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Epic Games have released Unreal Engine 4.17 which comes with some nice improvements to their handling of Vulkan.
Hopefully with Epic putting some real focus on Vulkan, that developers using Unreal Engine will start using it on Linux instead of OpenGL, which has caused multiple developers headaches. We've heard from the developers behind EVERSPACE, as the most recent example who seem to be having many issues. I don't imagine upgrading to a new UE release as being simple to do, but maybe they will be able to and take advantage of Vulkan.
With Unreal Engine 4.17, Vulkan now uses Shader Model 5 by default. They also completed a Vulkan refactoring which they say "brings stability and correctness to SM5 and Editor". They've also worked out some stability fixes for Vulkan, to make it a better experience overall.
Unreal Engine isn't developed by Epic alone any more, they note that this release actually includes around 90 improvements made by the community, since their code is available on github. This includes work contributed by people like Timothee Besset (TTimo) who mostly recently ported Rocket League, Sam Hocevar of Dontnod the Life is Strange developer and plenty of other awesome people.
As expected, there's masses of other changes that come with this new version of Unreal Engine, with the changelog being really quite long. See the full release notes here.
Thanks for the tip, Raven! Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Hopefully with Epic putting some real focus on Vulkan, that developers using Unreal Engine will start using it on Linux instead of OpenGL, which has caused multiple developers headaches. We've heard from the developers behind EVERSPACE, as the most recent example who seem to be having many issues. I don't imagine upgrading to a new UE release as being simple to do, but maybe they will be able to and take advantage of Vulkan.
With Unreal Engine 4.17, Vulkan now uses Shader Model 5 by default. They also completed a Vulkan refactoring which they say "brings stability and correctness to SM5 and Editor". They've also worked out some stability fixes for Vulkan, to make it a better experience overall.
Unreal Engine isn't developed by Epic alone any more, they note that this release actually includes around 90 improvements made by the community, since their code is available on github. This includes work contributed by people like Timothee Besset (TTimo) who mostly recently ported Rocket League, Sam Hocevar of Dontnod the Life is Strange developer and plenty of other awesome people.
As expected, there's masses of other changes that come with this new version of Unreal Engine, with the changelog being really quite long. See the full release notes here.
Thanks for the tip, Raven! Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
I think you completely missed my point.
In fact what I was saying was the complete opposite of being a zealot. Right now the situation with UE4 is we have two different API's. They basically develop DirectX for Windows and OpenGL for Linux.
So asking them to improve the OpenGL build is in fact asking them to develop especially for Linux (e.g. this is more of a zealot position because you want them to drop everything and appease just the Linux users)
But with Vulkan, on the other hand, they don't have to develop as much especially for Linux. I'm not asking them to pay special attention to us, or fighting for what I think Linux needs. The point I was making was a mere observation of how things are already starting to go and why it's good for us.
Vulkan is already starting to win, even just in the Windows space. So Epic could completely forget about Linux altogether, just develop Vulkan for the Windows users who need it and we would reap the benefits too.
Eventually the Vulkan version should surpass the OpenGL one. Not because of the supposed performance improvements of Vulkan but because Epic is much more likely to develop Vulkan for the benefit of everyone, rather than just developing OpenGL for only the benefit of Linux users in particular.
Read any articles on Vulkan and you'll see that it has much closer parity in quality and performance across all operating systems for free. Any games that run Vulkan and have a Linux client will automatically give us very near (if not identical to) the support and performance that windows users are getting, without developers having to give Linux any special attention.
Last edited by ison111 on 9 August 2017 at 9:55 pm UTC
In fact what I was saying was the complete opposite of being a zealot. Right now the situation with UE4 is we have two different API's. They basically develop DirectX for Windows and OpenGL for Linux.
So asking them to improve the OpenGL build is in fact asking them to develop especially for Linux (e.g. this is more of a zealot position because you want them to drop everything and appease just the Linux users)
But with Vulkan, on the other hand, they don't have to develop as much especially for Linux. I'm not asking them to pay special attention to us, or fighting for what I think Linux needs. The point I was making was a mere observation of how things are already starting to go and why it's good for us.
Vulkan is already starting to win, even just in the Windows space. So Epic could completely forget about Linux altogether, just develop Vulkan for the Windows users who need it and we would reap the benefits too.
Eventually the Vulkan version should surpass the OpenGL one. Not because of the supposed performance improvements of Vulkan but because Epic is much more likely to develop Vulkan for the benefit of everyone, rather than just developing OpenGL for only the benefit of Linux users in particular.
Read any articles on Vulkan and you'll see that it has much closer parity in quality and performance across all operating systems for free. Any games that run Vulkan and have a Linux client will automatically give us very near (if not identical to) the support and performance that windows users are getting, without developers having to give Linux any special attention.
Last edited by ison111 on 9 August 2017 at 9:55 pm UTC
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Power-Metal-Games Aug 10, 2017
Don't get offended. I was just explaining experiences of someone who is using UE4 everyday, and my frustration wasn't against anyone else than Epic.
Yes, it makes sense what you are saying. Epic will gladly get rid of OpenGL to make things easier for themselves. And with Vulkan they are getting larger market actually. But I wasn't talking about OpenGL and Vulkan. I was talking about editor - that thing you use for making games in fact and you use it every day and very much. Games, they actually work, it's not a problem.
And yes, in fact, they really fixed editor this time and now it's really working not differently than on windows. Actually I have impression that it's flying. But they messed up few new things, I mentioned previously. It doesn't look so terrible and I decided to switch to 4.17 from 4.14. I succeeded to migrate our project and it looks that everything is working and even a little better (this maybe a placebo effect too, but never mind...).
Last edited by Power-Metal-Games on 10 August 2017 at 12:12 pm UTC
Yes, it makes sense what you are saying. Epic will gladly get rid of OpenGL to make things easier for themselves. And with Vulkan they are getting larger market actually. But I wasn't talking about OpenGL and Vulkan. I was talking about editor - that thing you use for making games in fact and you use it every day and very much. Games, they actually work, it's not a problem.
And yes, in fact, they really fixed editor this time and now it's really working not differently than on windows. Actually I have impression that it's flying. But they messed up few new things, I mentioned previously. It doesn't look so terrible and I decided to switch to 4.17 from 4.14. I succeeded to migrate our project and it looks that everything is working and even a little better (this maybe a placebo effect too, but never mind...).
Last edited by Power-Metal-Games on 10 August 2017 at 12:12 pm UTC
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