Khronos Debuts OpenGL ES 3.2 & New GL Extensions, But No Vulkan This Week

[Pecisk]

According to the info on anandtech Sony is one of the companies that has participated in Vulkan. This suggests that the PS4 may add support for Vulkan in the future. That would be very cool, likely more performance and it would make porting quicker, cheaper and easier for game developers.

Sony is very interested to have more ports to it's platform (as PS4 is more or less leading gaming console atm), so obviously having low level graphics api support (which doesn't cost them lot to add) could help them a huge deal. Wouldn't surprised that they will roll out their API support very next day after Khronos publishes spec.

[Pecisk]

For this they have to hurry. D3D12 is already released and its integrated in the MIcrosoft IDE and Tools. I fear that vulkan come to late and to little.

Errr what? Do you really think that success or failure is measured that way? Engine guys are *already* working on their implementations, because almost everyone is involved in writing spec! As for game developers - they won't care, as long as engine runs thing fast and smooth on all platforms (SteamOS/Linux, Android, PS4, Windows is mentioned as support). Microsoft can spend their billions on PR forcing game devs to dance around them, but really long term and system wide support, stability is what will make difference.

Unless Microsoft doesn't open source DX12 to be ported to other OSes, race is still on.

[dh04000]

- Mir and Wayland will have first-class support with Vulkan's Window System Integration.

Not sure if I like this...... OpenGL is basically tied to the XServer and didn't that cause a bunch of headaches?

Let Vulkan define their window system agnostically, and let Mir and Vulkan implement support for this one agnostic platform independently.

[hajj_3]

According to the info on anandtech Sony is one of the companies that has participated in Vulkan. This suggests that the PS4 may add support for Vulkan in the future. That would be very cool, likely more performance and it would make porting quicker, cheaper and easier for game developers.

[johnc]

All of the major Engine companies, Epic, Unity, Valve and others have committed to shipping Vulkan support. And Android has confirmed they will support it. So, all those games that use those engines will be able to offer support for Vulkan as well.

Yeah but we have engines now that support DirectX and OpenGL and game developers aren't targeting OpenGL. Maybe for Unity that's the case, since their tools make it easy to build Mac and Linux games. But, e.g., on Windows just about everything is DX. Everything. Even Unity games.

And from what I've been seeing, it just seems like the entire PC game development industry -- sans Valve -- is talking DX12. And the Mac industry is talking Metal.

[Nille]

It's annoying, but hopefully Vulcan can "take over" the cross-platform bit - Khronos is playing catch-up again...

For this they have to hurry. D3D12 is already released and its integrated in the MIcrosoft IDE and Tools. I fear that vulkan come to late and to little.

[Deavir]

All of the major Engine companies, Epic, Unity, Valve and others have committed to shipping Vulkan support. And Android has confirmed they will support it. So, all those games that use those engines will be able to offer support for Vulkan as well.

And why is the future of Android gaming unknown? Games are the most profitable app category on Android. They are almost the only category that is making any money, in fact.

I agree and that is what confused me about the comments. How is this anything but good new? Android/SteamOS is going to popularize Vulkan, my guess is PS4 will use it too. Games that need OSX and windows support will be stuck with OpenGL (no moving to metal or DirectX). If anything the need to cross-platform support will grow so OSX will probably get Vulkan due to industry pressure.

[dragorth]

It is available on all platforms. But it is not the preferred API for all platforms. Going forward it will only be used on Android and Linux.

Hardly anybody is going to release Vulkan games for Windows. And it looks like Vulkan won't even be supported on Mac, nor any other modern version of OpenGL.

I disagree. Vulkan implementations have been promised for Windows 7/8/8.1 and 10. Its direct competitir is DX12, and it is only on Windows 10. With support from the major Engine providers, and the ability to get the performance of DX12 on the largest Windows platform, Windows 7, it will encourage games to target Vulkan just to compete.

[dragorth]

I wonder whether it's worth it adding tessellation to Android. I remember when they were announcing DX10/D3D 10, it was being sold as a method of creating geometry almost for free, or at least with using a disproportionally small amount of resources compared to rendering using polygons and other <= DX9 methods.

But as far as I can tell that sales pitch has not been realised. Look at the clusterfunk that was the DX10 patch for Crysis 2, performance took a HUGE hit in implementing tessellation. And while I appreciate that may have been an extreme case, I can't see other implementations being good. I'm pretty sure Arkham Knight uses tessellation quite a lot, another mess on PC.

I'd like to know how phones, which are roughly between Xbox and 360 power right now for flagship handsets, are expected to take advantage of a feature that, so far, is bringing modern GFX cards to their knees. Correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe they're just laying the groundwork for the future, we all know how long it takes for ES versions to be utilised, most things are still using ES 2 as far as I know.

With regards to Vulkan, my big wish is for an open-source radeon driver asap, would be cool to see. Hopefully we'll start to see uptake in Vulkan useage at a far accelerated rate to OpenGL / DirectX etc. It seems like an investment in the future to use Vulkan.

The hardware tessellation support is basically a fixed function feature that accelerates displacement of geometry. They added it to the spec partly because the hardware supports it. And Android has supported it for a year or so now. Crysis 2 was a poor implementation. They had not optimized the levels properly. Period.

Tessellation does not have to be used on everything. The developer should limit its use, and the good ones will. If its done right, it shouldn't hit performance, and the game can be improved.

[dragorth]

Engines will implement Vulkan like they do OpenGL now. That in itself won't mean much. Developers would still have to build their games around that, and, as of right now, very few probably will. Most of the interest from game developers is in DX12. I think Vulkan games will be a lot like we see OpenGL games today... sort of after-thought ported versions.

It really comes down to the target platform. The only target platform of interest for OpenGL / Vulkan right now is Android. And the future of Android gaming is sort of... unknown.

All of the major Engine companies, Epic, Unity, Valve and others have committed to shipping Vulkan support. And Android has confirmed they will support it. So, all those games that use those engines will be able to offer support for Vulkan as well.

And why is the future of Android gaming unknown? Games are the most profitable app category on Android. They are almost the only category that is making any money, in fact.