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After 18 months of work, the Vulkan 1.0 graphics specification has been released:
This is a little different from the Khronos Group's past launches, however, in that this time around there will be more than a specification PDF available – there are drivers, support documentation and a free SDK, and there is even a game that you can download with a Vulkan backend. There is a multitude of companies comprising the Khronos Group, and those in the working group for Vulkan include not only AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, but game engine makers and even Oculus VR.
[...] Unlike DirectX 12, Vulkan is completely open-source and royalty-free. Anyone who wants to use the code or adjust the code to fit their personal needs is free to do so, be that for private or commercial purposes. [...] DirectX 12 is Microsoft's graphics API, and it works only on Windows 10. Metal is an API made by Apple, and although it is also a low-overhead API, it works only on Apple devices. Vulkan, by contrast, works on many platforms. You can use in on operating systems as old as Windows XP on up to Windows 10, pretty much any Linux distro including SteamOS, and Android. Interestingly enough, Apple has opted not to integrate support for Vulkan into its devices -- although it is free to do so, so a day may come when Apple devices do have Vulkan support.
The development of the API owes a lot to AMD's Mantle:
[Continues.]
Since Khronos's last major press update almost a year ago in March of 2015, not a great deal has changed on the technical side from a high level. After being gifted Mantle 1.0 from AMD – an action that significantly sped up the development process and bypassed the need to figure out some fundamental questions about how the API should be designed – the consortium went about adapting Mantle to serve as a wider, more generic API suitable for hardware from multiple vendors across multiple OSes.
The end result is that Vulkan has its roots firmly in Mantle, through Khronos has worked to make it very clear that multiple vendors are responsible for contributing IP that ultimately went into Vulkan. And while the specific low-level details of the API are beyond the scope of this article, I do know that the shader resource binding system is significantly different from Mantle, and that's not the only system that was updated or overhauled during Vulkan's development.
More coverage at Ars and The Register. Check out Khronos Group's hub for the Vulkan 1.0 specification. Both AMD and Nvidia have released Vulkan drivers. Finally, here is the Valve-funded LunarG Vulkan-based SDK.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday February 17 2016, @05:50AM
Not going to happen mainstream (or is it main-Steam?), not without a major economic incentive.
That was the point of my correction, in case you missed it, you nearsighted mentally subverted you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 17 2016, @07:51AM
Not going to happen mainstream (or is it main-Steam?), not without a major economic incentive.
Nope, you're wrong. Windows 10 is a disaster, Windows 8 was even worse of a disaster and helped Steam come to linux and even port their own engine. You know why everyone from IDTECH, to Unreal to Valve now has engines that run on Linux? Because it's a one off cost to develop, and if you start with cross platform dev toolchain in mind in the beginning then there is no actual cost to select it. Publishers are looking at indies getting 20% to 30% of their funding from Linux gamers who have money to spare, but no games... And they're asking the developers, "What would it take to run on multiple platforms?" The devs reply, "Uh, use an engine that runs on multiple platforms?" The publisher then says, "Yes, do that, let's get more free money for the same cost to develop."
The story is actually the opposite of what you expect. See, then the publisher say, "Hey, we're going to push this out for Mac and Linux too!" Then microsoft contacts them and makes an offer to keep in exclusive to windows. You don't have to develop assets on Linux to deploy on Linux with today's game engines. I can't think of one that doesn't support Linux. The publisher just tells the devs, well, looks like we don't push out the cross platform binaries, MS is going to pay us off again.
Same thing happens in the console arena. Look there and you'll see devs releasing the same game for different consoles -- and then sometimes signing exclusivity deals, these deals have to garauntee a certain amount of $PROFIT for the exclusivity or else it's more profitable to release cross platform, and it's easy too -- "The game uses Havok and Unreal! How much will you pay us not to release it on everything under the damn sun?"
MS has gotten greedy, and many devs (such as myself) do not like the way they are taxing the users by taxing the developers by taking a cut of software sales deployed through their marketplace. MS never needed that before, but now it costs me 30% of my sale just to deploy on their platform. Guess what that means? I'm not eating that fucking bill. That means what used to cost you $10 will now cost you $15 (so I can still get my $10.50 and MS pockets the fiver).
So, it has never been difficult to deploy on Linux, and the cost of doing so is a drop in the bucket compared to even a single voice actor / rigged & animated character model. So, suddenly Valve has a whole fucking OS distro, and is singing the praises of OpenGL. And now the hardware MFGs are diversifying their bread and butter because it's uncertain whether MS will allow anyone to make money in the future. Sure, it's going to be a real bitch going cross platform if you have had your head up your ass for the past 20 years and kept dragging along legacy compiler dependencies while selecting platform dependent toolchains (mine compiles for both DirectX and OpenGL with the flip of a #IFDEF compiler flag). However, that's only really true in the business software arena (like Adobe), and not the game industry, which has had many commercial engines go completely open source... so studios get the work of making things cross platform for nothing.
Vulkan continues this trend. The writing is on the wall for proprietary graphics stacks. The world of computing is a diverse place full of many platforms, and no one wants to exclude any market share for no good reason by selecting exclusive support for DirectX and MS compilers.
Protip: Publishers love free money. Today, Proprietary = Less market share. Even if it's just a few hundred thousand dollars more revenue, it's worth the one time effort to become platform independent -- Meaning you can compile for all Consoles and PC OSs too. Game development is arguably the most cross platform industry in the world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 17 2016, @08:40AM
I don't believe that it is as "free" as you make out. As anyone who has written software knows, even if the tool chain is cross-platform, keeping the code cross-platform and doing all those squillions of testing cycles on a whole new set of software/hardware stacks is a huge PITA i.e. $$$.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 17 2016, @10:59AM
That's why the engine license costs so much. That's what you're paying for when you license the engine. You are paying Epic (Unreal) or EA (IDTECH) or Valve (Source) -- all of these engines run cross platform. You don't actually have to compile the code yourself even if all you customize are shader pipelines and all your logic is in the scripting engine...
If a two man indie dev team can release on all the major PC platforms at once, then I'm calling bullshit on your expense claims.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday February 17 2016, @05:39PM
If you're using someone else's game engine, then you're not the target market for a graphics API.
What something like Vulcan does is allow Epic, EA, Valve, etc. to create their multi-platform game engines targetting only a single API, instead of having to maintain separate DirectX, OpenGL, etc, branches within the engine. That lowers *their* development costs, which means more profit for them and/or cheaper engine licenses for you.
Since it's a low-overhead API it also makes it possible to make the game engine much more responsive, at the cost of having to do more of the low-level stuff yourself. So it's possible that you may actually end up doing as much work on the engine as you did to support multiple other APIs, but now that work translates to much improved performance on all platforms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 17 2016, @07:59AM
why don't you guys just get a room or smth?