The developer of X-Plane, a cross-platform advanced flight simulator has written up a lengthy blogpost about Vulkan after going over the spec.
The developer certainly knows their stuff, and outlines the problems with OpenGL (more than a few). A lot of this is well known to us like bad handling of multiple cores and threading, but it's good to see another developer writing about it all.
The developer then moves onto talking about how Vulkan helps:
They also touch on the downsides to Vulkan (it's no magical bullet to fix everything remember). The main problem really will be that developers will have to re-learn, and that Vulkan may be harder to use than OpenGL.
Find the blog post here if you missed the link at the top.
It will be more interesting to see how their thoughts have changed after actually getting down and using it, as the developer does state they haven't currently tried it.
It sounds like they need to do quite a bit of work before they are ready to support Vulkan.
Thanks for pointing it out, SuperTux! Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
The developer certainly knows their stuff, and outlines the problems with OpenGL (more than a few). A lot of this is well known to us like bad handling of multiple cores and threading, but it's good to see another developer writing about it all.
The developer then moves onto talking about how Vulkan helps:
Quote- Vulkan is a much smaller, simpler API – OpenGL has simply become too complicated to completely test. With Vulkan, we can hope to test the entire driver.
- Vulkan is being built with an open source test suite from day 1, with the goal being to build up a huge number of tests so we can know that a given driver is correct.
- The Vulkan API is very clear about what operations are fast and what operations are slow. An application that uses the fast API can expect fast performance on those code paths. Guessing is not required.
They also touch on the downsides to Vulkan (it's no magical bullet to fix everything remember). The main problem really will be that developers will have to re-learn, and that Vulkan may be harder to use than OpenGL.
Find the blog post here if you missed the link at the top.
It will be more interesting to see how their thoughts have changed after actually getting down and using it, as the developer does state they haven't currently tried it.
It sounds like they need to do quite a bit of work before they are ready to support Vulkan.
Thanks for pointing it out, SuperTux! Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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MintedGamer Mar 26, 2016
Quoting: GuestMore work up front, but less work in the long run. Little to no worrying about various drivers having various bugs on various platforms...better performance...I think Vulkan should be chosen for anyone writing an engine.
Unreal 4, Source 2 and EA/DICEs Frostbyte engine will all support Vulkan. I'm hopeful for a big increase in the number of games that will release with Linux support.
Last edited by MintedGamer on 26 March 2016 at 1:36 am UTC
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QuoteThe main problem really will be that developers will have to re-learn, and that Vulkan may be harder to use than OpenGL.
True, but same is true for DX12. It's the direction we're heading at the moment. We'll see if there will exist a high-level API on top of Vulkan some day. I could think of things like this. Vulkan as well gives a lot of possibilities to middlewares, which will now probably become a even larger market that it was before.
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