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

[rkido]

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.

There's a very good reason why game developers aren't targeting desktop OpenGL: because it's a trainwreck. Extension support is all over the place between OS X, AMD on Linux/Windows, NVIDIA on Linux/Windows, and Intel on Linux, and even if they all supported the latest spec, the implementations are still all so different that it would hardly help matters. And from what I understand, though I'm no expert, the architecture is also terrible. OpenGL in its current form is a crufty, spaghetti API that consistently gets lower performance than DX11 because, even if the 'possibility' of well-optimized modern games exists somewhere deep inside the spaghetti, no one can figure out how to do it, not even the OpenGL experts at Aspyr and Feral.

Which brings us to Vulkan. Simple, rock-solid drivers everywhere tested against a cross-platform conformance suite. Support from Google, Intel, and the major engine developers. A series of Linux+Vulkan-powered personal game consoles coming out later this year with surprisingly wide support from the game industry.

There is value in being skeptical, sometimes. But for the first time there is nothing technical in the way -- at least nothing that isn't trivial. So now it's just a matter of getting as many people on board as possible, to which skepticism-for-the-sake-of-skepticism is counterproductive.

[Ancurio]

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.

"Likely more performance" -> certainly not. Vulkan is higher level than anything console developers are used it. It comes close, but native console development is the fastest you can possibly get.

[rkido]

And OS X most likely will get Vulkan support via third party drivers from Nvidia and AMD.

From what I understand, this isn't possible. Graphics drivers work differently on OS X. Apple provides the API, and the vendor-provided graphics drivers simply handle translating that API from software to hardware. That's why OpenGL on OS X is terrible. Apple doesn't care about real games, and it's been stuck on an ancient spec for a long time. I'm quite certain that Apple will never support Vulkan, despite their initial support. They changed their minds.

It may not be a big deal though. Depends on how hard it is to convert between DX12, Vulkan, and Metal. Certainly must be easier than DX to GL.

Game developers making their own custom engines should be strongly urged to just use Vulkan and Metal. Supporting even one high-performance API is a lot more work than DX9/11 or OpenGL, so the less work they have to do, the better. And this way they would get high-performance games with rock-solid drivers on Android, Valve's personal consoles, OS X, iOS, and Windows XP-10. Possibly PS4. That's ... everything, except Windows Phone (lol) and Xbox One.

[Awesomeness]

And OS X most likely will get Vulkan support via third party drivers from Nvidia and AMD.

Since when are there 3rd party GPU drivers under OSX?

The X11 Vulkan support will require DRI3 be supported by the hardware drivers.

Too bad DRI3 is disabled everywhere by default: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/dri...be655e27e6e9c2

[johnc]

Since when are there 3rd party GPU drivers under OSX?

Surprise of surprises, only nvidia makes them.

[johnc]

There's a very good reason why game developers aren't targeting desktop OpenGL: because it's a trainwreck. Extension support is all over the place between OS X, AMD on Linux/Windows, NVIDIA on Linux/Windows, and Intel on Linux, and even if they all supported the latest spec, the implementations are still all so different that it would hardly help matters. And from what I understand, though I'm no expert, the architecture is also terrible. OpenGL in its current form is a crufty, spaghetti API that consistently gets lower performance than DX11 because, even if the 'possibility' of well-optimized modern games exists somewhere deep inside the spaghetti, no one can figure out how to do it, not even the OpenGL experts at Aspyr and Feral.

That's actually not much difference than DX. Just think about the games that come over from consoles: https://youtu.be/03Nq632eV6I?t=4m11s

Which brings us to Vulkan. Simple, rock-solid drivers everywhere

heh.

[Awesomeness]

Surprise of surprises, only nvidia makes them.

No. There are only CUDA drivers by NVidia for OSX: http://www.nvidia.com/object/mac-driver-archive.html
Ever since its inception, there has never been graphics drivers for OSX by any other than Apple themselves (speaking, obviously, only about real hardware, not emulated GPUs in some virtual machine solution).
And since all GPU manufacturers want to have their GPUs in upcoming Macs, neither will want to piss off Apple. So no Vulkan under OSX until Apple wants it.

[AnonymousCoward]

The drivers are at least partially written by AMD and nVidia. We will not hear about Vulkan from Apple until they just announce that next version of OSX will support it. Any positive info about Vulkan could defer developers from Metal.

[dragorth]

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.

The difference here is the Windows OS support. DX12 supports Windows 10, period. But most users are on Windows 7/8/8.1. Vulkan will support all of those, so if they get it out fast enough, they will have a huge advantage in these engines. If Windows 10 gets huge adoption, then Vulkan loses that advantage.

OpenGL never had that advantage. While games target DX9 still, they don't do this due to Windows XP support, they do this because that is the guaranteed lowest common denominator on all Windows systems since Vista. Even Windows 10 still supports DX9 hardware as a minimum requirement. So, OpenGL has been competing with DX9/10/11, with advantage of working on a few Windows XP PCs, when game devs have been focusing on newer hardware, and those using XP on newer hardware are few and far between.

[blackout23]

And OS X most likely will get Vulkan support via third party drivers from Nvidia and AMD.

Yes....then what's keeping driver vendors from shipping OpenGL 4.5 on OSX?