Learning More About The Intel Vulkan Driver, Linux Vulkan Plans

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Learning More About The Intel Vulkan Driver, Linux Vulkan Plans

LunarG, the company that's been doing a lot of consulting work for Valve on optimizing Linux graphics drivers, is also the company that Valve paid to develop the Intel Vulkan Linux graphics driver. LunarG has been doing Linux graphics driver development for years with Mesa/Gallium3D and was formed by some of the same former Tungsten Graphics staff. Here's some more information on their Vulkan and SPIR-V adventures...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LunarG-Vulkan-AMA

[Kemosabe]

If it's really THAT low-level it looks like Vulkan will be a huge extra effort especially for small studios which will increase development costs significantly. Is it still the messiah under the 3d graphics APIs or will it ruin the current ecosystem of hundrets of small indie studios?

[curaga]

Typo: "love on"

[chuckula]

If it's really THAT low-level it looks like Vulkan will be a huge extra effort especially for small studios which will increase development costs significantly. Is it still the messiah under the 3d graphics APIs or will it ruin the current ecosystem of hundrets of small indie studios?

Here's what's happening: A bunch of the burden is shifting from the driver layer up to the 3D graphics engine layer. The graphics engine gets more complex but since the engine developers now have direct access to the lower-level hardware, the thought is that the engine can take advantage of the hardware in a more efficient manner and provide better performance.

For smaller projects that aren't using a sophisticated graphics engine, Vulkan will definitely be more complex than traditional OpenGL. However, it might be worth it if the Vulkan drivers really are better and if the Vulkan API is cleaner & better documented then all the tricks needed to get OpenGL working properly on modern hardware.

[Drago]

If it's really THAT low-level it looks like Vulkan will be a huge extra effort especially for small studios which will increase development costs significantly. Is it still the messiah under the 3d graphics APIs or will it ruin the current ecosystem of hundrets of small indie studios?

Smaller studios have already 2 top-notch game engines Unreal4 and Source2 for free, that they can use and modify to suit their needs. These engines will provide Vulkan for free.

[schmidtbag]

Smaller studios have already 2 top-notch game engines Unreal4 and Source2 for free, that they can use and modify to suit their needs. These engines will provide Vulkan for free.

I was going to say the same thing. Most smaller studios don't bother creating their own engines and if they do, it's usually DX9/OGL2.x based anyway.


Out of curiosity though, is Vulkan going to be in a separate library from Mesa? I just think it'd be easier for maintenance and users if Mesa was strictly classic openGL.

[haagch]

If it's really THAT low-level it looks like Vulkan will be a huge extra effort especially for small studios which will increase development costs significantly. Is it still the messiah under the 3d graphics APIs or will it ruin the current ecosystem of hundrets of small indie studios?

Assuming there won't be any libraries that implement the most commonly used 3d graphics operations?

[Timeus]

Vulkan & wayland

Are Gtk3 and Qt5 going to support Vulkan? Maybe having Vulkan as a rendering backend. wayland has no rendering api so it should be easy for it to have vulkan support.

[Drago]

Are Gtk3 and Qt5 going to support Vulkan? Maybe having Vulkan as a rendering backend. wayland has no rendering api so it should be easy for it to have vulkan support.

I want to know exactly the same thing.

[davidbepo]

egl + vulkan

if egl is going to use vulkan then it will be easier to support vulkan in wayland
vulkan + wayland graphilicious