A Chat With Khronos President Neil Trevett About Vulkan, OpenXR, SPIR-V In 2017

[johnc]

I don't know it sounds a bit like that Khronos is not convinced at all about Vulkan.

There's not a lot of industry interest. But I think DX12 isn't really doing that well either, considering the huge push for it.

I figure in a few years all the "low-level" hysterics will pass and we'll get back to more abstract APIs.

[triangle]

I figure in a few years all the "low-level" hysterics will pass and we'll get back to more abstract APIs.

There should be a lot of middle ware that supports Vulkan by then. That was part of the idea...
hardware vendors provide uniform low level support, and engines do the rest.

More on topic, if khronos creates a sort of *standard* middle ware, the same disasters that struck OpenGL had will strike it also!
Think about it... It will turn into an OpenGL when hardware vendors start implementing it directly for short term gains.

The more middle ware the better, the less driver API's the better, that's what Vulkan is there to salve.

[chimpy]

Well AAA games take forever to develop so it'll probably be next year that real d12 & Vulkan games will be released instead of d11 to d12 wrapped games we have now.

[shmerl]

TL;DR - Apple are jerks, and will remain jerks in the foreseeable future.

80% of the common APIs sounds like a limiting idea. Won't developers just target that without using all that Vulkan provides?

[DMJC]

This just confirms what everyone already knew. Without Steve Jobs Apple is screwed. Tim Cook is abandoning open standards and rapidly pushing the Mac platform towards being a half assed computing platform. Removing the audio line in from Macbook Pros (what the fuck Apple??? How does anyone do Audio editing anymore?) moving away from Open Source 3D support, Crippling the Mac Pro trash bin design (it actually melts under heavy use, not my opinion, experience from actual video pros using it to render at 4K which it was advertised as capable of). A completely underwhelming product line with no direction. It used to be that I would never consider any laptop brand but Apple, well as of this week I've just dropped $2k AUD on a Razer Blade Stealth with another $800 to follow on the Razer Core (ironically a Thunderbolt add-on box which Apple could have released 3-5 years ago, or had ready for launch with the new Macbook Pro). Apple no longer makes the best hardware anymore and until they acknowledge there's a problem in the land of Mac they will start bleeding high end and power user customers.

[tomtomme]

Apple... The only company too greedy to support Vulkan... Khronos, don't give in to this!

what about sony?
a second company... and microsoft also gives a f***** on xbox
also intel: only 6th gpu gen upwards on windows, and only win 10.

at least nintendo switch is listed: https://www.khronos.org/conformance/...roducts#vulkan

[aht0]

at least nintendo switch is listed: https://www.khronos.org/conformance/...roducts#vulkan

which is a FreeBSD running on ARM, despite the "Nintendo OS" written there. Shall see how it affects the main OS. Probably not at all, figuring they are going to act like Sony (Nintendo is also Japanese company)

[Meteorhead]

There should be a lot of middle ware that supports Vulkan by then. That was part of the idea...
hardware vendors provide uniform low level support, and engines do the rest.

More on topic, if khronos creates a sort of *standard* middle ware, the same disasters that struck OpenGL had will strike it also!
Think about it... It will turn into an OpenGL when hardware vendors start implementing it directly for short term gains.

The more middle ware the better, the less driver API's the better, that's what Vulkan is there to salve.

I don't think any of the wrappers will gain enough traction for it to be worthwile for vendors to reimplement. Even if they did, who cares? If they got the assets to do so, it's for the better. Also, ff the wrapper is a template library, it is pretty much impossible to detect from drivers. A standard C++ wrapper atop the C API helps (which AFAIK exists) but yeah, the more wrappers, the better. That is what will drive the API forward.

[starshipeleven]

I figure in a few years all the "low-level" hysterics will pass and we'll get back to more abstract APIs.

Lol nope. It's just that people won't just dump a whole engine and rewrite it for the sake of new graphics API. It's gonna be slow for both Vulkan and DX11 same as it was slow for DX9 -> DX11.

[starshipeleven]

also intel: only 6th gpu gen upwards on windows, and only win 10.

1. I thought Intel also supports Vulkan on Linux
2. That's very likely part of a deal they made with MS where MS paid them to do so because of obvious reasons
3. it's completely irrelevant for most AAA titles anyway as Intel iGPUs are too weak for AAA gaming.