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posted by martyb on Wednesday February 17 2016, @04:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the live-long-and-phosphor dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Wednesday February 17 2016, @12:16PM

    by Vanderhoth (61) on Wednesday February 17 2016, @12:16PM (#305719)

    Already happening. I've been playing XCom2 on my Linux machine for a couple weeks now, and I have a bunch of others.

    There are more and more games coming to Linux all the time, but I credit Valve though. They decided to make a Steam OS based on Debian when Micorsoft started talking about their "app store" for Windows 8. Valve didn't want to be a slave to what MS wanted to force on them. I think they were worried MS would start charging people to install steam and dictate to Valve what games they'd be able to carry (because steam would be sold through Windows app store). So Valve made their own OS and they want as many games as possible to run on their "steam machines", which are just PCs that meet basic specs running Steam OS. So really they're the driving force.

    Steam [steampowered.com] is the largest distributor of games at the moment and getting on their platform almost ensures a games success, almost. Devs want they're games on Steam, so they make them run on Steam OS, which also allows them to runs on any Debian based Linux distro.

    Good Old Games (GOG.com [gog.com]) also has started carrying games that run on Linux, both old and new. (Pillars of Eternity [gog.com] for example)

    I've also had pretty good success getting games to run through WINE, but that's getting a little off topic as they mostly still use DirectX and the games don't run natively, which I'm assuming is the point of this discussion.

    --
    "Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday February 17 2016, @05:48PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday February 17 2016, @05:48PM (#305863)

    And this makes it easier. Where's the problem?

    There's a few big-name engines that have cross-platform support, and games made using those engines tend to be released on Linux as well as Windows. Get away from those big engines though and cross-platform support drops dramatically.

    More to the point, a cross-platform API means less work for the engine developers. Which means the game engines can be developed faster and cheaper than if you're having to constantly maintain multiple branches that do basically the same thing through different APIs.

    As for WINE, etc, I fail to see how that's relevant to the discussion. Yes, it's wonderful for letting us play Windows games *on* Linux, but it has almost nothing to do with games *for* Linux. ("almost" nothing, because I assume at least some developers strive to avoid running afoul of WINE incompatibilities)

    • (Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Wednesday February 17 2016, @10:18PM

      by Vanderhoth (61) on Wednesday February 17 2016, @10:18PM (#305982)

      And this makes it easier. Where's the problem?

      There is no problem. That's what I was pointing out. And I agree, this is good and only going to make things better.

      As for WINE, etc, I fail to see how that's relevant to the discussion

      Which is why I said it was getting off topic. I was just pointing out where there fails to be a native method to run a game on Linux, WINE some times fills in. So I can still play a lot of AAA titles on Linux.

      I'm extremely grateful to Valve though because I credit them to with the recent push to make more games run natively on Linux.

      --
      "Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe