AMD & Others Are Working On The LLVM SPIR-V Converter

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD & Others Are Working On The LLVM to/from SPIR-V Converter

AMD is among the companies working on adding a reader/writer for SPIR-V within LLVM...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LLVM-SPIR-V-Reader-Writer

[Pecisk]

This is really great news. Hopefully it comes to fruition. Having wider SPIR-V support means more code and improvements supporting it, which can only mean better Vulcan ecosystem

[eydee]

Can't wait to see how this works out. I really hope Vulkan won't end up like OpenGL as a barely used API by AAA games.

[kenjitamura]

Windows 10 and DirectX 12 are expected in late July while Vulkan is expected early August so it's not like DX12 will have a big advantage in release time to start hording market share. It will boil down to whether game developers prefer DX12 or Vulkan because the vast majority of developers refuse to use more than one rendering implementation for their games.

You'd think common sense would dictate that all else equal the developers would all choose the standard that can be deployed across more systems so as long as DX12 isn't much easier to use or have some killer exclusive feature then Vulkan should be able to keep a good share of the market.

We probably won't even see the start of the fight for control for at least another year with how slow games are to adopt the newest API's after their release.

[Nille]

Windows 10 and DirectX 12 are expected in late July while Vulkan is expected early August so it's not like DX12 will have a big advantage in release time to start hording market share.

D3D12 is already available in the Win10 Preview and with the Beta Drivers from AMD and Nvidia. Every Developer that is interested in D3D12 can test it out and work already with it.

[mark45]

Unlike DX10 vs GL3, DX12 will be of the same quality as Vulkan and have the old pros and cons: OOTB support on windows, not cross-platform.
Unless some unfortunate thing happens to Vulkan (like the lack of good drivers for too long), most devs will actually move over to Vulkan in the midterm directly or indirectly by running on engines which will allow to choose between Vulkan and DX.

[justmy2cents]

Unlike DX10 vs GL3, DX12 will be of the same quality as Vulkan and have the old pros and cons:

how do you figure that? it is more like same cons and no more pros
previous gen pros
- shaders could be shipped binary, while OpenGL needed source. Vulkan uses SPIR-V IL which negates that con of OpenGL. more so, choice of additional languages for shaders is another pro for it. any language that ships language to SPIR-V can be used and SPIR-V docs are public
- DX had better debugging, Glave solves that. and with Intel OOS drivers you can debug to much deeper extent with Vulkan
- DX drivers were more consistent. much of this should be contributed to driver costs since most of implementation resided in driver making it huge pile of code. Vulkan drivers are simpler and low level (Intel at GDC was 30k something). huge pile of code was even more so detrimenting since markets for OpenGL were smaller

OOTB support on windows, not cross-platform. Unless some unfortunate thing happens to Vulkan (like the lack of good drivers for too long), most devs will actually move over to Vulkan in the midterm directly or indirectly by running on engines which will allow to choose between Vulkan and DX.

last i checked Windows doesn't ship binary drivers from NVidia and AMD. how is that OOTB?

and one more thing, this time DX12 will suffer small market due to only being in Win10 and XBox. there were 2 DX versions with downside like this, but none when game was changing into next gen. that is one huge new con for DX

[Nille]

last i checked Windows doesn't ship binary drivers from NVidia and AMD. how is that OOTB?

The Windows Installation comes with binary Drivers from AMD and Nvidia. Over the Windows Update you get also the latest WHQL Drivers.

[Pecisk]

As for Windows and DirectX12 people really hype it without good reason. It will take some time for devs to tap that power and for vendors to finalize drivers. Also uptake from Windows 7 won't be so fast as Windows 10 still keep that Windows 8 tile look, which not a lot people are fun of. In long term, especially with it's potential for mobile platforms Vulkan can easily win out, as long as Valve and others doesn't blink.

[Pecisk]

The Windows Installation comes with binary Drivers from AMD and Nvidia. Over the Windows Update you get also the latest WHQL Drivers.

It doesn't. It provides basic 2D drivers for them.