Friday, September 16th 2016
AMD Actively Promoting Vulkan Beyond GPUOpen
Vulkan, the new-generation cross-platform 3D graphics API governed by the people behind OpenGL, the Khronos Group, is gaining in relevance, with Google making it the primary 3D graphics API for Android. AMD said that it's actively promoting the API. Responding to a question by TechPowerUp in its recent Radeon Technology Group (RTG) first anniversary presser, its chief Raja Koduri agreed that the company is actively working with developers to add Vulkan to their productions, and optimize them for Radeon GPUs. This, we believe, could be due to one of many strategic reasons.
First, Vulkan works inherently better on AMD Graphics CoreNext GPU architecture because it's been largely derived from Mantle, a now defunct 3D graphics API by AMD that brings a lot of "close-to-metal" API features that make game consoles more performance-efficient, over to the PC ecosystem. The proof of this pudding is the AAA title and 2016 reboot of the iconic first-person shooter "Doom," in which Radeon GPUs get significant performance boosts switching from the default OpenGL renderer to Vulkan. These boosts aren't as pronounced on NVIDIA GPUs.
Second, and this could be a long shot, but the growing popularity of Vulkan could give AMD leverage over Microsoft to steer Direct3D development in areas that AMD GPUs are inherently good at - these include asynchronous compute, and tiled-resources (AMD GPUs benefit due to higher memory bandwidths). AMD has been engaging aggressively with game studios working on AAA games that use DirectX 12, and thus far AMD GPUs have been either gaining or sustaining performance better than NVIDIA GPUs, when switching from DirectX 11 fallbacks to DirectX 12 renderers.
AMD has already "opened" up much of its GPU IP to game developers through its GPUOpen initiative. Here, developers will find detailed technical resources on how to take advantage of not just AMD-specific GPU IP, but also some industry standards. Vulkan is among the richly differentiated resources AMD is giving away through the initiative.
Vulkan still has a long way to go before it becomes the primary API in AAA releases. To most gamers who don't tinker with advanced graphics settings, "Doom" still works on OpenGL. and "Talos Prinicple," works on Direct3D 11 by default, for example. It could be a while before a game runs on Vulkan out of the box, and the way its special interest group Khronos, and more importantly AMD, promote its use, not just during game development, but also long-term support, will have a lot to do with it. A lot will also depend on NVIDIA, which holds about 70% in PC discrete GPU market share, to support the API. Over-customizing Vulkan would send it the way of OpenGL. Too many vendor-specific extensions to keep up drove game developers to Direct3D in the first place.
First, Vulkan works inherently better on AMD Graphics CoreNext GPU architecture because it's been largely derived from Mantle, a now defunct 3D graphics API by AMD that brings a lot of "close-to-metal" API features that make game consoles more performance-efficient, over to the PC ecosystem. The proof of this pudding is the AAA title and 2016 reboot of the iconic first-person shooter "Doom," in which Radeon GPUs get significant performance boosts switching from the default OpenGL renderer to Vulkan. These boosts aren't as pronounced on NVIDIA GPUs.
AMD has already "opened" up much of its GPU IP to game developers through its GPUOpen initiative. Here, developers will find detailed technical resources on how to take advantage of not just AMD-specific GPU IP, but also some industry standards. Vulkan is among the richly differentiated resources AMD is giving away through the initiative.
Vulkan still has a long way to go before it becomes the primary API in AAA releases. To most gamers who don't tinker with advanced graphics settings, "Doom" still works on OpenGL. and "Talos Prinicple," works on Direct3D 11 by default, for example. It could be a while before a game runs on Vulkan out of the box, and the way its special interest group Khronos, and more importantly AMD, promote its use, not just during game development, but also long-term support, will have a lot to do with it. A lot will also depend on NVIDIA, which holds about 70% in PC discrete GPU market share, to support the API. Over-customizing Vulkan would send it the way of OpenGL. Too many vendor-specific extensions to keep up drove game developers to Direct3D in the first place.
111 Comments on AMD Actively Promoting Vulkan Beyond GPUOpen
GCN cards get worse framerates on Vulkan in Tales Principle compared to D3D11.
Let's see what we have in 2 years from now....
Now no-one will know my mind mastery.
Despite the planned road map for Volta in 2017 which will probably scale with DX12 and Vulkan, they released an unscheduled "new" architecture in Pascal, which is really Maxwell 3.0 that doesn't improve with these APIs.
Nvidia's philosophy is simply sell their customers a whole new architecture when the deficiencies become too problematic, making the previous generation obsolete in a very short time.
But as long as their loyal fans slavishly buy their product at their command, they will continue to be short-sighted about building their hardware for up-comming technical developments.
A graphics API that works reliably and with high performance across operating systems, especially Windows and Linux would be fantastic, but I suspect that vested interests won't let that happen.
They did the same thing with dx 11.1 and mantle and honestly it's just PR and false hope for their customers. By the time these architecture advantages become material we will already have two more arch releases.
Thou, isn´t Android based on LINUX?
So would this choice not be the only logical one for google?
As long as gamers are willing to get Win 10 in order to use DX 12, and as long as the majority of gamers are willing to pay the obscene prices of these Paxwell cards, nothing will change.
Simply put, AMD didn't make the same assumptions by how applications would be using these APIs (DX11 + OpenGL) and conformed to a more strict interpretation of these API specifications whereas nVidia implemented it in a way there the API conforms to the spec but, what is expected to happen when theses APIs are called might not be actually what's happening under the hood. The benefit of this is that nVidia's driver a lot of times can turn around and say, "Yup, I'm done doing what you told me to do," but, in reality, it might have just been put on a queue to be processed later. With DX12 and Vulkan, that kind of work is expected to be done by the game devs, not driver devs.
The real reason (well, one of them anyway) they're pushing Vulkan, is their drivers still suck at OpenGL.
But since Vulkan is cross-platform and assuming it's actually good, I have no problem with any company pushing for support. Because developers will need incentives if they're required to do more work now.
:toast:
I was looking to buy a Fury X a while back as a sidegrade project (with a 6700k) to replace my existing set up. Problem is that in the UK at least the Fury X is still retailing at or above £500. So I still have to pay that premium for a 'last gen' card when AMD have already launched their new gen Polaris.
You can always tell the balanced posters because they bitch about both sides being culpable for the current state of affairs. AMD are just as much the reason Nvidia do what they do as AMD haven't stepped up to the plate. Their long game is so long that people get bored waiting and move on to something new. But then there is the fact that AMD is so focused on providing for the new consoles that they neglect the PC side. It seems fairly obvious now that Polaris was co-designed on the PC side as it was being produced to go into the PS4 Pro.
So we have to wait for AMD to deliver Vega, likely in the same time frame the 1080ti will be out, perhaps even followed closely by Volta. And even if Vega is 50% better than Fury X (AMD's usual generational perf improvement) that won't really be enough to 'swing' the boat around. Sure, in selected titles but we really need AMD to produce something special. And then there is the stinger...
The Fury X is generally only about 20% faster than the 390X (therefore only 30% faster than the 290X).
The GCN changes haven't yielded significant generational improvements so Vega needs to really ramp it up. If Vega doesn't deliver, your pain will only continue.
As to Vulkan, apparently this situation doesn't apply as much to NVIDIA, since it works pretty well on the current gen.
* use opengl code and simply run it with a vulkan wrapper (this is probably what was done with talos)
* create native vulkan code and run it (this is probably what doom uses)
aka
* Talos runs like crap because it it uses opengl code behind it
* Doom runs like butter because its close to 100% vulkan code