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Update: Good news, it will be on video.

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It seems Nvidia are getting more invested in Linux, and this makes me rather happy. At SIGGRAPH 2015 on Sunday Nvidia is doing a number of talks, and two are very interesting for us Linux folks.

Between 9-10AM (LA Time) Nvidia will be hosting a "Vulkan on NVIDIA GPUs" talk, and that's incredibly exciting. I now fully expect them to be the first ones out the door with Vulkan in their official drivers. I know Valve are doing experimental Intel drivers, but this is Nvidia doing it officially.

Then at 12:45 - 1:45 pm Nvidia will host another talk titled "The Time Has Come: Powerful Profiling and Debugging Tools Arrive for Linux and OpenGL With NVIDIA’s Linux Graphics Debugger".

It's fantastic to see Nvidia do talks like this, and hopefully they will be available on video somewhere afterwards. Otherwise we will be at the mercy of anyone able to attend, which is impossible for me with a young child right now, not to mention flying to LA + accommodation would be crazy price wise.

I hope to see Intel and AMD talk up Vulkan a bit more soon too.

This has been the single most exciting year in Linux Gaming history, remember it folks. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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wolfyrion Aug 7, 2015
I am getting impatient with Vulkan, I want to see it in Action and I have more than 1000 questions to ask about it :o

For Example:

1.As far as I know Vulkan needs new drivers from Nvidia to utilize Vulkan api , right?
2.So Dota 2 is using source 2 but since there are no drivers that support vulkan api it means that Dota2 is not utilizing Vulkan api, that goes for all platforms, right?
3. Game Engines are going to utilize Vulkan Api? So whatever games are already on Linux are going to get new builds with Vulkan Api support? So we can see Shadow of Mordor utilizing Vulkan Api?
4. How easy or hard to convert the current games to support Vulkan API?

meh... lots of things to ask , I better stop here :P


Last edited by wolfyrion on 7 August 2015 at 11:51 am UTC
sub Aug 7, 2015
Quoting: Guestpretty sure nvidia still don't have OpenCL 2.0 support either.

They don't even support OpenCL 1.2, released end of 2011.

It clearly highlights the proprietary character soaked in that company.
And it clearly shows that OpenCL (together with good driver support)
is a good API. Otherwise, they could just let the users decide between
CUDA and OpenCL - if CUDA is really the better "product".
But it's more or less the same - granted, with good library support - but
actually meant as a vendor lock-in.
And it worked out... unfortunately.

NVidia is NOT your friend if you care a bit of software and hardware freedom.
Eike Aug 7, 2015
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Quoting: Guest4) It takes a bit of effort. New API, developer experience, and approach to the engine are all factors - the last in particular may make it simply not worthwhile. Newer games on newer engines are where the first appearances are likely to be.

I've got a question as well. As far as I understood, Vulkan and the new DirectX are lower level APIs than their predecessors, and so it will make way more work to implement something in Vulkan or DirectX 12 than in OpenGL or DirectX 11. Is this correct?


Last edited by Eike on 7 August 2015 at 12:19 pm UTC
I suppose this has to do with December's big SteamOS release also. Vulkan takes Linux gaming to a whole new level (?)
MayeulC Aug 7, 2015
I am terribly excited about vulkan. I hope the support will be backed in mesa day one !

About nVidia's debugger, though, IMO they should have worked to improve a cross-vendor solution; that would have meant less work and good tools for everyone... But you know, when you can sell 10x more cards to developers than AMD, logic and ethics don't stand a chance against financials :/

I hope mesa devs will come up with a cross-vendor multi gpu solution for vulkan, though, unless it is exposed directly by the api ?


Last edited by MayeulC on 8 August 2015 at 11:19 am UTC
vulture Aug 7, 2015
Quoting: ZeloxI hope vulkan can and will support sli and multimontor setups.
At the moment linuxs is useless when it comes to sli and gaming with more then one montior.

Sadly.

no, it won't. sli/crossfire is obsoleted by both vulkan and directx12. with those you can control each and every gpu (even if they are from different vendor).

sli like feature in the game will be up to developer, not up to drivers
vulture Aug 7, 2015
Quoting: wolfyrionI am getting impatient with Vulkan, I want to see it in Action and I have more than 1000 questions to ask about it :o

For Example:

1.As far as I know Vulkan needs new drivers from Nvidia to utilize Vulkan api , right?
2.So Dota 2 is using source 2 but since there are no drivers that support vulkan api it means that Dota2 is not utilizing Vulkan api, that goes for all platforms, right?
3. Game Engines are going to utilize Vulkan Api? So whatever games are already on Linux are going to get new builds with Vulkan Api support? So we can see Shadow of Mordor utilizing Vulkan Api?
4. How easy or hard to convert the current games to support Vulkan API?

meh... lots of things to ask , I better stop here :P

1. no, the hardware portion is more or less the same, vulkan is equivalent to libGL
2. if there are no drivers yet, how would it?
3. not every one. making vulkan into borderlands 2 which is on Unreal 3 would not make sense from financial point, especially since 3 won't ever get Vulkan support . only new engines will probably utilize it. somewhat like UE4 has --opengl4
4. if there is no public API yet... you expect guessing?
vulture Aug 7, 2015
Quoting: Eike
Quoting: Guest4) It takes a bit of effort. New API, developer experience, and approach to the engine are all factors - the last in particular may make it simply not worthwhile. Newer games on newer engines are where the first appearances are likely to be.

I've got a question as well. As far as I understood, Vulkan and the new DirectX are lower level APIs than their predecessors, and so it will make way more work to implement something in Vulkan or DirectX 12 than in OpenGL or DirectX 11. Is this correct?

yes, and no. (don't know Vulkan, but i do a lot of low level programming)

writing something in pure low level would take enormously lot of work. but, when you do that you're not just writing low level whole time. you create methods to leverage and reuse that work, so it doesn't make much difference in the end. in fact, usual amount of debugging is much lower when you work with low level, since there were no complex blocks you wouldn't have access to

but, making app like game where performance matters will never be 100% of just making it. lot of that will go into profiling and optimizing. that is something that is so much harder if you can't optimize at low level. with high level you need to create workarounds.

one another thing that will be much simpler is threading, which is not really nice with older DirectX or OpenGL. both, DirectX12 and Vulkan have threading as part of their nature


Last edited by vulture on 7 August 2015 at 2:07 pm UTC
vulture Aug 7, 2015
Quoting: MyeulCI hope mesa devs will come up with a cross-vendor multi gpu solution for vulkan, though, unless it is exposed directly by the api ?

cross vendor multi gpu is part of Vulkan and direct access to gpu, no need for Mesa to do that
MayeulC Aug 7, 2015
Thanks everyone for this information. I have one more question : since DX12 is very similar to Mantle, we can expect it to be very similar to vulkan, right ? Will it make a difference in the porting effort to vulkan ? Or is it something we don't know for sure yet?
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