Comments On The Unity Engine & Vulkan API Support

[humbug]

Are they? The newly released beta of Source 2 utilizes both OpenGL and Direct3D, even older API versions. They are planning to offer Vulkan support in the future.

Well ya they are supporting current DX9-DX11 and OpenGL.
What I meant is that out of the new gen APIs they are only supporting Vulkan, no DX12.

[Luke_Wolf]

Well ya they are supporting current DX9-DX11 and OpenGL.
What I meant is that out of the new gen APIs they are only supporting Vulkan, no DX12.

And the only reason Valve is doing that is... Politics. In that they want to break the Windows monopoly on PC gaming for various self-serving reasons, other companies do not currently have an interest in trying to play that game.

[humbug]

And the only reason Valve is doing that is... Politics. In that they want to break the Windows monopoly on PC gaming for various self-serving reasons, other companies do not currently have an interest in trying to play that game.

True.

[You-]

While Valve's position does involve politics (which most people on this site will agree with), I do not think it is just that.

Vulkan supports WIndows platforms that Microsoft will not.

DX12 is WIndows 10 only.

The most popular Windows release to date is WIndows 7.

I have upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10 (mainly because I expect there to be many underlying platform security improvements), but it is undeniable that for desktops, Windows 7 is much more useable and a better operating system. (type to search for a program is utterly broken. For settings, hit S (for c for control panel, f for firefox....) and nothing appears, so start typing the full name, half way through it appears but type an extra character and it disapears, delete it, it doesnt reappear... so much easier in gnome shell, or even Windows 7.)

Assuming that Microsoft has immediate success with windows 10, It will still likely be years before 50% of the Windows users are on Windows 10.

Once drivers have been updated to support Vulkan, the only limitation to using Vulkan will be whether the graphics card is new enough. (I have a 6850 and I think its one generation too old for Official Vulkan/Spir-v support from AMD Catalyst).

[mark45]

BTW here's Nvidia's Siggraph 2015 talk.

[johnc]

Intel and AMD have been relatively quiet re: Vulkan lately. AMD has really been talking up DX12.

[Michael]

Intel and AMD have been relatively quiet re: Vulkan lately. AMD has really been talking up DX12.

Intel users will have the open-source Valve/LunarG Vulkan driver.

[smitty3268]

Intel users will have the open-source Valve/LunarG Vulkan driver.

I guess that will be shipped on SteamOS?

The upstream Mesa Intel devs have never really taken much or seemed to agree with the directions LunarG has tried to take their driver, and i know they've been working on their own version of SPIR-V support.

[justmy2cents]

BTW here's Nvidia's Siggraph 2015 talk.

lol, gotta say this. i loved how they presented linux by using "Born to frag" icon. and the fact that NVidia person specified supported platforms as "Wayland, X, Windows..." with Wayland first should STFU whole lot of naysayers about lack of MVidia proprietary Wayland drivers

[johnc]

Intel users will have the open-source Valve/LunarG Vulkan driver.

Well it's good to know that a company that makes a trillion dollars every five minutes is outsourcing its responsibility to LunarG.