NVIDIA Coming Around to Vulkan Support

[okidna]

The race in my book is about the fact that Vulkan is basically Mantle. So if any company should be able to roll out a proper Vulkan support in its video drivers, it's the company behind Mantle. If nVIDIA beats AMD on this, it would be indicative of major issues inside AMD. Wild guess: maybe they simply fired too many engineers from the driver/sw team. Of course Crimson could well also introduce Vulkan support, so let's wait until it gets rolled out.

I have to agree with you, the fact that Vulkan come from Mantle and near zero announcement or presentation from AMD, just doesn't add up.

If you visit this mini-site, you'll find out that NVIDIA, Valve, PowerVR, and other companies already has "something" that includes Vulkan.
Valve even showed that they already have a working Linux driver that run Dota 2 on Vulkan with Intel GPU.

But I don't know, maybe because AMD already know Mantle really well they don't need to develop something new for Vulkan. Let's wait until Vulkan become more mature and experiencing higher adoption and implementation rate.

 

[efikkan]

How are they "coming around to it"? Nvidia are one of the companies that supported Vulkan development since back when it was called OpenGL Next. Plus they have always had above average OpenGL support.

Nvidia is still the only vendor with enterprise quality OpenGL drivers, and sadly enough the only vendor even remotely close.

So, Vulkan is basically Mantle with the API call names updated. And now nVIDIA will be the first company to implement Vulkan? Beating AMD? Or maybe I missed the first Catalyst with Vulkan support? *confused*

That is untrue.
Vulkan may share some similarities in terms of some function names, but the underlying API build around SPIR-V and GLSL and is not based on Mantle.

It's obvious that both Fury and the preceding few GCN generation of cards (or even more likely, all GCN based Radeons) on the hardware level do support Vulkan, just as they support Mantle. But I haven't yet seen a Catalyst with that feature enabled.

AMD advertised OpenGL 4.5 "support" for almost a year before they added driver support, as both AMD and Nvidia also did with Direct3D 12 support. What they mean is hardware support. It will be a while until we see software support.

Pretty sure Vulkan spec isn't finalized yet. Catalyst probably had preliminary support for Vulkan since at least the 2014 Omega driver.

No, there is currently no support for Vulkan in any public AMD driver.

 

[Steevo]

Let me ask back: if I want to develop a Vulkan application, can I develop it using a reliable Catalyst (of ForceWare for that matter) driver today? I'd say no. It's Catalyst and ForceWare and Intel video drivers that should come first. They should make Vulkan applications/games work, or else developers cannot use a reliable development environment. From an end-user perspective, you're right of course. But end-users use such software that are developed by someone. And that someone has to work with something. And as a software developer I would find it insulting if properly supporting developers would have to be labelled as a PR stunt All 3 PC GPU manufacturers should get their act together and roll out Vulkan-ready drivers yesterday. But, as I've stated above, I'd expect AMD to be first, since no matter how you put it, Vulkan (= Mantle) is their child, their development, they should know best how to implement support for their hardware in their drivers. Unless of course they have no resources anymore to be on the cutting-edge of PC gfx tech.

If you are developing a Vulkan app, you are using this.


http://www.amd.com/Documents/Mantle-Programming-Guide-and-API-Reference.pdf

And lo, its a Mantle programming guide that AMD gave to Khronos along with Mantle code, drivers, and all else mantle related that became the core DNA of Vulkan.....


"OpenGL® 4.5 support available in AMD Catalyst™ 15.30 WHQL driver."



As a fact OpenGL code debugger is written by AMD http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/opencl-zone/codexl/




So how about you pull your head out of your ass, and learn to read and do you own "googling" which I know is hard princess, but you really can do the wurdz and shit.

 

[Fiery]

So how about you pull your head out of your ass, and learn to read and do you own "googling" which I know is hard princess, but you really can do the wurdz and shit.

Thank you for your insults, that paints a great picture on your view about developers.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

If you visit this mini-site, you'll find out that NVIDIA, Valve, PowerVR, and other companies already has "something" that includes Vulkan.
Valve even showed that they already have a working Linux driver that run Dota 2 on Vulkan with Intel GPU.

Could be OpenGL too. Vulkan is backwards compatible not unlike DirectX 12's Direct3D feature level 9_0.

No, there is currently no support for Vulkan in any public AMD driver.

I thought I made myself clear:

Likely only developers and graphics manufacturers have access to Vulkan right now. It's still very beta software.

I'm sure AMD will release drivers for Vulkan to run on all cards that support Mantle when it is closer to finalized. Vulkan is supposedly going to run on cards all the way back to OpenGL 3.# but I doubt it will have the Mantle-esque performance boost on non-Mantle cards.

