Godot To Focus On Vulkan Over OpenGL ES 3.0 Now That There's Mac Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Godot To Focus On Vulkan Over OpenGL ES 3.0 Now That There's Mac Support

The Godot Game Engine is one of the few projects already announcing a change in their plans following this morning's announcement of better and open-source Vulkan support on macOS/iOS...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Godot-Vulkan-Focus

[Guy1524]

This is great! Maybe one day Vulkan will be the standard API which all engines use.

[boxie]

This is great! Maybe one day Vulkan will be the standard API which all engines use.

One API to find them and in the darkness bind them! :P


I do hope that Apple see this and decide to support Vulkan as a proper first class citizen - if not now, then sometime in the future.

[humbug]

One API to find them and in the darkness bind them! :P


I do hope that Apple see this and decide to support Vulkan as a proper first class citizen - if not now, then sometime in the future.

Apple does see all this stuff. This is why they try to block Vulkan. They don't want to encourage cross platform app development between Android and IOS. They want to differentiate IOS.

[ltcommander.data]

Apple does see all this stuff. This is why they try to block Vulkan. They don't want to encourage cross platform app development between Android and IOS. They want to differentiate IOS.

Interestingly, in the context of this article and the Godot Engine, Apple was not the major impediment to cross platform app development between Android and iOS, Android was. As described by the developers, OpenGL ES 3.0 matched their feature-set needs and works perfectly fine on iOS. It is the fragmented Android ecosystem where a significant portion of devices still do not support OpenGL ES 3.0 and most of the devices that do claim to support OpenGL ES 3.0 aren't actually usable due to poor drivers that became the showstopper.

[grigi]

It sounds like many of the OpenGL related issues that people have hit. Mostly that there is such a large spectrum of quality that it is extremely difficult to target all of them. Almost like OpenGL ES 3.0 was too little too late.
So Vulkan is looking more and more promising.

[Dukenukemx]

Wish Vulkan existed on the Radeon HD 5000 6000 cards. With prices so high, got no choice but to keep those old cards.

[carewolf]

Not to question awesomeness, but why is the model portraying Wonder Woman writing her own game engine?

[darkbasic]

I hope they won't trow away OpenGL ES 3.0 and they will keep it as an alternative to Vulkan.

[Zola]

Interestingly, in the context of this article and the Godot Engine, Apple was not the major impediment to cross platform app development between Android and iOS, Android was. As described by the developers, OpenGL ES 3.0 matched their feature-set needs and works perfectly fine on iOS. It is the fragmented Android ecosystem where a significant portion of devices still do not support OpenGL ES 3.0 and most of the devices that do claim to support OpenGL ES 3.0 aren't actually usable due to poor drivers that became the showstopper.

The three biggest Vendor's GPU's (MALI, Adreno & PowerVR ) have a EGLS 3.1~3.2 with Android extension for at least two generations already (3~4 years) with satisfactory working drivers. The OS itself has all mentioned supported for more than two years now (from M 6.0). Vulkan drivers side still needs lots of catching up to do as it's current state is far from optimal (or even good). Anyway even with less than optimal Vulkan driver's now old passing generation Adreno 540 menages to catch up with GPU found on A11 SoC while A540 uses less than half energy & it's capable to ensure almost all peek performance in prolonged use.
It's actually funny that Apple's EGLS driver's for iOS are in worser shape than generally PowerVR for Android.