The Game Developers Conference (GDC) isn't too far away now, and a few more sessions are starting to appear. One in particular caught the interesting of a reader who sent it in, and now it's exciting me too.
The title of a particular talk from AMD is "D3D12 & Vulkan: Lessons Learned", now that's interesting by itself, but in the description they state this:
QuoteThe presentation will include useful insights gained while developing the first wave of Vulkan & DirectX®12 titles.
Either AMD have been working with a developer behind the scenes on a new game using Vulkan, or someone has been porting a title or two over to it ready for sometime this year. Either of those would be exciting, and it's really great that AMD is doing a talk on it. I hope Nvidia and Intel are also planning to get word out about what they have been doing for Vulkan some more too, but it's especially good to see AMD talking it up again.
If AMD's Vulkan driver works as good or better than Nvidia's then we will finally have more of a choice of who to go with, not that I'm going to be moving away from my Nvidia 980ti any time soon though. Competition is good and all that.
GDC starts on March 14th and runs until the the 18th, so it's not all that long until we get more details. We imagine more details will leak out before it too.
I'm starting to think Vulkan will be released alongside GDC (or very close to it) to enable developers to talk more openly about it like this.
Also, a gentle reminder, it's Vulkan, not Vulcan.
Thanks for the info Kallestofeles. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Quoting: neowiz73no worries about the FOSS drivers, those will be released by the Khronos Group once Vulkan is officially released. So it should be easy porting for the rest of Linux.
So most likely the usual upstream will happen. Ubuntu and based distros may get it sooner, through their graphics-drivers ppa. Unless they have plans to push these drivers to the official repos sooner and try to get them available by the time 16.04 goes stable. I kind of doubt it though, most likely it will be the 16.10 release.
At least we should consider these newer ports due to come out in March/April for possible first contenders to show off the new drivers. all I know is Linux will be crazy awesome going forward on this. Not just for gaming but overall general performance and battery life on Laptops, plus this will help the adoption of Wayland and Mir that much better.
I'm really looking forward to seeing this available through the Unreal Engine and we see Ark adopt this very soon as well.
Khronos makes drivers? I thought they were strictly into API development and licensing them out. As far as I know the only relation Khronos has with FOSS drivers is that they upheld SGI's decision to allow Mesa to develop OpenGL drivers without purchasing a license.
Or that was my understanding from having skimmed Wiki articles and the such. I'm still very much wet behind the ears.
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cant we just get the driver out even if there are no games yet.. you know, just something. Its all 'next month' and its been like that for 12months.
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Quoting: MadeanaccounttocommentKhronos makes drivers? I thought they were strictly into API development and licensing them out. As far as I know the only relation Khronos has with FOSS drivers is that they upheld SGI's decision to allow Mesa to develop OpenGL drivers without purchasing a license.
Or that was my understanding from having skimmed Wiki articles and the such. I'm still very much wet behind the ears.
according to the first couple of videos I've seen on the initial presentations and even the one from SIGGRAPH last august they have mentioned that the software side drivers which are the open sourced drivers will be kept and provided by the Khronos Group. these are the general case drivers that allow software devs to enable most graphical acceleration without any proprietary bits.
this means that programs and most basic games, GUIs, DEs won't need proprietary drivers for acceleration.
Then there is the proprietary bits which will be held with their parent companies, which will be an additional hardware driver to be installed later. which is what Nvidia will provide. I'm not aware if AMD will have proprietary bits. But there is also a hardware driver that has to be installed separate from the software driver.
The software driver will be the common used section for all software running with Vulkan.
SPIR-V is the main component to the software driver, which is also being designed to be backward compatible to OpenGL as well. which should give easier setup for OpenGL programs.
Last edited by neowiz73 on 12 January 2016 at 9:36 am UTC
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Quoting: GuestI expect NVIDIA to help with the open source NVIDIA driver for Vulkan support, since supporting Vulkan in drivers is supposed to be pretty trivial, much more-so than with OpenGL.
Well, this would require them to release their signed firmwares, which I don't think will happen anytime soon.
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Quoting: MyeulCQuoting: GuestI expect NVIDIA to help with the open source NVIDIA driver for Vulkan support, since supporting Vulkan in drivers is supposed to be pretty trivial, much more-so than with OpenGL.
Well, this would require them to release their signed firmwares, which I don't think will happen anytime soon.
The rendering API has aboslutely nothing to do with NVIDIAs signed firmwares.
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Quoting: GuestBest we can hope for is that Valve release the intel drivers they modified for testing Vulkan.
That's what Valve promised.
Page 18:
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/2015/Pierre-Loup_Griffais_and_John_McDonald_Vulkan.pdf
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I tried to find the original test video footage of Vulkan where I heard them mention the software drivers. but it was from early 2014 and seems impossible to find now. But from more recent videos/documents it would seem like it's referred to as just APIs and binaries.
Nevertheless, Nvidia has already been adding some vulkan libs into their latest drivers. it's going to be awesome to see this come to fruition.
Nevertheless, Nvidia has already been adding some vulkan libs into their latest drivers. it's going to be awesome to see this come to fruition.
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Quoting: GuestQuoting: subQuoting: GuestBest we can hope for is that Valve release the intel drivers they modified for testing Vulkan.
That's what Valve promised.
Page 18:
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/2015/Pierre-Loup_Griffais_and_John_McDonald_Vulkan.pdf
A "promise" back then means nothing until it's actually released.
Right, in that regard you cannot trust anyone promising anything. :D
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Quoting: Guestwords are cheap, let's wait until something is actually released.Golden words
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Quoting: Guestnvidia will not help with FOSS drivers for Vulkan. Signed firmware is required to load drivers, regardless of rendering api, and nvidia will not release those.
Khronos might provide reference material, and possibly even some debug tools via one of their members (Valve & LunarG for example), but will not provide drivers themselves. Best we can hope for is that Valve release the intel drivers they modified for testing Vulkan.
That's nonsense. NVIDIA is working hard to get their firmware loading support in good shape so it can be upstreamed. The problem is that it's different for Tegra and desktop GPUs.
The Google Pixel C is running nouveau with the signed firmware for example.
https://plus.google.com/+AlexandreCourbot/posts/XfWEnf2xg8Q
Just read the comments by Alexandre Courbot.
Last edited by blackout24 on 12 January 2016 at 6:36 pm UTC
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