Intel Exhorts Developers Towards Vulkan Usage as Graphics API of Choice

[Captain_Tom]

But how is vulcan going to be different for 1 & 2 - or even 3? "If we used Vulkan many more console-first games would have been on PC quickly" PS4 has it's own api for most games (vulcan support still incoming afaik) and Xbox uses DX. We will still be waiting for new version features (just like OGL back in the day) and we will still be guessing.

Regardless of the standard used there will still be porting/version issues and developers stuck in their old ways.

1) Most of gaming uses OpenGL-based rendering. (Sorry if you are a dinosaur still clinging to an XBOX lol)

2) OpenGL and Vulkan do not need new microcodes/architecture for support.

 

[Ruru]

Doom and Wolfenstein II are the only Vulkan games on my Steam library. And I run Doom with OpenGL since it just runs better with OpenGL on my GTX 980.

 

[Captain_Tom]

Doom and Wolfenstein II are the only Vulkan games on my Steam library. And I run Doom with OpenGL since it just runs better with OpenGL on my GTX 980.

It would run better with Vulkan if it was the standard - but instead Nvidia is incentivized to continue to prop up DX11.

 

[Ruru]

It would run better with Vulkan if it was the standard - but instead Nvidia is incentivized to continue to prop up DX11.

Exactly. With a R9 290 Vulkan ran it better.

 

[Captain_Tom]

Exactly. With a R9 290 Vulkan ran it better.

I think you are missing what I am saying - Nvidia could make the GTX 980 perform better on Vulkan. It is objectively a more efficient API.

But instead they try as hard as they can to make GTX cards only work well on DX11 - it gives them an advantage since they specifically built Maxwell for DX11 and they have a commanding Windows marketshare (But again, it would get better performance on Vulkan if they put in even a little effort).

 

[windwhirl]

The best thing that could happen to PC gaming (besides a decentralized/cheaper game distributor), is the removal of DirectX as the standard.

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)

1-DirectX 12 was introduced in 2014 and launched with Windows 10. It has been supported in all AMD cards using GCN 1.1 (Sea Islands) or later, some of those were introduced with the Rx 200 series in 2013. Nvidia did it with Fermi (supposedly, but I'd say Maxwell was the first). That almost nobody uses the DX12 APIs, that's another matter entirely (if you can do the same thing without changing the API, why hurry?). Though, I do like the idea of everyone just using one set of APIs (Vulkan, since it supersedes OpenGL and is cross-platform) that is also fully up-to-date.

2-Depends on the developer. The same could happen in Vulkan or OpenGL. However, I did read some people saying that AMD's support for OpenGL was/is rather crappy, which is the kind of thing that may push a developer to use DirectX more frequently. And then you have Nvidia, who supposedly doesn't really try to optimize their GPUs for DX12, probably making developers more prone to choosing DX11.

3-Remember that games also use other non-graphics API (sound APIs for example), and are optimized according to the platform where it is played. And then, there's the game engine, which may or may not work well on any given platform (or not work at all). DirectX has the advantage of offering pretty much all the APIs you could need for a game. OpenGL doesn't offer that, and Vulkan doesn't either.

 

[Durvelle27]

To some of the comments above; consoles do support Vulkan if the manufacturers allow use of it. Remember both consoles run AMD GPUs based on Polaris

 

[phanbuey]

1) Most of gaming uses OpenGL-based rendering. (Sorry if you are a dinosaur still clinging to an XBOX lol)

2) OpenGL and Vulkan do not need new microcodes/architecture for support.

I'm sorry too that you have to be a twat in your reply -- I was genuinely asking.

 

[seronx]

Vulkan and DX12 are largely the same thing though.

DX12 is s__op
Vulkan is vk__op

Other than that Vulkan can already pretty much do everything DX12 can:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wine-VKD3D-1.0-D3D12-Vulkan
https://source.winehq.org/git/vkd3d.git/

VK9 => D3D9 to Vulkan
DXUP/DXVK => D3D10&D3D11 to Vulkan

Regardless, the Vulkan-fication is already happening.

 

[Xaled]

Why would MS move forward on the next DX when 12 has been mostly ignored? Even Vulkan only got one new game in 2017.

https://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.

The real quistion is why the producer of Xbox, MS would want to improve PC gaming? it is not in its favor

 

[londiste]

Doesn't DX11 favor Nvidia's architectures? Since Nvidia apparently "sponsors" a lot more development...

Not really. Nvidia has just put a lot of work over time into driver development. They have some interesting solutions to bottlenecks like using 2 threads for driver work that was (and is) one of the major reasons for a more efficient DX11 driver.

The problem with DX12 is that it really is not intended to replace DX11 but to augment it. DX12 is lower level and more powerful but you need to do bunch of things manually that you do not need to do with DX11. There is no visual benefit, everything that is done with DX12 can be done with DX11. There is a performance benefit with a huge but - developer needs to do something more efficiently than DX11 and drivers are currently doing. That is easy enough in some areas, difficult in others. Every developer who has spoken about this has said DX12 needs more time to work with. For a game developer/publisher, time is money. Most of this applies to Vulkan as well.

