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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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

[computerquip]

- 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.

OpenGL isn't tied to the XServer. The problem is how the ABI works in Linux. For instance, one obvious headache is that the GLX implementation is expected to be within libGL. This is asinine since one may not wish to use the GLX implementation with OpenGL. It can be ignored and used with other windowing implementations if available.

Another is that multiple implementations is damn near impossible to implement efficiently with each other in scope, say for multiple cards or similar.

More information on the ABI issues here: http://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2013...esentation.pdf