The Rust Vulkan Gfx-rs Portability Initiative Reaches New Milestone

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Rust Vulkan Gfx-rs Portability Initiative Reaches New Milestone

Gfx-rs Portability is the library being developed within the Rust programming language that implements the Vulkan Portability Initiative as an effort akin to MoltenVK for easily getting Vulkan applications running on macOS and other platforms where Vulkan API support may not be natively available...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Rust-Vulkan-Gfx-Rs-0.4-Portable

[kvark]

Please note that this is *not* a conformant Vulkan implementation. The conformance of portability initiative in general still has a long way to go. gfx-portability is basically just a library that an application can use on Mac (or Windows) in place of a Vulkan driver that tries to behave like one. We support a large portion of the API, and now we expose the extension that allows to query the bits we don't support.

[tsuru]

Slight topic hijack: Is gfx-rs being used in WebRender now? I remember there being talk and some proof-of-concept work but I don't remember hearing if it officially happened...

[shmerl]

How is Vulkan → D3D12 effort going? It would enable developers to use Vulkan when targeting Xbox. Also, to break through another lock-in, it can be very useful to have Vulkan → GNM as well for PlayStation.

[kvark]

Slight topic hijack: Is gfx-rs being used in WebRender now? I remember there being talk and some proof-of-concept work but I don't remember hearing if it officially happened...

It's going pretty well. There is less than a hundred (out of 30K) Gecko reftests failing for each of the major backends (Vulkan/D3D12/Metal). I gave a lightning talk about the progress at Mozilla All Hands (Orlando, 2018). Recording isn't public, AFAIK, but slides are available at https://github.com/kvark/slides/blob...doAllHands.pdf . Code link is attached here. Major problem is to avoid disruption of WebRender rollout in Gecko, which is happening as we speak.

[kvark]

How is Vulkan → D3D12 effort going? It would enable developers to use Vulkan when targeting Xbox. Also, to break through another lock-in, it can be very useful to have Vulkan → GNM as well for PlayStation.

Indeed, I'm looking forward to see D3D12 maturing and GNM emerging some day. The progress on D3D12 is steady even if slow. We are approaching a point where we can run Dota2, but we aren't there yet. GNM would be in consideration when we are able to prove Sony that the whole idea of an abstraction at this level is useful for developers, on the examples of Metal and D3D12 titles shipping.

[GunpowaderGuy]

we need to use this to make a webvulkan proof of concept fast , before apple gl ( their redundant web api ) gets mainstream(er)

[kvark]

we need to use this to make a webvulkan proof of concept fast , before apple gl ( their redundant web api ) gets mainstream(er)

The idea of WebVulkan was considered (2 years ago, see Obsidian API proposal from me/Mozilla), and we were very interested in it, but it was never meant to happen. There are multiple reasons for this, but at the end of the day it's not a choice between WebVulkan and "apple gl" (there isn't such a thing, btw). The W3C community group includes all the browser vendors plus Intel, the produced WebGPU API will be semi-efficient on all major platforms, and our work-in-progress implementation (linked) is based on gfx-rs.