Vulkan Videos From This Week's GDC 2016 Conference

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Vulkan Videos From This Week's GDC 2016 Conference

The Khronos Group has begun uploading their videos from this week's Game Developers Conference where they talked about the next-generation Vulkan API and more...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Vulkan-API-GDC-2016-Videos

[computerquip]

I don't really understand how the video and audio quality, even on low res, is that bad. My phone, the LG G4 can take better video and audio than that. Can someone donate them a camera or something? Audio is quiet in some areas, and video quality is so bad, I can barely read the text on the screen.

[dragorth]

Video like this is ussually done with a dedicated camera, and separate audio recorder. It sounds like in this video that they used the camera audio. But that is speculation. There were probably lots of moving parts, and between the speakers not speaking into the mics and the equipment, audio got drop. They also haven't tried cleaning the audio, I presume.

[Adarion]

Indeed, one would actually expect a bit better quality and professionalism from an organization in the graphics business. But then, maybe the HQ versions are actually better and this one is just for the impatient people to grasp the info.

[Kano]

In the 2nd video it was talked about Doto 2/Source 2. It was very interesting that the D3D9 renderer is so fast. Vulkan can only win in some latency aspects for the rendering thread for standard gameplay. But the used res of 640x480 was questionable. Of course you mainly eliminate GPU limits but something below 1080p is hard to understand to talk about at all. Most likely the framerates have been even more similar with higher res. They ported Source 2 to Mantle first and then to Vulkan.

[juno]

GDC was a disappointment for me. Call me naive but I was expecting much more towards Vulkan. Instead, devs were speaking of DX12 all the time.

After the 'rage' Sweeney had against Microsoft, I expected Epic to put pressure on, not even talking. What do they need DX12 for when they can have Vulkan?

Also slightly disappointed from DICE with their Frostbite engine. Imho they are one of the best studios, speaking of what they provide technically. They also showed that they care about multi plattform and low level optimisations when they ran Battlefield on Metal on an iPad or when they implemented their Mantle renderer. Statements are still that they are going to use Vulkan on 'some' platforms and DX12 on 'others'. Could anyone explain me why, please?

No clear statement from Unity as well, as far as I can tell.

And Crytek, again one technically excellent studio, showed no sign of interest in Vulkan at all.

Sure, Valve is still on track, but does still disappoint. Sitting on a shitload of money and still let Talos be the first Vulkan beta running on Linux, not DOTA. And who uses Source2, anyway?

So apart from Valve, there are the embedded/mobile companies. What's left for PC gaming?

[bridgman]

AFAICS the general thinking at the moment is still "DX12 for Windows, Vulkan for Linux/Android, Metal for MacOS", probably driven by the fact that DX12 has been available for essentially one game cycle longer than Vulkan and that AFAIK MacOS does not plan to support DX12 or Vulkan.

I don't think game developers could have gambled on Vulkan for games launching in the next few months, but now the spec has been released and drivers are coming out the next cycle could be different (develop on Vulkan run everywhere except MacOS).

The complicating factor is that from a game developer's perspective it could seem to make more sense to use OpenGL for Linux/Android games rather than Vulkan since implementing over OpenGL picks up MacOS coverage as well.

Practically speaking I think what is going to have to happen is something like:

Step 1 - game devs refactor their game engines to make good use of DX12, release some DX12 games (mostly done)
Step 2 - game devs extend the DX12 paths to cover Vulkan and Metal as well, release some DX12/Vulkan/Metal games
Step 3 - game devs realize they don't need DX12 now that they have Vulkan, focus on Vulkan/Metal only

[Pecisk]

AFAICS the general thinking is "DX12 for Windows, Vulkan for Linux/Android, Metal for MacOS", probably driven by the fact that DX12 has been available for essentially one game cycle longer than Vulkan and that AFAIK MacOS does not plan to support DX12 or Vulkan.

