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Epic Games have done a talk at SIGGRAPH 2017 and it turns out they're looking to make Vulkan the default API for exported Linux games.

The Epic Games presentation starts from 1:18:45. If you listen at 1:21:55 it's mentioned a few seconds later that Vulkan will be made the default for Linux.
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Hopefully this will help the developers who've been having lots of issues with OpenGL in Unreal Engine, like EVERSPACE.

It sounds like Epic are actually putting quite a bit of focus on Vulkan, which is great. If you have access to their github, you can actually run the editor with Vulkan right now by passing "-vulkan" to it when you launch it.

Thanks for the email mirv! Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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roothorick Aug 5, 2017
Said it before, will say it again. OpenGL will quickly go the way of FORTRAN: only good for legacy code (but still a valuable skill because of legacy code). Developers leaving their GL codepaths to rot as they focus on Vulkan is just a sign of the times, and I personally don't see any issue with it.

Quoting: etonbearsVulkan ( and D3D12 actually ) are properly supported only on Windows 10, but not other Windows versions. Eventually Vulkan will have broad WIndows support, so it will be interesting to see if D3D12 then gets a magic backport to older Windows versions.

Eh, not really. Nvidia and AMD have already backported their Vulkan implementations all the way back to Win7. I don't know about performance compared to Win10 but they're plenty fast measured in isolation.

DX12 is indeed restricted to Win10, however, and the response to this has been most developers continuing to support primarily if not exclusively DX11, even on Win10. X-Bone may require DX12, but the low-level nature of the API combined with the strictly fixed hardware means it takes far less effort to make a DX12 renderer tooled specifically for the console than it would to make a DX12 renderer targeting the PC. Thus, developers usually only use DX12 on the console, and opt for a single renderer backend on PC -- which is usually DX11.

I really hope that MS stubbornly clings to restricting DX12 to Win10; that would be a huge boon for us, pushing developers towards Vulkan, which would dramatically increase compatibility with Wine and make native ports easier. Their bullish disregard of complaints and concerns about Win10 suggests there's a good chance they will.
silmeth Aug 5, 2017
Quoting: roothorickSaid it before, will say it again. OpenGL will quickly go the way of FORTRAN: only good for legacy code (but still a valuable skill because of legacy code). Developers leaving their GL codepaths to rot as they focus on Vulkan is just a sign of the times, and I personally don't see any issue with it.

I actually expect some people will try to make new high-level APIs implemented on top of Vulkan¹ to be the next OpenGL-level API, but more modern and sensible, some others will actually try to implement OpenGL-over-Vulkan² (similarly to the project of D3D9 on top of Vulkan – VK9 etc., and one of them will finally, after a dozen years or so, win and become the de-facto new standard with a reasonably large community.

But before that, I expect smaller teams to keep using OpenGL, and the bigger ones to sculpture their own things using Vulkan, D3D12 and Metal.

¹ Like nVidia’s VkHLF
² There are attempts, but with virtually no activity for some time.


Last edited by silmeth on 5 August 2017 at 9:03 pm UTC
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