Unreal Engine 4.17 released with expanded Vulkan support

There is some stability and performance issues with Vulkan and the Editor on Linux, would still be more advisable to use OpenGL4 as the default in the editor but target and stage/build for Vulkan.

I am super excited about this, I have been developing in unreal engine for months, I just hope they improve the native editor on linux since it is extremely complicated and buggy in current form.

Here is a video of UE4 4.17 running with vulkan in the editor,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik_S227ghgs
I wouldn't use vulkan for the editor for production atm as its still quite a bit unstable, but you can't set vulkan sm4/sm5 under Project Settings -> Platforms -> Linux.

*Edit* Compare against using the default OpenGL 4.3 in editor.
https://youtu.be/2WoNZIntOXk


Last edited by salamanderrake on 8 August 2017 at 10:16 pm UTC

Timothee Besset? Man, this is the guy we owe our gaming enjoyment during the dark days of Linux gaming.

• Quake III Arena


• Return to Castle Wolfenstein


• Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory


• Doom 3


• Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil


• Quake 4


• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars


• Quake Live

In fact, I just played an ETQW clan match and I still cannot believe that I am able to play such masterpiece on Linux natively. I hope he keeps making quality contribution to UE4.

For all of Epic's talk of how much they like Linux. And how little trust their CEO has in Microsoft. They've done nothing to support the platform. It's just a happy accident, due to their open sourced engine. Their latest game "Fortnite" has no support for Linux either. Supports Mac though.

I really hope the next version of UT has Vulkan support. There's still graphical bugs that have been around almost since the beginning which a Vulkan version would probably have fixed for free.

[EDIT]
Actually it probably won't happen on the next release since even on the roadmap for the engine it still doesn't list "Vulkan support for PC and Linux" under the current release, while it shows up under Future Releases instead.
Still it's good to see them starting to work on it some more.
[/EDIT]


Last edited by ison111 on 9 August 2017 at 12:52 am UTC

Hope that Ark will be updated soon on last UE... lol!!!

As someone who uses UE4 everyday and on Linux, I couldn't care less about Vulkan. All I want is that UE4 finally can be used „normally“ as it's possible on Windows. It's so painful to everyday use a blueprint editor that is lagging without any reason on a cpu and a gpu that costs more than 1500€. Unfortunately, from 4.13 to 4.16 almost no changes. It looks that so few work is needed for UE4 to become fully usable on Linux and I'm hoping about that with every new release, but it seems that true is that Epic simply doesn't care at all to anything else than Windows and PS4.
At last when I copy my project entirely done on Linux to Windows partition and try to run it there, it's always working without any problem. That's great, in fact. After all, I got habituated. Now hopping that 4.17 will finally bring something new. Downloading today and compiling to test it...

As someone who uses UE4 everyday and on Linux, I couldn't care less about Vulkan. All I want is that UE4 finally can be used „normally“ as it's possible on Windows.

I don't understand why you wouldn't be excited for Vulkan then.

UE4 doesn't seem to be changing with each new release probably because they just aren't working on the OpenGL side very much. So we retain bugs.

But Vulkan is a game changer in that regard. It bridges the gap between Windows and Linux development cycles. Even among windows users Vulkan is in high demand among those who can't use DX12 (because they don't want to switch to windows10)
So Vulkan would receive regular updates and bug fixes which would directly effect us on Linux. Even if Epic forgets about us, with Vulkan we'd still feel like first class citizens.

Not to mention Vulkan is supposed to be a much simpler and more bare bones api, meaning that all development on it is going to be more implementation independent, and performance on both Windows and Linux should always be quite similar for free, without them having to do much special development for just Linux.

But Vulkan is a game changer in that regard...

Probably because I'm not a Linux warrior, zealot or whatever. If it is the game changer, the time will show it. If it's good enough, it will win. If not, it will not change big thing.

I switched from windows 2 years ago because 10 become such a terrible piece of s... that that become insupportable. Now I'm just a computer user that feels no need to tell the other people what os is better for them to use. They use what they want, it's not my problem at all.
Now, when I need to spend some hours working with Windows 10, I still can't believe what MS made with that crap. It's updating for hours, taking cpu time all the time for some obscure thing, it's taking my mouse cursor from me for few seconds without reason... and many more terrible things.

Now when I got used to Linux, I can say that it's a really good os with a big potential. But, my main problem is that UE4 is not good enough and it's not changing for a year to now.
With any new release people who don't use UE4 at all are only talking about Vulkan. I don't care for Vulkan at all. I just want those simple and elementary things to work and I see that this is not asking for too much work from Epic but they are simply not interested. With millions they are earning they could pay someone to work on this, but they don0t want it.

And, actually I compiled UE4 and for the first time after a year I can see the actual changes. Now editor works really better. There is no lag anymore and everything seems to work much better except few things: in the blueprint editor, mouse cursor is always returning to center of the screen when I release right mouse button, and this is super frustrating. And, my projectiles are completely blurred and strange when they fly. It seems that editor mostly got fixed but some things become fup. Everything else seems to work better.

I think you completely missed my point.

In fact what I was saying was the complete opposite of being a zealot. Right now the situation with UE4 is we have two different API's. They basically develop DirectX for Windows and OpenGL for Linux.
So asking them to improve the OpenGL build is in fact asking them to develop especially for Linux (e.g. this is more of a zealot position because you want them to drop everything and appease just the Linux users)

But with Vulkan, on the other hand, they don't have to develop as much especially for Linux. I'm not asking them to pay special attention to us, or fighting for what I think Linux needs. The point I was making was a mere observation of how things are already starting to go and why it's good for us.
Vulkan is already starting to win, even just in the Windows space. So Epic could completely forget about Linux altogether, just develop Vulkan for the Windows users who need it and we would reap the benefits too.
Eventually the Vulkan version should surpass the OpenGL one. Not because of the supposed performance improvements of Vulkan but because Epic is much more likely to develop Vulkan for the benefit of everyone, rather than just developing OpenGL for only the benefit of Linux users in particular.

Read any articles on Vulkan and you'll see that it has much closer parity in quality and performance across all operating systems for free. Any games that run Vulkan and have a Linux client will automatically give us very near (if not identical to) the support and performance that windows users are getting, without developers having to give Linux any special attention.


Last edited by ison111 on 9 August 2017 at 9:55 pm UTC

Don't get offended. I was just explaining experiences of someone who is using UE4 everyday, and my frustration wasn't against anyone else than Epic.

Yes, it makes sense what you are saying. Epic will gladly get rid of OpenGL to make things easier for themselves. And with Vulkan they are getting larger market actually. But I wasn't talking about OpenGL and Vulkan. I was talking about editor - that thing you use for making games in fact and you use it every day and very much. Games, they actually work, it's not a problem.

And yes, in fact, they really fixed editor this time and now it's really working not differently than on windows. Actually I have impression that it's flying. But they messed up few new things, I mentioned previously. It doesn't look so terrible and I decided to switch to 4.17 from 4.14. I succeeded to migrate our project and it looks that everything is working and even a little better (this maybe a placebo effect too, but never mind...).


Last edited by Power-Metal-Games on 10 August 2017 at 12:12 pm UTC