Quoting: jamesc359The multi-threaded command queue is the icing on top of the cake here.

Not just that. With Vulkan you can even use multiple queues simultaneously as long as the GPU supports many of them. Including compute queues. So it's not just several threads per queues, but several queues at the same time as well which allows saturating the GPU to its full potential.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: lvlarkAll of this 'Vulkan can give more performance, if devs put in more time' is probably good for pre-built engines like Unity, Frostbite, Unreal, etc. because they have the resources to really optimise things, whereas smaller teams can't

Why can't smaller teams do it? If performance is critical for their success, they'll focus on it first. It's not about the size of the team, but about knowledge and ability to learn. Just throwing more people at the problem doesn't necessarily solve it better.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Here it's estimated as "a number of weeks [External Link]". No idea what that calculation is based on though.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Is it coming out DRM-free?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: STiATWayland + Vulkan would be like... writing a complete Vulkan based threaded compositing window manager for Wayland from scratch. That alone would take Martin a few years I guess, even with his experience. My bet still goes for that he'll get interested in it and he'll dabble with it once he considers Wayland-Port "stable & done"

I definitely hope he'll get to it at some point.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: subWell, AMDGPU will hit the kernel in a usable state in autumn, if things are going well.

Where did they give an ETA? Such a huge time until a usable Vulkan driver for AMD sounds pretty bad.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: ElectricPrismSo I'm thinking Plasma 5/+ on Vulkan, my eyebrows raise.

And I'm thinking highly parallel rendering in KWin and avoiding all those nasty UI lags during startup. But Martin didn't seem to be impressed or interested in moving in that direction.

https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2015/08/thoughts-on-vulkan-in-kwin/ [External Link]

Now let’s look at the strength of Vulkan: going closer to the hardware and doing multi-threaded rendering. KWin still performs the rendering in the main GUI thread. Qt tried to do rendering in an off-thread for QtQuick’s scene-graph, in case of KWin we also do that in the main-gui thread. Reworking our compositor to use threading is a lot of work and would also probably improve the performance with OpenGL. Anyway as long as KWin doesn’t support threaded rendering this improvement by Vulkan is rather moot.

I really hope they'll redesign KWin similarly to how Servo is designed for highly parallel rendering logic. Though they'll probably need to rewrite KWin in Rust to do that ;)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Avehicle7887Vulkan powered Witcher 3 for Linux in 3...2..1.....

Maybe one day.

Yep. I'm waiting for the same :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Indeed. Some games are relatively short, yet they are still great games.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Segata Sanshiro

Quoting: ShmerlSpoiled with choice? Choice and branching are always enhancing adventures and RPGs. Of course it's quite an effort to implement.

Perhaps I was a little brash, If I explain and justify everything I say then these articles would be even longer than they are :P. I agree, I love branching stories, multiple endings and having an effect on the story and the world is part of what sets video games apart from other mediums. It's just that when there is a clear artistic vision, people tend to get annoyed that things didn't pan out EXACTLY how they wanted. It's like reading Lord Of The Flies (SPOILERS) and saying that a boat arriving at the end is a "cop out" because you wanted a different ending.

In this case they made a decision not to have a choice and it wasn't through laziness because having a couple of extra cutscenes at the end wouldn't have taken much to implement. They just knew how they wanted it to finish, and they did a good job so we should respect that. It shouldn't always be about giving the audience what they want, just look at the pile of turd that is Hollywood and see why it's not always the best idea. Sorry for the long answer!

Thanks for the answer. You are right that games are different medium than let's say books or films. In this sense combining the story and gameplay is a challenge. It's much easier to craft a linear story and turn it into a game. However developing the branching and complexity of choice is hard not simply because one has to duplicate work (and in the end the players will just see a portion of it, unless they'll replay it with different choices). The huge effort goes into making a cohesive combination of that branching and the story itself. I.e. to put it differently, creating a good story with such approach is simply much harder and requires deeper insight into game design. It's a higher level of game creating art in my view. Those who succeed in making branching stories in games good are really professional game creators.

So my initial feeling is not that it's about what people want or not. It's more about avoiding the complexity of the game design. For which a small studio can be excused.

View this comment - View article - View full comments