OpenGL Drivers In 2021 Still Sadly Benefit From Faking Their Driver Name / GPU

[unic0rn]

More than five years after Vulkan, this is still (all?) GL. Meanwhile, Apple have made a clean slate with Metal 1/2. Good job, Google!

As a macOS user, I'll say this: https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards

40% of Android devices has no Vulkan support at all, do you expect the developers to ignore such a huge part of the market?

Not everyone needs a new smartphone every year. Also, Metal saw faster adoption because, as you've noted, Apple. Google doesn't have such power. You can ignore devices running 6 and lower, but Android 7-9 still takes almost 40% of the market. I have Android 7 on my smartphone myself, it's fine. I do plan to switch it to something with Android 11, but as it is, I would simply ignore software that either requires higher Android version or Vulkan. Now, I'm not saying that fragmentation is good, but it is what it is, developers cannot ignore it. You cannot blame Google for the fact people aren't buying new smartphones fast enough.

[AJenbo]

You can ignore devices running 6 and lower

I must be doing it wrong then, I just added support for Android 4.3 - 4.4
(using SDL2 so most is abstracted away)

[stormcrow]

right but this 40% will go down by 10-15% per year.

this measn in 2-3 years the rate of no-vulkan smartphone hardware like maybe 2-5%

Maybe. You can't really count on that in the Android space. It's good to plan for it with an off main branch of your app, but counting on it might end up detrimental to your revenue if that doesn't pan out in 2-3 years.

I don't always care for Apple's heavy handed tactics, but this is one of the things Apple gets right with iOS & MacOS. Almost all of their currently actively supported hardware will most likely be on the most current version of their OS.

This article's situation illustrates a problem with the historical Linux graphics stack. To lower development costs and to keep developers from pulling their hair out, developers specifically target known good identifiers of the drivers they're familiar with. Technical debt coming home to roost many years later with projects that were abandoned, slow to catch up, or unsupported closed source software.

[Orphis]

So games doesn't actually behave on what driver can do/chip can do but instead behaving differently depending on vendor string.

That's because the driver will announce that the chip is more capable than the reality. There are tons of bugs in those GPUs and drivers, and you usually need to work around those whenever you try to do anything advanced. In the end, the only reliable thing is the list of chipsets and drivers you hardcoded in your game to make it run. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that well when newer chipsets or drivers are released and don't have the old issues.

[torsionbar28]

This is the driver version of:

Now you can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay, but you cain't call me Johnson.

Still better scenario than "Call me Caitlyn"

[mulenmar]

Seems like a silly name -- isn't the very problem that there is a drag on performance that needs to be leashed? 🥁

[Quackdoc]

Does anyone know how widely Vulkan is used on Android? All I heard is some report long before Android 10 was released, that Android 10's UI will use Vulkan for rendering. Apart from that, I didn't see anything else. And it seems the vast majority of Android games still use OpenGL ES.

Unfortunately vulkan support on android is terrible. in large part that hardware that supports vulkan, doesn't get updated to support it, and doesn't get continual updates. even if the hardware physically supports higher versions of vulkan, GPU devs won't work on it. and as I said, even if they do, you might be SOL.

as for the devs, many don't even want to bother with it, and game engines don't exactly make android development easy. thankfully that has changed recently, but for 99% of android games, vulkan support is a waste of time and money.

[bearoso]

Pass this along to the Chrome/Chromium developers. They’re applying workarounds for fglrx to modern amdgpu drivers. In bug reports about it they pretend to believe there’s only one “AMD” driver out there and mark it as invalid.

[arun54321]

Does anyone know how widely Vulkan is used on Android? All I heard is some report long before Android 10 was released, that Android 10's UI will use Vulkan for rendering. Apart from that, I didn't see anything else. And it seems the vast majority of Android games still use OpenGL ES.

Many popular and latest androids games are running in vulkan.

[Developer12]

How the hell are they running these games in the first place? A compatibility layer for android games on regular arm linux? Android userspace on a linux kernel/drivers?