AMD's Vulkan Driver Will Only Work With The AMDGPU Kernel Driver

[smitty3268]

Suppose I'm a game developer, and I only have the time/budget/inclination to target one graphics API. I'm less likely to pick an API if a significant percentage of my potential customers don't have drivers that support it. Plenty of people still have HD5000-6000 cards, so not supporting Vulkan on those cards will have the effect of hindering Vulkan adoption. If I have to write an OpenGL backend, I may not bother with a Vulkan backend. Frankly, this is bad news for AMD, since AMD's OpenGL/DirectX<12 performance is not competitive.

This would be a lot more convincing if all the current game developers weren't already just completely skipping AMD support entirely. They ship games that say flat out that they'll only work on NVidia right now (on linux), so at this point they could switch to Vulkan and actually boost the number of AMD cards they were supporting.

Also, most devs use engines these days with backends that are prebuilt. It's only hobbyists that are trying to write the backends themselves.

[artivision]

AMD is trying to force Tier3 (Async Compute) with DX12 and Vulcan from the beginning because they have the advantage. They try to convince everyone to optimize their games and Post Processing FX for Async Compute and give less attention to what happens when this future is not there. Since Tier1 GPUs will not get the new APIs anyway (AMD's doing). That will backfire as always when Devs may not use those low level APIs shortly and for this exact reason.

[chuckula]

Hey dick shit, when I worked at NeXT and Apple what I post about it is actual past experience. Suck it up buttercup. If you don't like it too fucking bad.

Sure you did. And I was a sniper in Afghanistan with over 200 confirmed kills because I wrote it on the Internet.

Anyway, even if you were Steve Job's fluffer for a while in the 80s, that just proves that you really ought to know better than to make asinine biased statements that even a North Korean drone could call out as being stupid.

I don't really care that you've invented an appeal to authority logical fallacy where you pretend that you are the mythical "authority" I've seen your stupid drivel posted on way too many websites and it's pretty clear that, like your former boyfriend Jobs, you're a marketer who doesn't know jack shit about how technology actually works.

[geearf]

Suppose I'm a game developer, and I only have the time/budget/inclination to target one graphics API. I'm less likely to pick an API if a significant percentage of my potential customers don't have drivers that support it. Plenty of people still have HD5000-6000 cards, so not supporting Vulkan on those cards will have the effect of hindering Vulkan adoption. If I have to write an OpenGL backend, I may not bother with a Vulkan backend. Frankly, this is bad news for AMD, since AMD's OpenGL/DirectX<12 performance is not competitive.

The fact that you might not get performance gains out of pre-GCN hardware is not relevant; not supporting Vulkan on that hardware is still a bad decision for AMD because it will hinder Vulkan adoption, and AMD needs Vulkan to catch on.

Although I do agree with your post mostly, let me disagree with the first sentence
If you're a game dev with little time, most likely you're not writing your own 3D engine but using an existing so it's a moot point.
Your whole arguments works better for a 3d engine dev

[geearf]

Sure you did. And I was a sniper in Afghanistan with over 200 confirmed kills because I wrote it on the Internet.

To be fair (I don't know the truth whatsoever), you can find the resume of a guy named Marc Driftmeyer easily, and he did work for both NeXT and Apple, but in no particular impressive way (no offense Marc!), so I'm not sure why someone would lie about that...

[MaxToTheMax]

Most developers don't even support those cards in their minimal requirement anymore.

Not true. Given the way Moore's law has slowed down lately, 5 years isn't really an eternity anymore. You can still buy those cards on Newegg and they do support OpenGL 4.4/D3D 11, so they could easily end up in a budget build.

[humbug]

deleted

[eddielinux]

IMHO, I think in next 3 years so many people will have 4k monitors or tvs and like actual gaming systems everything will be obsolete, sometimes this is the way that technologies moves forward.

[glxextxexlg]

I knew it.. I knew AMD had its move to kill vulkan. I wouldn't be surprised if current delay in vulkan's release is because AMD hasn't got a working driver yet. Suckers.

[Nille]

Vulkan was never announced for HD5k and HD6k Cards. There is even no D3D12 Support or Mantle Support for this cards.

So, Vulkan and D3D12 work only on GCN Cards. Thats fine but now the Problem. The AMDGPU driver support only a very small amount from the GCN Cards. So, can we expect that the driver support in the near future all GCN Cards?