back to article Here comes Vulkan: The next generation of the OpenGL graphics API

The Khronos Group, non-profit custodian of the OpenGL cross-platform graphics API, has announced its replacement, called Vulkan. Vulkan, previously known as glNext, is being presented in detail at The Game Developers Conference (GDC) currently under way in San Francisco. Khronos has also announced OpenCL 2.1, an updated …

  1. DropBear
    Facepalm

    Great...

    “The GPU has been laid bare for you. You can screw it up, but in the right hands this gives you maximum system performance, and gives the developer lots of flexibility”

    So, basically, there will be not a single piece of Vulkan-using software that won't crash horribly on occasion, considering that (as usual) absolutely nobody will bother writing flawless code for it.

    1. RyokuMas
      Facepalm

      Re: Great...

      Not to mention the metric shit-tonne of work involved scraping round Stack Overflow and the like just to figure out the black magic required to get a bitmap on the screen when you're trying to get started with it...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Great...

      So pretty much a copy of what Microsoft have done with Direct-X 12 then. Except further away from market...

      1. yossarianuk

        Re: Great...

        But this is not tied to one company/OS.

        This will work in PS4, Linux, Android, etc

        Its been around (in planning at least) for some time

        http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/03/20/opengl-gdc2014/

        This is great news for ALL gamers.

        1. x 7

          Re: Great...

          "This will crash in PS4, Linux, Android, etc"

          Fixed that typo for you

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Great...

            Seriously?

            Guys get together and produce a standard, go through ages of specification and design, work through it to make sure that the system is as designed, talk to hardware manufacturers, work on tool-sets to get developers working, and only when the system is working as planned, and the hardware is in place do they bring it out for the average Joe to use ...

            Yeah, this is obviously a bad thing

            1. DropBear

              Re: Great...

              "Yeah, this is obviously a bad thing"

              Well, in theory it's a great thing; I practice, however... well... in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, however...

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Great...

          The PS4 doesn't use OpenGL, it uses libgcm which has Sony's own direct to hardware bodge so it is unlikely that Sony will port to this.

          Not many people care about Linux when Open GL runs faster under Windows with identical hardware.

          And Android isn't even in the same ballpark.

          So it's basically only on PCs that this matters. Direct-X has historically wiped the floor with Open-GL in that market and I don't see that changing any time soon. For instance everyone talks about Direct-X 11 cards, not Open GL 4.4 cards...

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Great...

            Everyone in the Graphics realm would love a portable, low-level API.

            It's great for game developers, hardware manufacturers and users alike.

            If Microsoft don't embrace it, they're going to find that more and more Windows is the "alternative" platform that developers might consider if they have enough budget, because with one single API, they can tackle the majority of every other platform.

            The real question is why we haven't had this until now.

            I wish it success.

            1. Dave 126 Silver badge

              Re: Great...

              >Not many people care about Linux when Open GL runs faster under Windows with identical hardware.

              That's likely to be a GPU driver issue. Vulkan should make it quicker for AMD and nVidia to get drivers out, because Vulkan asks the game engines to do what used to be the job of the graphics drivers.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Great...

                "That's likely to be a GPU driver issue"

                Well it's consistent across different manufacturer chipsets inc AMD, Intel and Nvidia. There are several benchmarks around that demonstrate it with Windows 8.1 versus the latest Ubuntu. So what Microsoft did to improve graphics performance for Windows 8 apparently worked:

                http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/07/23/hardware-accelerating-everything-windows-8-graphics.aspx

            2. regadpellagru

              Re: Great...

              "The real question is why we haven't had this until now.

              I wish it success."

              We never had this up to now because of MS-imposed vendor lock-in. As simple as that.

              MS was clever enough to see that a nice 3D API would attract devs and lock gamers to Windows (or Xbox).

              Now, MS is struggling and Valve and others are seemingly backing this up.

              I also *really* wish them success. This could kill MS off the gaming market, and also off the OS market, where they are really performing like crap.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Great...

                How is this going to kill Microsoft off the gaming market? It might hurt Microsoft's aim of DirectX everywhere, but OpenGL runs on Windows, and so will this.

                Do you think that all avid gamers will leave Windows if they can get equal or perhaps even slightly better performance on another platform? Where are they going to go? OS X? Linux? Or do you think they'll leave PCs behind entirely and game only on consoles meaning PS5 wins by default? Or do you think everyone will game on mobile, meaning Android and iOS?

                Even if no one gamed on Windows, how is that going to kill Microsoft off the OS market as you suggest? Businesses don't care about gaming, they aren't going to switch. Dell isn't going to stop making and Best Buy isn't going to stop selling Windows PCs - not like any avid gamers are buying from either now.

                1. regadpellagru

                  Re: Great...

                  "How is this going to kill Microsoft off the gaming market? It might hurt Microsoft's aim of DirectX everywhere, but OpenGL runs on Windows, and so will this."

                  Because, once devs have a non-proprietary alternative to the monopolistic DX, they'll switch to it for more platforms integration. Then MS, will loose more market share, typically the likes like myself who only still have windows because of gaming.

