How Open-Source Allowed Valve To Implement VULKAN Much Faster On The Source 2 Engine

[techzilla]

AMD is the driving innovating force on the GPU Stack,

Personally I use AMD for all my CPU's and GPU's, as I see them as the most beneficial player. Its on their shoulders all the reversed community based projects are standing, and their work is paying off on new ARM Gallium drivers as well. Of coarse I'd love to see AMD in the ARM space 100%, and I plan on getting one of the new Seattle based systems soon as it's launched.

Intel is very Linux compatible, no question, they ensure their stuff works, and they deserve props for their contributions....but they don't create the foundation that AMD creates, and Nvidia.... well they are just leaches, plain and simple. If they did anything it would be just to spite AMD, so they can get back to ending open drivers for good. SO for my money, and all systems I influence, I use AMD.

Plus, my 16 core Opteron ain't beanbag,

[b15hop]

You are completely wrong. Nvidia already outperformed DirectX 9 without Vulkan on a highend Intel box (definitely no AMD cpu!) with Source, Vulkan was tested with an Intel GPU (which is only possible with an Intel CPU), so in what way did you see that AMD leads performance in any test? You should stop dreaming.

On that note, where do we learn how to code in Vulcan. I feel like it's going to be a gem if they pull it off right. I really hope valve get Vulcan up to scratch because it's about time.

I would be very disappointed if nvidia doesn't support Vulcan on at least 700 series GPU's. My 780gtx would be a paperweight otherwise. I have this feeling they will try push the latest GPU as soon as Vulcan comes out. Even though really, it should be a huge performance increase for certain tasks.

[dragorth]

On that note, where do we learn how to code in Vulcan. I feel like it's going to be a gem if they pull it off right. I really hope valve get Vulcan up to scratch because it's about time.

I would be very disappointed if nvidia doesn't support Vulcan on at least 700 series GPU's. My 780gtx would be a paperweight otherwise. I have this feeling they will try push the latest GPU as soon as Vulcan comes out. Even though really, it should be a huge performance increase for certain tasks.

You can not learn Vulkan directly, at least not currently. Vulkan is based on AMD's Mantle, so if you want to use something that should be similar to about 80%, at a guess, you could test Mantle on Windows if you have a compatible AMD GPU. There will be differences, but we won't know what they are until the Vulkan spec is released. Or, you could take a look at DX12, on Windows 10. The model is very similar, and you get the benefit of not learning an obsolete api.

It will be up to Nvidia what GPUs they will support with Vulkan, though Vulkan does require at least an OpenGL ES 3 capable GPU. Unless someone makes an Open Source driver for the cards Nvidia does not support.