Vulkan 1.3.245 Brings New NVIDIA Vendor Extension To Help Optimize Ray-Tracing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Vulkan 1.3.245 Brings New NVIDIA Vendor Extension To Help Optimize Ray-Tracing

The Vulkan 1.3.245 extension is a small update to this industry-standard graphics/compute API with just a handful of issues resolved but it does introduce one new extension, which is a NVIDIA vendor extension aiming to further enhance Vulkan ray-tracing...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-1.3.245-Released

[ClosedSource]

"STOP PUTTING THE EBUL PROPRIETARY NVIDIA EXTENSIONS IN VULKAN! AND ALSO REWRITE VULKAN IN RUST!" - Phoronix.

[Daktyl198]

Vulkan is doomed to die the same death as OpenGL due to the extension system. Most people developing for Windows already refuse to use it, and Apple straight up refused to implement it into their new macOS versions because they knew it would be a repeat of OpenGL. The simple reality is that nobody wants to search through 17 miles of documentation to find the correct extension that does what they want to do. Each new extension makes it more annoying to use, especially with the versioning system and having to understand that not every driver supports the extensions you want to use. How many extensions are just "does the same thing, but slightly better"?

[Quackdoc]

Vulkan is doomed to die the same death as OpenGL due to the extension system. Most people developing for Windows already refuse to use it, and Apple straight up refused to implement it into their new macOS versions because they knew it would be a repeat of OpenGL. The simple reality is that nobody wants to search through 17 miles of documentation to find the correct extension that does what they want to do. Each new extension makes it more annoying to use, especially with the versioning system and having to understand that not every driver supports the extensions you want to use. How many extensions are just "does the same thing, but slightly better"?

I highly doubt it, this is a *terrible* metric, but a metric none the less, there are 307 D3D12 games listed on PC gaming wiki, vulkan has 186 games. this is already a very good amount. if you were to use this metric, but this is hardly bad adoption. that's roughly 1/4 games that choose a lower level API that choose vulkan. and ofc as more and more engines gain good support for vulkan, such as godot. this number could very well increase.

as for apple, no one cares what they do, they do their own thing in their bubble.

[mbriar]

I highly doubt it, this is a *terrible* metric, but a metric none the less, there are 307 D3D12 games listed on PC gaming wiki, vulkan has 186 games. this is already a very good amount. if you were to use this metric, but this is hardly bad adoption. that's roughly 1/4 games that choose a lower level API that choose vulkan. and ofc as more and more engines gain good support for vulkan, such as godot. this number could very well increase.

as for apple, no one cares what they do, they do their own thing in their bubble.

If you remove every game that is either a source port of an ancient game (Quake 2 is 3 times on the vulkan list) or which has vulkan only for the terrible linux port (all games using UE4 or Unity) the situation looks much worse. Every new game that comes out uses d3d12, and the last big game to release with vulkan was Doom Eternal in 2020 - d3d12 is extremely dominant, but I don't think it has anything to do with vulkan's extension system.

[SerialCool]

Tencent, by far the largest video game company in the world from China, wants/needs to promote Vulkan more because of the Chinese Communist Party and ban DirectX along with Windows from China by 2025. Thus, Vulkan has a safer future than DirectX because of countries like China, Russia and Co. Also, Vulkan finds a much larger worldwide distribution than DirectX because of Linux together with Android.
Vulkan is not dependent on one company or one country, whereas DirectX is.

(I am explicitly only talking about the future, distribution and adaptability of Vulkan, not about human rights and so on).

[Leopard]

I highly doubt it, this is a *terrible* metric, but a metric none the less, there are 307 D3D12 games listed on PC gaming wiki, vulkan has 186 games. this is already a very good amount. if you were to use this metric, but this is hardly bad adoption. that's roughly 1/4 games that choose a lower level API that choose vulkan. and ofc as more and more engines gain good support for vulkan, such as godot. this number could very well increase.

as for apple, no one cares what they do, they do their own thing in their bubble.

That list is balooned by source ports and Linux only releases ( such as some Feral ports that uses Vulkan )

Even if there was a competition/war on desktop space about graphics api usage at all , D3D12 won it years ago.

[Quackdoc]

That list is balooned by source ports and Linux only releases ( such as some Feral ports that uses Vulkan )

Even if there was a competition/war on desktop space about graphics api usage at all , D3D12 won it years ago.

I dont think saying it's a source port as a reason why it should be disregarded as valuable. in the end the game is what matters, if an engine has vulkan, it has vulkan. not every game dev needs to be a vulkan/d3d12 developer.

as for linux only games I did say it's a terrible metric. but also by the same token, it's not like this is an exhaustive list of vulkan compatible games either, there are d3d12 game and ofc vulkan games that dont make the list

[piotrj3]

Vulkan is doomed to die the same death as OpenGL due to the extension system. Most people developing for Windows already refuse to use it, and Apple straight up refused to implement it into their new macOS versions because they knew it would be a repeat of OpenGL. The simple reality is that nobody wants to search through 17 miles of documentation to find the correct extension that does what they want to do. Each new extension makes it more annoying to use, especially with the versioning system and having to understand that not every driver supports the extensions you want to use. How many extensions are just "does the same thing, but slightly better"?

Extension system actually works well in Vulkan as Vulkan extensions initially are propertiary like extensions that gets promoted to standard for all. Vulkan raytracing initially was Nvidia own extension (thanks to that it appeared fast) and based on it other GPU makers submitted feedback and issues that were resolved before it finally became mainstream extention.

Also other GPU makers are free to implement Nvidia's vulkan extentions, there is 0 blocking here.

Also that extension system is half the reason why projects like DXVK can work at all. It is obvious why such extensions that are meant only to be used in translation layers shouldn't be mainstream for everyone, but thanks to that it is extention they can appear pretty fast as optional dependency that GPU makers are mostly willing to adopt.

Meanwhile less known GPU makers especially mobile/embedded ones probably don't care about many extentions DXVK etc uses.

[smitty3268]

Vulkan is doomed to die the same death as OpenGL due to the extension system. Most people developing for Windows already refuse to use it, and Apple straight up refused to implement it into their new macOS versions because they knew it would be a repeat of OpenGL. The simple reality is that nobody wants to search through 17 miles of documentation to find the correct extension that does what they want to do. Each new extension makes it more annoying to use, especially with the versioning system and having to understand that not every driver supports the extensions you want to use. How many extensions are just "does the same thing, but slightly better"?

Most people will just use core vulkan and they're done. No need to think about extensions at all.

The reason they sucked in OpenGL was that they were all enabled by default, and so when you developed your application you would start using them without realizing it, and then end up screwed when you tried to make it work on another driver. With Vulkan, you just get core by default, and if there's something you really care about then you can go to the extra effort of finding the extension you need and enabling it after making sure it's either compatible where you need it, or that you've added a fallback path.