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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...
> It's nVidia that has no drivers actually
What? https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver
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.
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
Well, using an engine means you get a lot of stuff out of it - firstly, not having to worry about the low-level underlying technologies. Your artists shouldn't need to worry about whether it's OpenGL or DirectX or Metal or Vulkan - that stuff should be abstracted away from them and the toolset should take care of it. Likewise, your modellers don't really care either.
Most of the game is really in asset generation - the textures, models, sounds, music, videos, artwork, scripts, etc.
And using a prebuilt engine has other benefits - porting gets to be much simpler - use Unity and you get iOS, Android, PC, Mac, PS3/PS4, Xbox360/Xbone and other platforms with it. Sure you have to do some work, but most of the hard part has been done for you.
Heck, modern engines can even enable/disable features as necessary - if you have DirectX 12 supported video, it will use those enhanced features, else it will downgrade to DirectX 11 or other API with lowered quality.
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.
MP4 vs. MP3 is really a dumb complaint. MP4 is MPEG 4, audio, video, all of it. MP3 is MPEG 1 Layer 3 Audio only. Apple just started using the new stuff first.
Firewire vs. USB is also a dumb complaint. Firewire was meant as a hot-swappable, modernized version of SCSI. USB was made as a hot-swappable, modernized version of Apple Desktop Bus. They simply don't even compete with one another. Sure, they're both serial data busses, but they weren't made to handle the same types of scenarios. They weren't even on the same plane of existence until some dipshit decided to put a disk drive on an input peripheral bus. The morons flocked to it and the rest is history. (And so, for the most part, is Firewire.)
Fairplay was the RIAA's baby. Apple killed it ASAP.
NuBus was an alternate to PCI, and they were both introduced at about the same time. PCI won.
But your point stands for the rest of them.
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.