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The Game Developers Conference (GDC) isn't too far away now, and a few more sessions are starting to appear. One in particular caught the interesting of a reader who sent it in, and now it's exciting me too.

The title of a particular talk from AMD is "D3D12 & Vulkan: Lessons Learned", now that's interesting by itself, but in the description they state this:
QuoteThe presentation will include useful insights gained while developing the first wave of Vulkan & DirectX®12 titles.

Either AMD have been working with a developer behind the scenes on a new game using Vulkan, or someone has been porting a title or two over to it ready for sometime this year. Either of those would be exciting, and it's really great that AMD is doing a talk on it. I hope Nvidia and Intel are also planning to get word out about what they have been doing for Vulkan some more too, but it's especially good to see AMD talking it up again.

If AMD's Vulkan driver works as good or better than Nvidia's then we will finally have more of a choice of who to go with, not that I'm going to be moving away from my Nvidia 980ti any time soon though. Competition is good and all that.

GDC starts on March 14th and runs until the the 18th, so it's not all that long until we get more details. We imagine more details will leak out before it too.

I'm starting to think Vulkan will be released alongside GDC (or very close to it) to enable developers to talk more openly about it like this.

Also, a gentle reminder, it's Vulkan, not Vulcan.

Thanks for the info Kallestofeles. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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tuubi Jan 11, 2016
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It would be weird if they hadn't been working with game developers on Vulkan backends. They wouldn't be stupid enough to do their first Vulkan driver releases without any testing on real game engines, right? I'm sure NVidia and even Intel are doing the exact same thing. Also, I'd bet these games are all very recent or upcoming big budget titles.
linux_gamer Jan 11, 2016
Quoting: TheBossAlso, a gentle reminder, it's Vulkan, not Vulcan.
First violator will be shot! ;)
Orkultus Jan 11, 2016
Hopefully the reason why amd haven't done anything amazing with their proprietary drivers, is because they are to busy putting the good performance code into vulkan.
ljrk Jan 11, 2016
And he even seems to be a Linux guy :-)

https://twitter.com/niv_anteru
ljrk Jan 11, 2016
Ofcourse, on has to. but in his twitter history he has some negative views on windows.h for example.
He seems to be a straight-forward pro-portability guy. Which I like
megasthenes Jan 11, 2016
what might those mysterious games be?
I'm betting TW3. Obviously they've been working in-house porting it without giving any further information on progress etc.
Also they've been saying that they will push out additional content to TW3 in the year 2016 which brought the game back to the possible port radar for me after most users (especially on steam) already were confident that they'll solely be working on cyberpunk after the release of Blood & Wine. That possibly isn't true..

Then there was the mysterious "Enhanced Edition" failure for some sellers, which they outright denied without saying that there's no such thing being made - and furthermore saying that "that's some error we (CDPR) will be looking into". The last thing kinda got me as that reads like someone might have violated a NDA...
Then the galaxy client is marked as "in progress" and I don't think that they're working on that without planning at least some kind of sale for the client release.

Exciting times.
Creak Jan 11, 2016
Quoting: megastheneswhat might those mysterious games be?
I'd say games based on Valve's Source engine. Maybe the first game to be updated will be Dota 2 (considering it's Valve's most played game.
megasthenes Jan 11, 2016
Quoting: Creak
Quoting: megastheneswhat might those mysterious games be?
I'd say games based on Valve's Source engine. Maybe the first game to be updated will be Dota 2 (considering it's Valve's most played game.

To be honest I'd be heavily underwhelmed but yes - you're probably right.
chuzzle44 Jan 11, 2016
Quoting: Creak
Quoting: megastheneswhat might those mysterious games be?
I'd say games based on Valve's Source engine. Maybe the first game to be updated will be Dota 2 (considering it's Valve's most played game.

There have been rumors going around about Left 4 dead 3.
neowiz73 Jan 12, 2016
no worries about the FOSS drivers, those will be released by the Khronos Group once Vulkan is officially released. So it should be easy porting for the rest of Linux.

So most likely the usual upstream will happen. Ubuntu and based distros may get it sooner, through their graphics-drivers ppa. Unless they have plans to push these drivers to the official repos sooner and try to get them available by the time 16.04 goes stable. I kind of doubt it though, most likely it will be the 16.10 release.

At least we should consider these newer ports due to come out in March/April for possible first contenders to show off the new drivers. all I know is Linux will be crazy awesome going forward on this. Not just for gaming but overall general performance and battery life on Laptops, plus this will help the adoption of Wayland and Mir that much better.

I'm really looking forward to seeing this available through the Unreal Engine and we see Ark adopt this very soon as well.


Last edited by neowiz73 on 12 January 2016 at 1:02 am UTC
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