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Graphics Open Source

Khronos Group Announces Release of Vulkan 1.0 (phoronix.com) 77

Posted by timothy from the next-phase-begins dept.
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.
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Khronos Group Announces Release of Vulkan 1.0 More

Khronos Group Announces Release of Vulkan 1.0

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  • OpenGL is dead. Long live OpenGL! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jfbilodeau ( 931293 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2016 @11:28AM (#51519373) Homepage

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

    • Re:OpenGL is dead. Long live OpenGL! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sbaker ( 47485 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2016 @11:50AM (#51519573) Homepage

      Well, kinda. For those who have to write extremely high performance graphics code and need to work close to the bare metal - Vulkan is the answer. For those who need not much more than a spinning cube - OpenGL/GLES/WebGL are still the answer. Actually, even for a lot of people who need high performance graphics code - they may well be working with middleware that uses Vulkan rather than with Vulkan itself.

      • If you just care about a spinning cube, then OpenGL or Direct 3D is not the answer. Use a 3D framework that manages your mesh for you. There are plenty out there.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

          I suggest GLUT. Not only you can draw a spinning cube but you also can just as easily draw a spinning teapot.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sbaker ( 47485 )

          OK - not *literally* a spinning cube...but anything that's not super-performance critical - or anything that runs easily at a decent frame rate without heavy software effort...should stick with OpenGL.

  • Oh wonderful. Another new made-up word. The AC's summary could and should have simply said, "NVIDIA has drivers that conform to the Vulkan spec." Why the need to make up a new word?

    I've noticed the related, made-up word, "performant" has become common lately. English is a messed up language as it is. Let's not make it even worse!

    I post this in the finest of our Slashdot traditions.

    • Re:It's not always necessary to invent new words (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kbonin ( 58917 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2016 @11:43AM (#51519489)

      I feel that performant embiggens our language...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

      • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        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.

  • Intel already has Open Source Support (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CajunArson ( 465943 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2016 @11:43AM (#51519485) Journal

    Intel has already published open source Vulkan support in a new Mesa branch: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/m... [freedesktop.org]

    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.

    • 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.

      Isn't Vulkan just a standardised version of Mantle, which AMD does have drivers for?

      • Re:Intel already has Open Source Support (Score:5, Interesting)

        by CajunArson ( 465943 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2016 @11:58AM (#51519651) Journal

        It's true that Vulkan inherits some things from Mantle (mostly using separate command buffers without global state and dropping the old-school OpenGL graphics context). However, there are also major differences from Mantle including the use of GLSL instead of HLSL (Microsoft's shader langauge) and the SPIR-V intermediate layer is a major part of Vulkan that literally has no equivalent in Mantle.

        On top of all that: Mantle only ever existed as a beta-quality driver for Windows. Despite some talk about cross-platform, it never ran under anything other than Windows, and even AMD's new graphics cards like the R9-Fury run *worse* on the old Mantle driver than they do under DX11.

        • Oh dear, that's really rather AMD isn't it? :(

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Bengie ( 1121981 )
          Vulkan is mostly a super-set of Mantle. The early versions of Vulkan had nearly all of its APIs named stuff like "MethodA_Mantle", and if you went to the Mantle documentation, there was a method called "MethodA" with the exact same signature.

      • 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.

        Isn't Vulkan just a standardised version of Mantle, which AMD does have drivers for?

        Yes, but not on Linux. They have been pushing a lot of big updates to the Linux driver recently, and they probably need those for the driver.

  • 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.

    • Re:Hard to develop, though (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Xest ( 935314 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2016 @12:04PM (#51519717)

      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.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        It's called the "smartest cow syndrome". You only need one cow to open a gate to let the others out of a field. In industry, this means you only need one experienced developer to write a new rendering subsystem or API (character animation, terrain rendering, particle systems, urban environments), then the rest of the industry uses that API. Everyone else who prefers to work on design gets driven out and then move into other frontiers (mobile, data visualization).

        It's a bit like urban development. Being a cr

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        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 - publ

  • "Everyone but Apple" (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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

  • API documenation (Score:4, Informative)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2016 @02:35PM (#51521045)

    check out the API cheatsheet [khronos.org]

    the rest of the API documentation is here: https://www.khronos.org/regist... [khronos.org]

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