Khronos Group Announces Vulkan, OpenCL 2.1, SPIR-V

[-MacNuke-]

Likewise, with the new APIs, maybe Intel will finally shift to Gallium3D assuming the new interface will be easy to implement as just a Gallium3D state tracker.

Errr, Vulkan by design seems to be a Gallium3D on itself... I do not see any reason why to keep Gallium3D in its current form. Gallium3D is designed around old DirectX versions and will only put massive overhead to Vulkan. Or why should a add a transition from SPIR-V code to Gallium IR instead of executing SPIR-V directly?

A new driver only needs to implement a SPIR-V execution engine for both Vulkan and OpenCL. The rest are application code and external compilers.

Simply rip out everthing from Gallium3D except the Kernel interfaces and put Vulkan on top of it.

[mannerov]

Doc already available

It seems like some kind of spec is already online:

https://www.khronos.org/registry/spir-v/specs/1.0/SPIRV.pdf

[Pecisk]

So basically we have accepted vendor terms that they can't be arsed to write good high level drivers for us to use.

Engine guys will be in awe because a) job security b) performance without acting like you are using something standartized.

I just love that confidence that now vendors will work together so at least this low level API could be actually usable.

Yeaaaaaaah....it's never gonna happen guys, admit it.

[Kristian Joensen]

LLVM is successful because it IS better. As for game engines, politics play a greater role in that realm afaik. Unigine should be a star by now but its russian and has opengl so forget it

Unigine is very expensive. If I want to create a game using Unigine I need to have 10s of thousands of dollars lying around before I even start. On the other hand if I want to create a game using Unreal Engine 4 I need to have $0 lying around before I start. The choice seems simple to me.

[-MacNuke-]

So basically we have accepted vendor terms that they can't be arsed to write good high level drivers for us to use.

OpenGL is a stateful API... if you want to write multithreaded code you want a stateless API... It has nothing to do with drivers or imlementations.

Now we have a ISA for GPUs... like x86 for CPUs.

[Pecisk]

OpenGL is a stateful API... if you want to write multithreaded code you want a stateless API... It has nothing to do with drivers or imlementations.

Now we have a ISA for GPUs... like x86 for CPUs.

So why all this buzz about "next gen OpenGL" which makes things easier? Talk about confusing marketing message here.

[-MacNuke-]

Talk about confusing marketing message here.

Vulkan is not a "next-gen OpenGL". Vulkan is a new Low Level API to get direct control over the GPU and its memory. It is more an enhanced OpenCL or simple.... x86 without a patent on it.

There will be no "Vulkan, please put this Bitmap into GPU memory, mipmap it and give me a pointer". With Vulkan you have to do it yourself in a way you want for EVERYTHING.

You have the power now, with all it's responsibilities.

[BlackStar]

Vulkan is not a "next-gen OpenGL". Vulkan is a new Low Level API to get direct control over the GPU and its memory. It is more an enhanced OpenCL or simple.... x86 without a patent on it.

There will be no "Vulkan, please put this Bitmap into GPU memory, mipmap it and give me a pointer". With Vulkan you have to do it yourself in a way you want for EVERYTHING.

You have the power now, with all it's responsibilities.

Indeed. The guys at PowerVR just put out a demo and some sample code. I really like what I see so far.

My pet peeve is that the new functions are prefixed with "vk" instead of "gl". They should have called this OpenGL V, codename "Vulkan" and kept the OpenGL trademark. Their current approach is smelling like marketing by committee...

[Pecisk]

Vulkan is not a "next-gen OpenGL". Vulkan is a new Low Level API to get direct control over the GPU and its memory. It is more an enhanced OpenCL or simple.... x86 without a patent on it.

There will be no "Vulkan, please put this Bitmap into GPU memory, mipmap it and give me a pointer". With Vulkan you have to do it yourself in a way you want for EVERYTHING.

You have the power now, with all it's responsibilities.

It doesn't evolve anything new from existing mind set. It is trying force new one, which is basically stuff devs did more than 20 years ago.

[FireBurn]

There's a great article here:

http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/trying-out-the-new-vulkan-graphics-api-on-powervr-gpus