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

[phoronix]

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

While Linux users tend to prefer open-source hardware drivers out of philosophical beliefs or just making an easier out-of-the-box Linux experience, Valve and other early Vulkan stakeholders have yet another reason to appreciate open-source drivers as it allowed them to jump-start porting of the Source 2 Engine over to the new graphics API much faster and easier than if they were relying on a closed-source Vulkan driver. Here's the story that LunarG has exclusively shared with Phoronix about their process of bringing up Vulkan with open-source.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=21611

[computerquip]

Was this the stakeholder surprise?

[89c51]

Will this vulkan driver become part of mesa at some point? And is it something that can easily be ported to nouveau and radeon?

[Michael]

Will this vulkan driver become part of mesa at some point?

As far as I know, no. It's completely standalone from Mesa in terms of its code-base with not much (any?) common code at scale.

And is it something that can easily be ported to nouveau and radeon?

Not really, it's a driver taking SPIR-V and turning it into Intel's machine code. Radeon and Nouveau are vastly different architectures, plus Radeon (presumably) would probably end up just using the SPIR-V to LLVM pass for then emitting their instructions given the stage and quality of their LLVM back-end.

[mark45]

What's the Firefox extension that marks self-links as red?

[Veske]

Does Dota 2 allready run with Vulkan then?

[89c51]

As far as I know, no. It's completely standalone from Mesa in terms of its code-base with not much (any?) common code at scale.



Not really, it's a driver taking SPIR-V and turning it into Intel's machine code. Radeon and Nouveau are vastly different architectures, plus Radeon (presumably) would probably end up just using the SPIR-V to LLVM pass for then emitting their instructions given the stage and quality of their LLVM back-end.

Thanks for the answers.

One more question -to anyone that can answer-. Which cards are going to support Vulkan. Only the newer ones or it will go further back.

[humbug]

Does Dota 2 allready run with Vulkan then?

Yes, internally at Valve experimental build. They'd showed it at GDC.

[Zan Lynx]

No real idea about card support but from what I've read about Vulkan, any cards that support DX11 or OpenGL 4 should be able to do it. DX12 cards will, obviously, since DX12 and Vulkan are very nearly the same idea. Also any card that can do Mantle should work with Vulkan.

What Nvidia and AMD will decide to write drivers for and support is a question only they can answer since they might leave out some older hardware in order to drive sales of new cards.

Although it seems to me that Nvidia has a pretty good record on supporting older cards with driver updates when they really don't have to. I don't know about AMD since my only AMD card is just two years old.

[blackout23]

Thanks for the answers.

One more question -to anyone that can answer-. Which cards are going to support Vulkan. Only the newer ones or it will go further back.

Anything that is capable of OpenGL 4.3 should be able to have a Vulkan driver. It's up to the hardware vendors which cards they want to support.


I wonder if there will be feature levels with Vulkan. DirectX12 support on Fermi won't be the same as with Maxwell. But will Vulkan 1.0 be capabilitywise be the same on all supported cards?