 

[okidna]

As a fact OpenGL code debugger is written by AMD http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/opencl-zone/codexl/\

Every company has their own debugger & profiler for OpenGL, OpenCL, D3D, etc.
AMD with their CodeXL and NVIDIA with Perfkit & Nsight (CUDA, DC, OpenCL, D3D, & OpenGL visual debugger).

 

[Steevo]

Thank you for your insults, that paints a great picture on your view about developers.

What does your development of Finalwire have to do with anything here in this discussion?
Our discussion is based on the idea that AMD has no Vulkan support, but they do, poor support possibly as with most of their other broken promises, but its there. In a thread where the progression of Mantle, a AMD software and API was given a new name by Khronos after it was given to them, and Nvidia releases a PR dump about their support for it.

 

[jigar2speed]

It may have been advertised as the second coming, but I have not seen anything related to changes in the driver. Just a new control center and some rebranding. You think they'd come up with a new driver and not rave about it?

There are going to be few performance tweaks - http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-crimson-drivers-officially-launching-24th-november-public/

 

[Fiery]

What does your development of Finalwire have to do with anything here in this discussion?

Geez, I never even mentioned our company. I was talking about software and game developers in general.

 

[R-T-B]

What does your development of Finalwire have to do with anything here in this discussion?
Our discussion is based on the idea that AMD has no Vulkan support, but they do, poor support possibly as with most of their other broken promises, but its there. In a thread where the progression of Mantle, a AMD software and API was given a new name by Khronos after it was given to them, and Nvidia releases a PR dump about their support for it.

You clearly must not be a coder.

I guarantee you you will need more than that "getting started with Mantle" PDF you basically linked to code a Vulkan app. Some libraries to code against might be a nice start. You won't get anywhere with the stuff you linked, as functions have been renamed.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

No idea where this came from originally but it's the API calls (Vulkan on left, Mantle on right)...

vkCmdPipelineBarrier is in there three times.

 

[efikkan]

And all of those are generic functions you would expect an API to include.

Claiming one is based on the other is just as silly as claiming that ARM is based on X86 because they both include similar arithmetics.

 

[Steevo]

You clearly must not be a coder.

I guarantee you you will need more than that "getting started with Mantle" PDF you basically linked to code a Vulkan app. Some libraries to code against might be a nice start. You won't get anywhere with the stuff you linked, as functions have been renamed.

Not for a living no, and it has been years since I coded anything, mostly still use batch files for the little needs I have.

But as Ford shows...... Vulkan is Mantle, and simply put, AMD was the reason we have it, the reason that MS pushed for DX12 improvements, and something they finally did right and deserve credit for. Nvidia would have fallen on swords before they did the same with Physx, and yet shills are still here saying how great they are for being "the first to support this" and how shit AMD is.

 

[efikkan]

You clearly don't know GPU programming. AMD and Nvidia don't end up with the same GPU features by accident, Direct3D is planned years ahead. Like Nvidia themselves put it:

Our work with Microsoft on DirectX 12 began more than four years ago

link.

The underlying API features is not based on Mantle. Vulkan is built around SPIR-V from Khronos.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Mantle was the first close-to-the-metal graphics API to reach the market followed by Apple Metal and Microsoft Direct3D 12. They were all developed separately. AMD contributed to Direct3D 12.

As for Mantle and Vulkan...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9038/next-generation-opengl-becomes-vulkan-additional-details-released

In fact Khronos has confirmed that AMD has contributed Mantle towards the development of Vulkan, and though we need to be clear that Vulkan is not Mantle, Mantle was used to bootstrap the process and speed its development, making Vulkan a derivation of sorts of Mantle (think Unix family tree). What has changed from Mantle is that Khronos has gone through a period of refinement, keeping what worked in Vulkan and throwing out portions of Mantle that didn’t work well – particularly HLSL and anything that would prevent the API from being cross-vendor – replacing it with the other necessary/better functionality.

 

[efikkan]

Mantle was the first close-to-the-metal graphics API to reach the market followed by Apple Metal and Microsoft Direct3D 12. They were all developed separately. AMD contributed to Direct3D 12.

Yes, MS, Nvidia, AMD and Intel started working on Direct3D 12 in 2010. Initially it was just a draft of features, which the vendors needed by 2011 when the initial designs of GCN 1.1 and Maxwell was done. In parallel AMD created Mantle based some of the same features and used it as an experiment and feedback for Direct3D 12 development. And that's the way everyone needs to look at it; Mantle was just an experiment derived from Direct3D and a valuable PR win.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

It wasn't derived from Direct3D. Direct3D may have inspired Mantle's creation but AMD entirely owned Mantle so there would be no licensing with Microsoft. I suspect Microsoft was dragging it's heels, AMD wanted something to spice up the deal for consoles with Microsoft and Sony, and DICE wanted more frames per second. All of that culminated in the creation of Mantle (DICE presumably partially financed it) and bringing it to market proved to Microsoft that closer to the metal is worth doing; Microsoft accelerated development of DirectX 12.