Khronos announces Vulkan, Next Generation OpenGL graphics API

[HEXUS]

The platform-agnostic modern graphics language is built to rival Microsoft's DirectX 12.

Read more.

[shaithis]

But will it take off?

Hopefully it will, if only for anything non-Microsoft.

The last game I remember having decent OpenGL support was Unreal Tournament...and that released in 1999!

[DanceswithUnix]

But will it take off?

Hopefully it will, if only for anything non-Microsoft.

The last game I remember having decent OpenGL support was Unreal Tournament...and that released in 1999!

For all those phones out there, it should take off.

I think CroTeam games are OpenGL. There must be more even under Windows?

[MrJim]

For all those phones out there, it should take off.

I think CroTeam games are OpenGL. There must be more.

All Valve games are OpenGL too (back in the days when they made games!), Id (now part of Bethesda) also...

[shaithis]

All Valve games are OpenGL too, ID also...

I was under the impression that Valve titles have to be forced to OpenGL (and then only a few of them support it) and the support isn't as good as DirectX.

[ddg4005]

It sounds interesting but I can't help but point out the irony; DirectX was once the clunky piece of sh*t compared to OpenGL. Now Vulkan borrows DirectX's method regarding the handling of shader code.

The worm has indeed turned.

[Hicks12]

But will it take off?

Hopefully it will, if only for anything non-Microsoft.

The last game I remember having decent OpenGL support was Unreal Tournament...and that released in 1999!

I think it will take off as they have finally removed all the redundancies for allowing support of previous version, this is a clean slate finally so no backwards compatibility which I think hurt opengl before. A lot of Vulkan is based off AMD mantle which is why they arent a million miles behind microsoft, it should provide great performance similar to DX12 and mantle but it is completely cross platform which in this day and age is a huge plus, Valve made a big push for linux titles and that required openGL but there have been a lot more games on linux of late (even AAA games like dying light!) so I dont foresee it being difficult to get devs to use Vulkan instead since in the press release you could see all the people on board and it was a lot (valve included).

Will it be as popular as DX12? No not yet as DX12 is realistically a year ahead, consumer release this year but Khronos plan to have their specs finalised by this year for release next year. Eventually it should surpass dx12 though if its as good as it looks to be!

[ddg4005]

I forgot to add that I like the name and it's spelling. Very cool.

[Bagnaj97]

I was under the impression that Valve titles have to be forced to OpenGL (and then only a few of them support it) and the support isn't as good as DirectX.

Halflife had an OpenGL renderer, I think the Source games were all DirectX though, until they were ported to Mac+Linux. As part of the porting process the OpenGL renderer was highly optimized and actually became faster than the DirectX version - http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

As for OpenGL games, The Croteam games (Serious Sam) have all been OGL.
Rage and earlier ID games were OGL.
World of Warcraft, WC3 and Diablo 3 can all be launched with the -opengl argument, in WoW the OGL renderer hasn't been updated for a long time, so it lacks the fancy water and lighting effects that have been added to the DX9 and DX11 renderers.
Lots of indie games have been OpenGL based, Bastion and Minecraft for example.

It looks like Vulkan is Mantle, but with SPIR-V rather than HLSL http://www.pcper.com/news/General-Te...s-Start-Vulkan

[DanceswithUnix]

It looks like Vulkan is Mantle, but with SPIR-V rather than HLSL http://www.pcper.com/news/General-Te...s-Start-Vulkan

Now that is really interesting. If AMD donated Mantle to become the next OpenGL big thing, then surely even AMD can't mess up the Linux driver support for their own standard? Can they? Please AMD, get this one right.

[GuidoLS]

If there's not wide adoption among the devs, it won't matter who made it or how good it is. And there certainly won't be any advantage of AMD at this point - it's designed as being multi-platform/multi-device. And the 600lb gorilla in the room that everyone seems to be missing is that Khronos is run by the VP of Nvidia - so I seriously doubt that he'd leave his company out, or even in 2nd place.

And it's still going to have to be a relatively simple API for people to work with, because since DX9 or so, DirectX has been, essentially, plug-n-play - a statement that still cannot be made for OpenGL.

[Bagnaj97]

Now that is really interesting. If AMD donated Mantle to become the next OpenGL big thing, then surely even AMD can't mess up the Linux driver support for their own standard? Can they? Please AMD, get this one right.

Well there's no Linux Mantle support yet so I wouldn't get your hopes up!
I wonder if the future of Mantle will be a staging area, with improvements passing to Vulkan once stabilised. Much like the current Linux-Staging tree.

[DanceswithUnix]

Well there's no Linux Mantle support yet so I wouldn't get your hopes up!
I wonder if the future of Mantle will be a staging area, with improvements passing to Vulkan once stabilised. Much like the current Linux-Staging tree.

That is sort of my point, if AMD handed the lot to Khronos then they have a head start on everyone else, and there really must be Vulkan drivers by now for AMD hardware. My guess is that now there never will be Linux Mantle drivers, any effort made so far will be diverted in this direction.

PowerVR are already showing off their early drivers, with CPU usage graphs and videos of the output.

http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/tryin...n-powervr-gpus

I presume others will be at the same sort of stage. Hopefully if Mantle is simpler then it is also easier to reverse engineer open source drivers too.

[Bagnaj97]

John McDonald of Valve has hinted that OpenGL could be built on top of Vulkan - https://twitter.com/basisspace/statu...82010403807232
If that's the case it could improve the Linux driver situation. Vulkan drivers are apparently easier to write and, once written, a single OpenGL solution could in theory run on top of them all. It's an intriguing idea...

[DanceswithUnix]

Valve have written an open source driver for Intel hardware:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...-Vulkan-Driver

I wonder if that will make Intel hardware the de-facto reference implementation for Vulkan.

I am also starting to wonder if Vulkan is why Valve have been holding back the SteamOS machines.

[shaithis]

This seems slightly odd but I guess they need to test on something.