on your computer to transfer data- would you need USB in that world? Well we sure as fuck need Vulkan.
AMD developed Mantle. Saw it was good. The Khronos Group though it could be better. They start working on Vulkan and looking hard at how it can satisfy and unify all the major platforms. A couple years later Microsoft catches wind that Vulkan is capable of huge performance improvements. The DX12 initiative is launched. Since Microsoft wants to be first to market and need only support a single platform, they are able to beat Vulkan to market. Now DX12 has received some notoriety and even helping to needlessly push people to Win 10.
Most are expecting Vulkan to perform better or equal to DX12. In this line, the phrasing of OP is a bit off. Performance of GAMES is unlikely to be much improved however the Vulkan API is considerably faster than OpenGL and DX11. Plus, Vulkan dramatically improves concurrency throughput, making it near linear up to GPU and memory bandwidth capabilities.
For those who don't know, Vulkan also allows for multiple GPUs, and the CPU as a virtual GPU, which means programmers can maximize concurrent dispatch and rendering jobs based on which is best for a given task. That said, this capability considerably complicates detection and allocation up front, but it opens the door wide for extremely powerful and interesting compute distribution.
Interesting footnote to your comment is that Apple more or less saved OpenGL. It likely would not exist today if not for their continued support after Microsoft started bribing companies to drop OpenGL. Which makes it even more sad that Apple is dragging their feet at adoption of Vulkan.
AMD has a beta driver; it just hasn't been certified yet (which is stated in the slides)
-SaNo
In retrospect it was more of a "if all your friends jump off a bridge, would you jump too" thing. AMD started it by saying low level access like on consoles would be superior, Microsoft and Apple jumped after and despite Mantle not really being much of a success they gave it to Khronos so now OpenGL has a low level API too. So now they all have one but if the market was really crying out for it, well not really. It did make AMD look somewhat better on anemic CPUs which helped their APU offerings but on a gaming rig you're usually GPU limited and then it won't make much of a difference.
For open source the main problem has been manpower, not so much the specification with Mesa trailing the OpenGL spec by about five years. And that doesn't include the tons of load/card/game-specific optimizations involved in the proprietary drivers. The work is still the same and it's not so much that game engines do it better, it's that they have the resources. With this low level API hopefully the OSS drivers can stay current and perform equally well on Vulkan as the proprietary competitors.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I know that everytime a new standard is developed there must be someone linking to this xkcd, however, in this case, it is not really relevant.
Vulkan is the offspring of Mantle, a proprietary API by AMD that was given away to the Khronos Group. As such, a competition between Mantle and Vulkan is highly unlikely. If Mantle stays alive, it is likely to be something built on top of Vulkan.
There are real competitors, like Direct3D 12 and Metal but Direct3D is Windows-only and Metal is Apple-only. Vulkan is the only one that is cross-platform. On Linux and ultimately Android, it is likely to be the only choice for those wanting a low-level API.
OpenGL is likely to stay with us for quite some time but not as a competitor to Vulkan as both have different use cases. In fact, Vulkan is a good thing as it will allow OpenGL to go back to its roots of providing a higher level API for things like CAD and experimenting with 3D rendering. The conflict of interest between game developers wanting a low-level, state of the art API and others wanting something more stable and higher level was disastrous to OpenGL in the early 2000s.
check out the API cheatsheet
the rest of the API documentation is here: https://www.khronos.org/regist...
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It's a thinner layer on top of your graphics hardware than DX 9, 10, 11, OpenGL 4.5 and below are. It's the cross-platform equivalent of DirectX 12. It'll be used a lot on mobile, mostly because it's a lot more efficient than OpenGL and therefore will be able to do the same work with less battery power, in theory at least. It's a lot more friendly to multicore CPUs than OpenGL. It's got an interesting "layered" architecture, very useful for developers. It's far, far easier to develop a driver for than previous APIs, so hopefully it'll improve competition, at least in the mobile space. All in all it's about time.
If you want the low-down on what was wrong with graphics drivers, read this eye-opening account from someone who worked a while at NVIDIA.
Haha you're right about conformant, although it appears to be an obsolete word. Performant, however, is definitely made up. I do know that much. And it's made its appearance on the internet mainly in the last 10 years or so, though I suspect it's been used in the past, much like the "irregardless" non-word.
The Khronos Group though it could be better.
When Khronos was asked why they didn't make a new API until Mantle came along, they replied saying they don't make new APIs, they only standardize existing ones. Never look to Khronos to innovate, they only follow what others have already done.