I don't think game developers could have gambled on Vulkan for games launching in the next few months, but now the spec has been released and drivers are coming out the next cycle could be different (develop on Vulkan run everywhere except MacOS).

The complicating factor is that from a game developer's perspective it could seem to make more sense to use OpenGL for Linux/Android games since that picks up MacOS coverage as well.

I think Vulkan is really new thing and chat about is cautiously optimistic. Also considering how much Microsoft PR money goes into boosting DirectX12, of course it has bigger coverage atm. All I have heard about Vulkan is quiet excitement, which imho means a lot more than very loud endorsements. In the end Vulkan is supported on more platforms and it makes sense to support it. Does specific engine uses DirectX12 on Windows 10 or Vulkan is besides the point.

[juno]

AFAICS the general thinking at the moment is still "DX12 for Windows, Vulkan for Linux/Android, Metal for MacOS", probably driven by the fact that DX12 has been available for essentially one game cycle longer than Vulkan and that AFAIK MacOS does not plan to support DX12 or Vulkan.

But why? OK Vulkan is not ready, but neither is DX12. Every single game for now seems like a complete mess, apart from Ashes of the Singularity (which has not been released yet). 'Insiders' had early access on Vulkan, it's not like the big studios all of the sudden heard about Vulkan for the first time when the spec was released to the public.
It looks to me like MS forced dx12 out to be first, put force on devs to implement it and now we have this messed up games with a last-minute dx12 render path patch.

Step 3 - game devs realize they don't need DX12 now that they have Vulkan, focus on Vulkan/Metal only

If they even thought about that topic, they would have realised this before they even started working with dx12. There is no need for dx12 and it does not make sense to put any effort into it. It's Windows 10 only while Vulkan is Windows 7/8/8.1/10, Linux/OSX(maybe; in the mean time via MoltenVK) and Android.
Doesn't seem like they thought this through, when a technical director says they'll use dx12 for some plattforms and vulkan for others...


Wanted to say something about Apple, but got to run

[bridgman]

But why? OK Vulkan is not ready, but neither is DX12. Every single game for now seems like a complete mess, apart from Ashes of the Singularity (which has not been released yet). 'Insiders' had early access on Vulkan, it's not like the big studios all of the sudden heard about Vulkan for the first time when the spec was released to the public. It looks to me like MS forced dx12 out to be first, put force on devs to implement it and now we have this messed up games with a last-minute dx12 render path patch.

Unless you are suggesting that MS manipulated Khronos proceedings they couldn't have "forced dx12 to be out first" but they could have "pushed for dx12 to happen quickly" which seems like something they would want to do. Game development takes a while, so I think it's fair to say that had game devs gone Vulkan-only things would have been messier than they are with DX12 today. That won't last, which is why I'm not getting upset about current state.

If they even thought about that topic, they would have realised this before they even started working with dx12. There is no need for dx12 and it does not make sense to put any effort into it. It's Windows 10 only while Vulkan is Windows 7/8/8.1/10, Linux/OSX(maybe; in the mean time via MoltenVK) and Android. Doesn't seem like they thought this through, when a technical director says they'll use dx12 for some plattforms and vulkan for others...

Remember that while Vulkan has been a visible thing for a while DX12 was visible quite a bit before that, so plans would have been made a year or more ago. When someone talks at a place like GDC they need to focus on "what they are doing today", not the complex decision tree they'll actually be following in the future. There are exceptions but generally you don't get those at high profile events.

One other thing I forgot to mention is that AFAIK DX12 also gets you XBox One support, which you don't get from Vulkan unless MS decides to implement Vulkan support on XBox.

Not sure if Sony is thinking about supporting Vulkan, although of course if I was I wouldn't be able to say anything here anyways. Supporting Vulkan would be interestingly disruptive, but from Sony's POV it's probably less attractive because it makes it easier for games to migrate from PS4 to PCs and Steam Boxes.