Basemark Baking Vulkan-Based Benchmark Ahead Of VR Wave

[N.Broekhuijsen]

In a few months time, Basemark will have its Vulkan benchmark ready for us to enjoy.

Basemark Baking Vulkan-Based Benchmark Ahead Of VR Wave : Read more

 

[pasow]

if Vulkan proves performant, it really should become the dominant API instead of DX12 for game development simply because it wont be restricted to Win10 and Xbone. porting games to other Operating Systems and counsels would be far simpler and more likely. not to mention the possibility of DX12 like performance gains under Win7 and Win8.x.

 

[Alec Mowat]

if Vulkan proves performant, it really should become the dominant API instead of DX12 for game development simply because it wont be restricted to Win10 and Xbone. porting games to other Operating Systems and counsels would be far simpler and more likely. not to mention the possibility of DX12 like performance gains under Win7 and Win8.x.

Vulkan is a none-profit API, DX12 is backed by billions of dollars. People are not going to migrate away from Microsoft, because it provides a stable level of support and development. It's cool there is some competition, but people stick with Microsoft. You get warranty, you get support.

 

[Haravikk]

if Vulkan proves performant, it really should become the dominant API instead of DX12 for game development simply because it wont be restricted to Win10 and Xbone. porting games to other Operating Systems and counsels would be far simpler and more likely. not to mention the possibility of DX12 like performance gains under Win7 and Win8.x.

Vulkan is just a new name for OpenGL, which has always been just as open and accessible as Vulkan will be, yet OpenGL never saw majority usage either.

There are a few reasons for this, including some dick moves by Microsoft that meant that OpenGL on Windows often ran poorly without extra work by developers. OpenGL also hasn't been at the forefront of new features for a while, essentially just implementing whatever DirectX does instead, largely thanks to big OpenGL members like CAD studios that don't like things to change (else OpenGL may have become something like Vulkan a long time ago).

I mean, we can hope that with the increase (however modest) in Linux compatible titles that we might see more games favouring the more open API, as it eliminates some of the work involved in porting, but that's still gathering momentum (and we don't yet know if it's a trend that will continue).

There are other issues too, like support on Mac; there are still more titles for Mac than for Linux, and while OS X's main graphics API has been OpenGL, Apple has been pretty lax in updating it, in favour of adding their own proprietary Metal API in the latest OS update. Now, ideally Metal should start to disappear, like AMD's Mantle, but I think the latter was always intended more to drive progress rather than to be used long-term (since it's in AMD's best interests to eliminate CPU overhead). In Metal's case it's not clear if Apple will drop it or not, as while switching to Vulkan makes sense for developers due to ease of porting, it's in Apple's best interests to lock them into their platforms, so it's possible Apple won't add Vulkan support at all, even though PowerVR GPUs already support it.

 

[Ben_36]

Vulkan is derived from and built upon components of AMD's Mantle. It comes from the Khronos group but it is NOT just an update to OpenGL.
"Vulkan is a none-profit API, DX12 is backed by billions of dollars"........... Vulkan is made by the Khronos consortium comprised of corporations the likes of EA, IBM, Canonical, Nintendo, Valve, Google... the list is immense. All of them are corporations that are actively developing Vulkan (aka. pouring money into it).