The OpenGL / Vulkan Slides From Khronos @ SIGGRAPH 2016

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The OpenGL / Vulkan Slides From Khronos @ SIGGRAPH 2016

Yesterday were The Khronos Group sessions at SIGGRAPH 2016. I already covered the OpenCL session while now here are my notes from the OpenGL/Vulkan BoF along with the presentation material...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenGL-Vulkan-SIG2016-Slides

[kenjitamura]

MoltenVK brings a Vulkan-over-Metal implementation to iOS and Mac OS

That's pretty awesome if it becomes usable soon. All this hysteria over the fact that linux won't get to ride on the coat tails of Apples expansion as a gaming platform because they won't support Vulkan may just fade away.

[Enverex]

I have a feeling Apple will do everything in their power to make sure that it doesn't work or succeed. Shouldn't be too hard given that they have complete control over the OS.

[mike4]

I doubt moltenvk will be able to get feature parity to Vulkan. Because of Metal and also the complexity for a small company. As for the performance...oh well probably much alike OpenGL.

[starshipeleven]

I have a feeling Apple will do everything in their power to make sure that it doesn't work or succeed. Shouldn't be too hard given that they have complete control over the OS.

There is little they can realistically do about it, and probably they were also expecting it.

[tegs]

I emailed the moltenVK team back in June asking why they didn't try to open source the software in order to aid adoption and have many more eyes on the project to improve its adoption. Heck, if there's an open solution out there that anyone can use, it can help developers, publishers, and game porters with their Vulkan powered games to the Mac platforms.

But the people behind moltenVK chose to make the software proprietary and plan to make money in the future through subscription licensing. They seem like an older group of programmers and hence why they chose to go with the traditional business model. Here's the email I got:


Hi Teg…

Thanks for your interest in MoltenVK!

The Brenwill Workshop is a believer and supporter of open-source initiatives. We are the developers of cocos3d, a popular 3D graphics engine for the iOS and macOS platforms.

Development of a Vulkan implementation requires significant resources. As a software development shop, we do not have the ability to leverage hardware sales to recoup those costs (as other Vulkan implementors do...and as Apple does with Metal). While, as you indicate, there is certainly some revenue to be earned through consulting and support, our experience has shown that consulting and support income alone is not a sufficient source of revenue to maintain a significant open-source initiative. This is why so many open-source projects fade away, leaving users adrift.

What is important is that game developers who use cross-platform frameworks such as Vulkan to publish their games, can rely on those implementations existing when they need them, and rely on them being designed and tested well. Currently, the best way to ensure that is to create a steady revenue stream through licensing.

We hope you try out MoltenVK when it becomes available in a few weeks, and we hope you will see the value it provides when you do.

Regards…

The MoltenVK Team

[juno]

To watch the videos we still need flash... isn't this a bit awkward from a consortium that is all over open standards?

[puleglot]

They removed Khronos-3D-BOF-SIGGRAPH_Jul16.pdf. On those slides was something like "opengl 4.5 is supported by yesterday release of mesa-12.1".

[juno]

They removed Khronos-3D-BOF-SIGGRAPH_Jul16.pdf. On those slides was something like "opengl 4.5 is supported by yesterday release of mesa-12.1".

Yes

Khronos significantly improving OpenGL 4.5 conformance tests
- Release in April
- Working to release as many tests in open source as possible

•Mesa 12.1 released yesterday reaches OpenGL 4.5!

If you search for the file name w/ filetype:[ignore this, preventing smiley face]pdf, you can still find the content

[yurikoles]

Michael there is a link to article in plain text instead of hyperlink