Slashdot Mirror
Vulkan Graphics is Coming To macOS and iOS, Will Enable Faster Games and Apps (anandtech.com)
The Khronos Group, a consortium of hardware and software companies, has announced that the Vulkan graphics technology is coming to Apple's platforms, allowing games and apps to run at faster performance levels on Macs and iOS devices. From a report: In collaboration with Valve, LunarG, and The Brenwill Workshop, this free open-source collection includes the full 1.0 release of the previously-commercial MoltenVK, a library for translating Vulkan API calls to Apple's Metal 1 and 2 calls, as well LunarG's new Vulkan SDK for macOS. Funding the costs of open-sourcing, Valve has been utilizing these tools on their applications, noting performance gains over native OpenGL drivers with Vulkan DOTA 2 on macOS as a production-load example. Altogether, this forms the next step in Khronos' Vulkan Portability Initiative, which was first announced at GDC 2017 as their "3D Portability Initiative," and later refined as the "Vulkan Portability Initiative" last summer. Spurred by industry demand, Khronos is striving for a cross-platform API portability solution, where an appropriate subset of Vulkan can act as a 'meta-API'-esque layer to map to DirectX 12 and Metal; the holy grail being that developers can craft a single Vulkan portable application or engine that can be seamlessly deployed across Vulkan, DX12, and Metal supporting platforms.
More like its an better cross-platform open alternative to OpenGL or DirectX. Sort of a next-gen OpenGL.
Basically, Vulcan is a better and more modern alternative to DirectX than OpenGL with many of the benefits of OpenGL such as cross-platform, portable, open, etc. but easier to use than OpenGL, and better performance as good or better than DirectX.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
There's absolutely nothing new about Vulkan though.
Among other things, 1) it plays nicely with machine CPU threads, 2) it supports a standardized binary intermediate language for GPU-run code, freeing you from constraints of having to use any particular language, 3) it supports both graphical AND computational tasks running such code within a single API.
Ezekiel 23:20
Vulkan is easier to use properly than OpenGL. OpenGL is designed around an architecture that no longer exists - no graphics chip made in the past two decades was strictly fixed-function. And because *every* modern graphics feature is an optional extension to OpenGL, every OpenGL program that wants to take advantage of, say, programmable shaders or compressed textures, has to spend a few hundred lines of code telling the drivers and runtime that yes, it knows what a fucking shader is and can you please let me use them now? Compare modern OpenGL to Direct3D 11 - features nobody actually uses (like fixed-function lighting) are removed, features everyone has (like shaders) are built-in, and while a basic demo *is* a few hundred lines of C, it's much more grokkable. And D3D11 has options for compatibility down to D3D9FL1 (GeForce 5000, GMA 900, Radeon 9000 series) hardware - you can code to D3D11 and still run on older hardware if you limit yourself to certain features or make the right fallback options.
OpenGL is easier to use for basic demos but is harder to use in practice. In particular, optimizing OpenGL is sheer madness, because everything is abstracted. You're basically just rearranging stuff to figure out how to make the drivers generate the right code. Whereas on Vulkan you actually interact with the API in the same way the hardware works - you ask a special malloc() for memory on the GPU, put some data in it, then tell your vertex shader how to interpret that data as triangles, then tell your pixel shader how to turn those triangles into pixels. It only looks like more code if you were relying on OpenGL defaults instead of explicitly coding what you're doing. Since very few apps do Gouraud-shaded, fixed-light, untextured rendering anymore except for graphics API tutorials, any practical program in Vulkan will be easier to write than the equivalent OpenGL program.
What Vulkan does is make trivial stuff harder, but hard stuff easier. You can write a multi-threaded OpenGL renderer, I believe, though I've never been masochistic enough to try. It's easier on Vulkan - still not trivial, but what multithreaded code is?