It's actually a matter of time KWin guys have. There is mainly Martin working on this kind of stuff, and there currently the Wayland port is still going on.

Changing the rendering structure is one thing, that is a huge refactoring, but even more, all effects/shadows etc. would have to be reimplemented.

Wayland + 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"

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Quoting: PeciskCan you AMD supporters cut the drama for once? When AMD gets criticized objectively for having performance issues, it's Nvidia who's guilty (and sometime it is, but not for everything). Now AMD is bad because they take their time with getting their own turf in order.

It's tiresome.

I see it the same way, it's not as if we had a dozen of games available making direct use of Vulkan yet. Actually, we don't even have one yet, and will have one in the next few days.

Developers won't care too much, since Linux won't be their focus platform right now when they're developing games, so it will very likely be okay if AMD releases later.

And it's certainly not as if we'll see a HUGE performance boost right away anyway. My guess is, that there will be a lot of optimization in the engines and drivers over the coming year, as it has been with DirectX12 where certain driver releases pushed performance of some games for up to almost 50 %.

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QuoteI really do hope this doesn't turn into OpenGL all over again with such extensions, but only time will tell.

Oh, that we'll certainly see. The same as the windows drivers offer features not being in DirectX (in example the NVidia HarWorks). That are selling points for the hardware vendors, patented things to get into games, make games look better on their hardware and getting their logo into the loading screens.

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Quoting: neowiz73oh my :),this should help with Mir and Wayland when it comes to Nvidia support. it is a basic low level API. but can be expanded on. at least it's on github so more can contribute to it's code.

Neither Mir nor Wayland will care a lot for a C++ API, they're both C and will very likely use the C API. Engine creators who develop their engine in C++ (still many are written in C) will probably like this wrapper API.

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Vulkan does not let you just access the hardware, just because it's closer to it, it's not a direct access. It basically just gives you more control about command queues and buffers, within a few other things. But you still have to get a command buffer by the driver (you request a buffer of a kind and size and the driver supplies you with that), that didn't change :p.

Vulkan applications still have their OWN LOCAL buffers, which the driver better does not get mixed up with other buffers reserved on the GPU. Getting Vulkan to be displayed on X11 and/or keeping different applications not getting in each others way is the responsibility of the driver (still).

But ye, you for sure can kill the driver with Vulkan, as much as you could with OpenGL (locking up the GPU).

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Quoting: Pecisk

Quoting: GuestI just hope Blizzard implement this in WoW because it really is the one and only game/application that annoyingly keeps me dual booting.

One can dream.

Blizzard is owned by Activision, and those are known as next EA. They also losing subs and Activision is very greedy at this point. So pointless.

WoW works very nicely under Wine, never had problems with it. Never dual booted because of WoW.

Considering the WoW Engine, which supports OpenGL and we don't have a Linux release, it's very likely even if they port their Engine to Vulkan (which I see as very likely over the next few years).

For the Legion tests - no, there isn't any sign of significant engine changes. Except that they'll require SM3 compatibility.

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Quoting: Pecisk

Quoting: STiAT

Quoting: Pecisk* Lots of mobile chips support Vulkan API trough Android (how about other Linux based distros? Are those drivers platform neutral)?

well.. the kernel couldn't care less, though, the compositor above will ;-). So in a driver-sense, android drivers stay android drivers, support for other display servers would require the driver to support them (e.g. X11, Wayland, Mir).

Good point, so essentially, other mobile Linux platforms can utilize those drivers. Nice.

All with the same display server as Android. Since Android has it's own display server - nope. Just everything based on the Android graphics stack will be able to use the drivers.

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Quoting: Pecisk* Lots of mobile chips support Vulkan API trough Android (how about other Linux based distros? Are those drivers platform neutral)?

well.. the kernel couldn't care less, though, the compositor above will ;-). So in a driver-sense, android drivers stay android drivers, support for other display servers would require the driver to support them (e.g. X11, Wayland, Mir).

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And I'm pretty sure SteamOS will get a Vulkan driver very very soon :-).

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https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2016-February/100773.html

Finally NVidia providing signed firmware blobs for GM200 and GM204 (GM206 to
follow soon), and providing patches to Nouveau to load the signed firmware too...

Mesa needs to be patched as well though.

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