DX12 and Vulkan are in the same boat when it comes to adoption - there is a handful of AAA developers that are interested and capable in driving the technical side of innovation. They are behind the current crop of DX12/Vulkan games, with mixed results.

As far as I know, there is only one DX12 game that provides a consistent performance boost across the range of cards a this point - Sniper Elite 4. Everything else is slower and/or problematic.
Doom and the rest of idTech6 - maybe. But there is a bunch of manufacturer/family specific features in there. Especially in Wolfenstein2 FP16 and culling come to mind.

The real quistion is why the producer of Xbox, MS would want to improve PC gaming? it is not in its favor

Why not? Gaming is one of the large perks for Windows at this point. Microsoft most definitely wants to keep that edge. Xbox app, Xbox Play Anywhere, emulation efforts for backwards compatibility. Microsoft both seems to aim for and is talking about some type of integration between Xbox and Windows 10.

 

[cucker tarlson]

Doom and Wolfenstein II are the only Vulkan games on my Steam library. And I run Doom with OpenGL since it just runs better with OpenGL on my GTX 980.

hve you tested it ? Cause I know they did manage to improve vulkan performance with a driver quite some time ago. Now vulkan is faster both on maxwell and pascal

https://www.purepc.pl/karty_graficz..._1080_ti_lightning_z_jasny_pieronie?page=0,12
https://www.purepc.pl/karty_graficz..._1080_ti_lightning_z_jasny_pieronie?page=0,11

https://techreport.com/news/31565/geforce-378-78-drivers-supercharge-directx-12-and-vulkan

 

[londiste]

Doom benchmark results depend a lot on specific scenes tested.

 

[Captain_Tom]

The real quistion is why the producer of Xbox, MS would want to improve PC gaming? it is not in its favor

Because XBOX is a sinking ship lol. They gotta strengthen Windows gaming as quickly as possible...

 

[Vayra86]

These API discussions and 90% of the comments used here are remarkably similar to people who 'HAD TO HAVE' HBM on their next GPU or it was a no-buy. Meanwhile...

When the next game releases on DX11 you will buy it regardless. And you should because it doesn't matter. DX11 can completely obliterate current day hardware and DX12 offers literally no benefit in terms of 'what a CPU' can do in terms of performance. It just levels it out a bit for lower end CPUs and lower clockspeeds which plays handily into a world where CPU core counts are going up. Its good, yes. But: games are always made for common denominators and not for the top 5% of high end systems. API's are not used as primary and only ones when the entire marketplace is slowly moving from one rig to the next, and the vast majority has ancient hardware.

- DX12 offers little to no tangible performance advantages as of today and 'building it from the ground up' simply isn't going to happen except for a tiny handful of games/engines. In fact, it is far LESS likely to happen these days with 'Engines as a Service' like Lumberyard and UE4 are marketed.

- Devs really don't care about the API they use, they care about the limitations it has. When they can build a game and use DX11 to get good performance, which, simply enough, is very much the case for a huge majority of games and game concepts, why would they invest time to support an API that has weak support on older hardware and even old OS'es? That's not lazy - that's common sense and economy.

- Some ppl here speak of higher draw calls and multicore support as if its a prerequisite for good gaming. Get yourself checked out, fast. All it does is alleviate a bottleneck in some rare edge cases or in games that are specifically pushing those aspects. 'But nobody will make those games because DX11' - yes. And because grand strategy, for example, has been near death for over a decade. And look at the smash hit they call Ashes... oh wait, in fact it flopped hard. Does that game really show the merit of new API benefits? Its stale, boring, lacking. Meanwhile, other grand strategy like Total War performs like a boss on DX11 ánd DX12. It uses multiple cores well and CPU performance directly translates to FPS to a great degree.

- The API is just an abstraction layer, good devs build an efficient game and engine at the core, look at Blizzard titles, performance, and CPU/GPU scaling for a good bunch of examples on that.

- GPU support? Really? Back in Maxwell days the same people that are crying today said 'my next GPU better have full DX12 support because all games will use it' while sensible souls replied 'relax, this'll take years and one or two more gens'. Look where we are now. These changes and upgrades are gradual and being ahead of the curve earns you nothing, it only costs money and you get fooled - or in fact, you're fooling yourself.



As for Vulkan and pushing it as the dominant API: great. Keep it going. Just don't expect much of it anytime soon.

Because XBOX is a sinking ship lol. They gotta strengthen Windows gaming as quickly as possible...

I hardly think they are panicking. Xbox is just a little toy for MS, nice if it works out, too bad if it doesn't. It shows, too, with all the non-gaming additions they make. For me, when it says MS and gaming on the same box, I know it needs to die fast, and it always does eventually.

The real quistion is why the producer of Xbox, MS would want to improve PC gaming? it is not in its favor

Of course it is, it keeps their OS relevant to consumers, and with that, mindshare and marketshare for many MS services. Would you buy Office for a Linux rig? Or visit the MS Store? (Not that I'd do that now, but hey)

 

[BorgOvermind]

Makes me laugh.

