Khronos Group Announces Release of Vulkan 1.0 (phoronix.com) 77
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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That's how I felt, too. I guess it has something to do with graphics.
Re:Who? What? Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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 needlessl
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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.
Re:Who? What? Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
vet your sources /. (Score:3)
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 [forbes.com].
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If you had clicked the link, the very first major heading is, "What Is Vulkan 1.0".
Lol, where's the sport in that??
Re:Who? What? Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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 ga
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> It's nVidia that has no drivers actually
What? https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver
OpenGL is dead. Long live OpenGL! (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
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.
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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.
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I suggest GLUT. Not only you can draw a spinning cube but you also can just as easily draw a spinning teapot.
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But does GLUT support Vulcan? And if so, should it be call GLUTan? ;)
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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.
It's not always necessary to invent new words (Score:1)
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)
I feel that performant embiggens our language...
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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.
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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.
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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)
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.
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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)
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.
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Oh dear, that's really rather AMD isn't it? :(
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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.
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Btw I never had any problem with my AMD drivers on Windows!
Hard to develop, though (Score:2)
Re:Hard to develop, though (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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
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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.
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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
"Everyone but Apple" (Score:1)
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
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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
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API documenation (Score:4, Informative)
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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Ignorant twats.