                  Those will switch to things like SteamOS.

                  Then, when another reason for loosing Windows (gaming) is there, the question of having it for classical personnal desktop will arise, and given some severe misaps I've seen amongst all my computer illiterate neighbours (win 8, viruses everywhere, vista insta-killed by a patch, etc ...), this would shift more market share to alternatives. A lot of people have fallen to MS's failures in the last 6 years or so ...

          2. yossarianuk

            Re: Great...

            Most benchmarks show Linux being faster than windows as long as you have Nvidia (and has been for years) and use the closed source binary.

            http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu1410_win81_nvidia&num=1

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Great...

              "Most benchmarks show Linux being faster than windows as long as you have Nvidia (and has been for years) and use the closed source binary."

              No, pretty much every benchmark but that one shows Windows 8.1 to be at faster overall. With multiple drivers / cards; and although that specific one shows a small gain for Linux over Windows on some of the tests it seems to be a borked Windows driver - of real note the one test where there is a big difference - GPU test - Windows is up to 3 times faster than Linux.

              Also of note for that particular site, when they want to claim the Linux driver is faster, they often compare against Windows 7, which is pretty meaningless when you are testing against the latest Linux.

              Whilst Linux is to some degree catching up, the vast majority of hardware / drivers / uses are between marginally to significantly faster on Windows 8.1

    3. cmannett85

      Re: Great...

      "there will be not a single piece of Vulkan-using software that won't crash horribly on occasion"

      So like all software then...

  2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

    Naysayers in my comment section?

    Amateurs, please!

    Gb2 XBox 360

    (And too cheap to buy the docs? I laugh.)

  3. Alistair
    Coat

    Waiting for Blizz to pull all this into WoW

    *and* nvidia to port it to my video card's driver.

    Oh, wait, you mean I need a new video card?

    1) Yes I'm thrilled - I run WoW in wine on linux in -opengl - it actually runs better in opengl on both linux and windows if you have a recent nvidia card and stay current on the drivers.

    It will just take 4 or 5 years to get into production as far as I can tell. I do hope its sooner, and *wont* require new video cards.

    2) I rather seriously expect that you will need the 'latest and greatest' of hardware to take advantage.

    3) have a SAS application we're considering GPU cards for -- hopefully we can find a coder to take advantage.

    1. Steven Raith

      Re: Waiting for Blizz to pull all this into WoW

      It'll run on anything OpenGL ES 3.1 compliant from what I've read elsewhere (which suggests hardware tesselation support it's necessary?) providing the vendor implements it correctly, so that'll be a Geforce 400 or newer.

      Not entirely sure about the AMD side, but given Vulkan contains a fair chunk of Mantle in it, I'd hope they'd make the effort to get it working nicely.

      Steven R

      1. Dave 126 Silver badge

        Re: Waiting for Blizz to pull all this into WoW

        AMD are likely to back this because, like Mantle, it reduces the load on the CPU. This suits AMD because their CPUs aren't as quick as Intel's.

        1. Steven Raith

          Re: Waiting for Blizz to pull all this into WoW

          AMD are likely to back it as they wrote large chunks of the core code - Vulkan had the entire Mantle stack donated to it, to be done with as Khronos pleased.

          What I meant was, I can't recall which AMD cards are at what OGL level, but further news suggests anything from an HD5xxx series onwards will be Vulkan compliant.

          So no, no new GPU to take advantage of Vulkan enabled engines like Source 2...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Waiting for Blizz to pull all this into WoW

      "It will just take 4 or 5 years to get into production as far as I can tell"

      Meanwhile Direct-X 12 will be out on PCs and the Xbox One this year apparently... Vulcan is another me too effort - and probably too late to matter much.

  4. Ugotta B. Kiddingme

    Sheesh!

    Come on OpenGL guys, keep it straight. KLINGONS come from Khronos, not Vulkans... [/eyeroll]

  5. John Sanders
    Windows

    Meanwhile in Linux land

    MESA is still at OpenGL 3.1 level...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Meanwhile in Linux land

      Erm.. No - Mesa supports OpenGL 3.3 completely, and most of 4.2 (http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/tree/docs/GL3.txt)

      Want more? Fix the patent system.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Couldn't come soon enough!

    So much of the code in realtime 3D apps/games is geared around overcoming the bottleneck of pushing Vert coordinates from the CPU to the GPU. That bottleneck is essentially why you often see very large static meshes, with very few moving parts (in comparison).

    Think of it like a client and sever... Every time a coordinate is updated in a game this data must be copied from the CPU to the GPU so it can be rendered. (Because memory is not shared). There are lots of clever tricks that people use to push or hide this limitation, like packing several bits of data into a single 32 bit float, or repeating the same set of verts and just pushing the floats for a transformation matrix, pooling buffers, etc, etc.

    But to be able to directly change memory will be a massive massive leap forward. You'd be surprised just how muchand how many of the current games you play are limited by that data pushing constraint.

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