Tuesday, July 10th 2018
Intel Exhorts Developers Towards Vulkan Usage as Graphics API of Choice
Intel, via a Game Dev Developer Zone blog post, took it into its hands to urge game developers towards usage of the industry-prevalent Vulkan API. Some unapologetic puns are thrown in, such as "(...) You might say that Vulkan lets apps live long and prosper", but these are only meant to entertain. And it's well known that Intel has supported the Khronos Group and Vulkan's inception from the beginning, alongside Google. The reasons for this blog post to make it into a front page, however, are twofold.
First, Intel commands the biggest graphics card share in the market - remember that most work PCs, tablets or even laptops are powered by Intel's integrated graphics, which means there's a huge slice of the market that developers have to account for while writing/developing their apps. Secondly, this could spell something when it comes to Intel's Visual Computing Group's strategy and development energies - a division that is being helmed by one other than Raja Koduri, himself with AMD's Mantle program - which would be then transmogrified into Vulkan. An interesting point to consider, certainly, as ntel's support behind Vulkan as a prime API could put Microsoft's DirectX - which suffers from not being cross-platform - under duress. And it's high-time that happened, since DX12 seems to be frozen in time for a long, long while now.
Source:
Intel game Dev Blog
Vulkan APIs are positioned to become one of the next dominant graphics rendering platforms.
54 Comments on Intel Exhorts Developers Towards Vulkan Usage as Graphics API of Choice
www.dsogaming.com/editorial/the-state-of-dx12-games-in-2017-is-directx-12-losing-its-steam/
Adoption has gone backward. DX11 is where it mostly is at.
Seems like a waste of resources if you're doing multiplatform.
Welp, one of its biggest advocates works at Intel now :)
Fact is, most Devs knows how to utilise DX11 for maximum performance, why on earth would they risk using anything else, other than to pander to a hardware vendors self important interests?
Open standards are ideologically great but in practical terms, require far higher investment with lower returns.
The interesting time will be when games start to use newly designed game engines. I fear many will continue to go the abstraction route, but familiarity will not the primary reason why they do so. The untamed potential in Direct3D 12 and Vulkan lies in the low-level control over memory etc., and to leverage this the rendering pipeline has to be tailored to all the specific parts of the game. Most current game engines use multiple levels of abstraction; first they usually abstract every API feature they need, then they add a new layer to handle all basic rendering primitives, and then probably a layer to handle generic pipelines, effects. etc. All of this needs to be completely redesigned and simplified in order to use these features properly, and using low-level code generally goes against what most programmers are taught to do these days.
I wonder if this involves intels use of amd igp on their certain cpus.
* Because there are still millions of Pcs, Laptops, etc. with Fermi GPUS cards
* These gears are still powerful enough to tun strongly much more years...
* Millions of Consumers are not dumb to waste their money to change their strong gear
* Millions of Laptops do not have Intel graphics enable like mine from ASUS
Fermi is too slow to be useful, anyway.
Search YouTube and you will find many people posting videos using Fermi GPUS when playing new video games
I have written to Nvidia CEO to ask for Vulkan Fermi support and they lied about old promises...OUTRAGEOUS
Attention I do not receive any gifts, money, holidays or whatsoever from Nvdia, Intel or any other IT companies!
I am just a consumer who likes to play PC game sometimes....having nice and smooth gaming experiences
Nvidia only very recently ended their Fermi drivers support
*My ASUS G73SW still runs well almost new PCs games full HD like FC5, GOW4, Rise of the Tomb Raider - 20 Years Celebration...and much more
* Nvidia not supporting Fermi users for more time with drivers and Vulkan, will loose millions of clients in the next years * angry clients
* FULL HD is still the King
Game developers would be mad Kamikazes if they change their strategy, because they will lost million of sales...
A GTX 970 barely cuts it for 1080 gaming, nowadays.
No matter what you think of it from a fanboy-ish point of view, aren't we all tired of:
1) Waiting for the new version of DirectX to be supported by the newest gen of GPU's?!
2) Guessing if a given DirectX version will actually be used? (DirectX 10, 12)
3) Waiting years for ports to come to other platforms like android/OSX/Linux/console to get a random game that was made on DirectX first? (Or the other way around! If we used Vulkan many more console-first games would have been on PC quickly)
Regardless of the standard used there will still be porting/version issues and developers stuck in their old ways.
2) OpenGL and Vulkan do not need new microcodes/architecture for support.