After something turns out to be good and beats any other alternative, many come barking how they 'supported' the winning choice.

Cowards !

Now intel will try making its emulators use Vulkan.

 

[enxo218]

Could we get a vulcan vs dx 11 vs dx 12 comparison with respect to game, hardware and os support ,availability and performance. I'm requesting this because articles such as these offer announcements with such barebones information that assumes the reader is an api expert and follows the associated software and hardware implications that escorts their changes. An in depth analysis with maybe a preference poll at the end...unless it already exists then some directions would be appreciated

As it stands I'm only aware of rise of the tomb raider 20th anniversary edition and I couldn't enable the dx12 option on my 970 on win 7

 

[kings]

Well, Intel also encourages FreeSync over G-Sync and yet, G-Sync is still kicking after all those years.

So, I don't expect the DirectX to go anywhere anytime soon either, just because Intel encourage something else!

 

[Durvelle27]

Could we get a vulcan vs dx 11 vs dx 12 comparison with respect to game, hardware and os support ,availability and performance. I'm requesting this because articles such as these offer announcements with such barebones information that assumes the reader is an api expert and follows the associated software and hardware implications that escorts their changes. An in depth analysis with maybe a preference poll at the end...unless it already exists then some directions would be appreciated

As it stands I'm only aware of rise of the tomb raider 20th anniversary edition and I couldn't enable the dx12 option on my 970 on win 7

Of course not

DX12 only works under Windows 10

 

[Xaled]

Well, Intel also encourages FreeSync over G-Sync and yet, G-Sync is still kicking after all those years.

For what it costs. Gsync kicking nothing but your pocket.
All those years? you mean only this 4 or 5 years of lack of competition in gamings graphics cards that let nVidia rename exisiting technology and bullshit the whole gaming world and industry with selling extremely overpriced bullshet. (although biggest and last try failed, aka GPP)

 

[enxo218]

Of course not

DX12 only works under Windows 10

I was holding out for hope that someone would say either the 10 exclusivity bad been dropped or a software workaround had been developed

 

[efikkan]

Vulkan and DX12 are largely the same thing though.

They have many similar features, but are not even close to the same thing. Vulkan is based on the SPIR-V compiler architecture like OpenCL, which is something Microsoft are planning to mimic in their next iteration.

 

[Aquinus]

DX12 and Vulkan are pretty much the same thing from a developer perspective. There's no more handholding, which for most games doesn't justify the added development cost.

Khronos specifically says though that you should use OpenGL if it's adequate for your use case and that Vulkan should only be used if you need that power or efficiency. Vulkan was never intended to be a replacement, it was intended to be another option.

 

[Tom_]

DX12 is too slow.

 

[londiste]

Could we get a vulcan vs dx 11 vs dx 12 comparison with respect to game, hardware and os support ,availability and performance. I'm requesting this because articles such as these offer announcements with such barebones information that assumes the reader is an api expert and follows the associated software and hardware implications that escorts their changes. An in depth analysis with maybe a preference poll at the end...unless it already exists then some directions would be appreciated

As it stands I'm only aware of rise of the tomb raider 20th anniversary edition and I couldn't enable the dx12 option on my 970 on win 7

OS Support for graphics APIs:
- DX11 - Windows Vista/7/8/10
- DX12 - Windows 10
- Vulcan/OpenGL - open standard, so can work in any OS
Actual implementation of API support depends on both OS and drivers.

Hardware support is a complicated topic. DX versions have feature levels - compatibility for cards that are built for older versions. DX11 is supported by any GPU that anyone is likely to run today. DX12 support is getting to pretty much the same point. By GPU manufacturers DX12 is supported for:
AMD:
- 7000/8000/200/300/400/500/Vega series. All GCN cards basically, including Fiji and Vega. Feature levels for AMD cards is a mess.
- Current drivers support GPUs from 200 series forward which are all fine enough for DX12.
Nvidia:
- 400/500/600/700/900/1000 series. Fermi/Kepler/Maxwell/Pascal with Fermi (400/500 series) technically being DX11 and Kepler (600/700 series) DX11.1 architecture.
- Current drivers support GPUs from 600 series forward, again all are fine enough for DX12.
Intel:
- iGPUS on 5th gen Core CPUs and newer (Broadwell/Skylake/KabyLake/CoffeeLake).

Performance is not straightforward either. It has more to do with developer intentions and capabilities than API itself. APIs have overhead that do limit some aspects of performance. The lower level an API is (like DX12/Vulkan compared to DX11/OpenGL), the less overhead it has in some if not most areas. The flip side of the same coin is that the same lower level API will inherently do less hand-holding, less checking if everything is as it should etc, leaving that for the developer to do. If developer is good, lower level API eliminates some bottlenecks and allows them to squeeze out every ounce of performance.

Currently, both Microsoft and Khronos Group present older version of API (DX11 and OpenGL) remaining as a simpler alternative alongside the newer one (DX12 and Vulkan).