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Latest Comments by minj
Humble Indie Bundle 16 launches, great selection with Sunless Sea now officially on Linux
23 Feb 2016 at 8:32 pm UTC

Is Sunless Sea not on Steam or only a case of a missing icon?

Khronos Group Vulkan Webinar now on Youtube
20 Feb 2016 at 10:27 pm UTC Likes: 6

tl;dw Vulkan is for OpenGL 3.1/4.x GPUs. Low-level (i.e. not for beginners) and cross-platform: was based on Mantle but moved on significantly, including core concepts. Should gloss over many inconsistencies, hitches and surprises of different OpenGL implementations. Everything in spec is open source. Spec will evolve, new tests will be added and vendors will be 'pressured' to comply with them. Hardware-specific extensions will still be used for innovation. Loader will manage multiple GPUs for a single app (config using JSON on your system, LOL). No window system required. More work in the future to support VR.

Vulkan supports WinXP+, Linux, ARM etc. Intel/Nvidia/ARM shipped betas. Nvidia in mainline soon. AMD in progress of compliance on Win (almost done, a few issues only). Android is on board. Apple sucks (in khronos but not involved, no vocal support, focused on Metal) but there are people trying to build an intermediary layer on Metal. DX12 is win10 only. Some of the large game engines on board. Talos shipped a quick beta. More simple libs/utils needed. LunarG SDK (thanks in large part to Valve) is ready and free: utils, samples, debugging tools (trace, replay etc), docs.

Vulkan is good and improves CPU-bound stuff mostly: parallelizable but command submission from single thread only, supposed to be cheap. Error checking and debug layers separate, removed in production. Vulkan uses pre-compiled shaders in SPIR-V; decompilable, compressible. Vulkan prerequisites were just added to OpenGL GLSL spec. gslang compiler is being improved accordingly. HLSL (i. e. DX shaders) to SPIR-V compiler should be developed externally by other people.

WebGL will probably not include Vulkan (too low-level, Apple is also a bottle-neck), may be conversely built on top of Vulkan. OpenCL should still be used for compute-only apps. No work on CUDA yet. OpenGL is not going away. Look for more stuff in GDC.

tl;dr Vulkan is awesome.

Intel now shipping Vulkan enabled drivers
20 Feb 2016 at 8:55 pm UTC

Vulkan Webinar says OGL 3.1/4.x support is needed.

Sure enough wiki [External Link] lists Ivy Bridge as the oldest generation that should get support \o/

Steam beta client adds Vulkan support, plus some handy Steam Controller adjustments
19 Feb 2016 at 12:33 pm UTC

Speaking of controllers... I still need to replace the xpad driver in linux44 with one from steamos to get my xbox360 wired controller running. I remember seeing some talk of those improvements reaching the mainline kernel long ago. What gives?

Or is it my system only?

Intel now shipping Vulkan enabled drivers
16 Feb 2016 at 8:23 pm UTC Likes: 1

So is Broadwell the limit for intel? It's been released in September, 2014. 18 months as a limit for a CPU, wtf?

I hope they will continue backporting it.

Vulkan 1.0 specification and SDK have been released
16 Feb 2016 at 5:51 pm UTC

The error checking is a different layer in Vulkan that can be enabled in dev and disabled in production. This should theoretically take care of all the major problems before they hit users. Then again AAA titles should be obvious bug-free on launch and we all now how take works...

Vulkan 1.0 specification and SDK have been released
16 Feb 2016 at 3:19 pm UTC

Quoting: Pecisk
Quoting: minjI remember someone anticipating for giggles that NVIDIA will beat AMD in Vulkan which was born out of their own spec (Mantle). Props to you sir but I don't know whether to laugh or weep.
Didn't know it was a race.
Oh but it was. Why do you think they waited for the first full implementation (Talos) to release the whole thing.

Vulkan 1.0 specification and SDK have been released
16 Feb 2016 at 3:05 pm UTC Likes: 3

I remember someone anticipating for giggles that NVIDIA will beat AMD in Vulkan which was born out of their own spec (Mantle). Props to you sir but I don't know whether to laugh or weep.

The talk about Vulkan at FOSDEM by Jason Ekstrand from Intel now has a video up
11 Feb 2016 at 10:51 pm UTC

This actually depressed me. Everything concrete is NDA'd, they keep shuffling their feet regarding any dates. There will hardly be any usable tools ready on launch. Apple's stance and support is unknown(?).

So as I see it, Vulkan will be viable for games only in ~2018 and the question still remains how attractive and competitive it will be compared to other APIs that are more established and available today: DX11, DX12 and even OpenGL. Mobile aside, why choose Vulkan if it can't even do OS X?