Khronos Group Announces Vulkan, OpenCL 2.1, SPIR-V

[-MacNuke-]

Their current approach is smelling like marketing by committee...

It would be more confusing to call Vulkan OpenGL... Vulkan has nothing to do with OpenGL, it does nothing that OpenGL does and it works in a total different way.

When I would read "OpenGL 5" than I would think "Oh nice, how can I improve my OpenGL code?"... but in fact I have to throw away everything and start from the beginning.

[glxextxexlg]

Unigine is very expensive. If I want to create a game using Unigine I need to have 10s of thousands of dollars lying around before I even start. On the other hand if I want to create a game using Unreal Engine 4 I need to have $0 lying around before I start. The choice seems simple to me.

Its a matter of choice and how you perceive the future of your project. Either you believe that your game design will be successful and get unigine, start building and pay only for updates or you're not sure and start with Unreal 4 and pay as you win. But.. if your game is very successful then you'll probably be spending much higher amounts of dollars to Unreal engine considering their cut won't leave you ever.

[ultimA]

Two things:

1) Yeah, I also see only negativity. Why? Vulkan (aside from its marketing) is a good thing, is highly needed, and by the looks of it they are going to get it right this time. I remember when OpenGL 3 was published, and how disappointed everybody was. Now they finally re-imagined things, and though still waiting for the specs for Vulkan, it looks like they finally have it this time.

2) About the marketing: Yeah they messed it up again My ten fingers aren't enough for everything that is wrong with the announcement. But honestly, what did we expect. Marking used to be bad for Khronos for a really long time now, and did you honetsly think they have hired new marketing/communication experts for Vulkan? On the bright side, who cares?! Vulkan is not an end-user product (hell it's not even a product), it is a highly technical specification, and many who need to support it (GPU developers and large game studios) have already jumped on the wagon. You want shiny design? LOL. Vulkan is supposed to be technically superior, not fancy. My point: Is there something you don't like about the technical stuff in Vulkan? Let us know! You don't like the logo? Get a life.

[Guest]

Where is intel? Apple will be particularly pissed off with this.

Apple probably has the worst OpenGL implementation, so they don't deserve to be highlighted.

[-MacNuke-]

Apple probably has the worst OpenGL implementation, so they don't deserve to be highlighted.

Not only the worst... you have to upgrade your whole Operating System to get a new version of it. And than comes Apple and says: "No, your MacBook is too old, buy a new one to get upgrades of your _SOFTWARE_"

[nadro]

Indeed. The guys at PowerVR just put out a demo and some sample code. I really like what I see so far.

My pet peeve is that the new functions are prefixed with "vk" instead of "gl". They should have called this OpenGL V, codename "Vulkan" and kept the OpenGL trademark. Their current approach is smelling like marketing by committee...

IMHO the more interesting is fact that the same functions are available in Mantle, they just replaced "gr" prefix by "vk", eg. vkCmdBindDescriptorSet, vkQueueSubmit, vkMapMemory, vkUnmapMemory. It looks like a Vulkan is Mantle + some minor changes.

[glxextxexlg]

Apple probably has the worst OpenGL implementation, so they don't deserve to be highlighted.

+1. And with their 100 dollars for developer entry fee and mac os only development platfrom? policies, they don't deserve development either. But this brings us to the same quest of marketing power. If marketing is done right you can sell crap to people waiting in queues since 4:43 am and its the real world unfortunately.

[-MacNuke-]

It looks like a Vulkan is Mantle + some minor changes.

It is a vendor neutral Mantle. In a Low Level API you can not do much differently.

As far as I know, Mantle does not have such thing as SPIR-V so it is an AMD-only thing. But I do not know exactly because there is no documentation for Mantle.

[dungeon]

IMHO the more interesting is fact that the same functions are available in Mantle, they just replaced "gr" prefix by "vk", eg. vkCmdBindDescriptorSet, vkQueueSubmit, vkMapMemory, vkUnmapMemory. It looks like a Vulkan is Mantle + some minor changes.

DX12 and Vulkan should be both Mantle-like, and again all those will be competitiors . More or less both are probably same like Mantle, with a only difference that MS wants control over API and Khronos Group too

[Ancurio]

Don't expect any driver releases or specification dumps this week at GDC

Alright fuck this, waited for nothing. What was the announcement even for? Just the names "Vulkan" and "SPIR-V"?

Also, this makes no sense:

it may open up big possibilities for existing GPU-based LLVM back-ends like the AMDGPU driver

I'm pretty sure AMDGPU is the name of the new kernel driver and has nothing to do with LLVM.