Vulkan, an alternative to OpenGL and DirectX has been released

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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I just wanted to mention in the midst of this back-and-forth that there is support from major players: http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/03/04/gdc-2015-valve-announces-source-2-engine

That alone, if you’ve been paying attention to the moves Valve have been making, should be enough to make you confident in the API being a success. Valve seems to every intention of moving away from the oppressive Microsoft ecosystem and to do that certain key aspects need to be in place. A solid alternative to DirectX on an open OS is one of them.

“We are extremely pleased at the industry’s rapid execution on the Vulkan API initiative. Due to Vulkan’s cross platform availability, high performance and healthy open source ecosystem, we expect to see rapid uptake by software developers, far exceeding the adoption of similar APIs which are limited to specific operating systems,” said Gabe Newell, co-founder and managing director, Valve.

Alternatively:

Arguably the most important consumer electronics and chip manufacturer of the moment are on board. The guys who told Qualcomm to keep their chips, made their own and now license the FinFET process to basically everyone.

“Samsung is excited about Vulkan’s launch today, which will help expand the gaming ecosystem across platforms,” said Tae-Yong Kim, vice president, mobile communication business, Samsung Electronics. “We have been working within Khronos to support an open standard that will enable high performance and cutting-edge technologies. Vulkan will provide a more exciting, immersive user experience for mobile gaming.”

Vulkan is based on what was Mantle, a low level AMD API which was cooked up to address issues with the DX11 pipeline holding back performance on newer hardware. Despite only mediocre penetration (probably because AMD can’t market for shit and I’m saying that as a fan) Microsoft responded by adapating DX12 to follow suit. Interestingly that API is also being plagued with issues, delays and drama. In AMD’s defense the primary partner for Mantle was DICE who make the Frostbite 3 Engine and subsequently any game that uses it has support for Mantle baked in. Those are reasonably impressive credentials.

I think it’s important to note that this is just AMD’s MO. They make something really awesome to open discourse and redress the balance of issues in the industry, then they give it away for free. Bullet, OpenCL, Mantle… We are open source and I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss AMD or the contributions they’ve made to the industry by calling those efforts a failure :stuck_out_tongue:

I, personally, would like to see Ton and the rest of the team actively involved in the development of the API and have it underpin our beloved Blender :slight_smile:

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AMD released beta driver with Vulcan support.

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I think blender will go vulcan…I’ve already seen so much to point to this interest…as far as not supporting old cards, that is silly, one of the first thing a lot of coders lean is to detect devices, and after that you can follow up with a simple switch case or something for fallback methods…sorry for probably restating the obvious, but I did only read the first page of this thread… like a good poster :slight_smile:

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There aren’t too many Blender developers and supporting on graphics API is already a pretty huge task. Right now, they are updating the OpenGL version just a little and it is an enormous amount of work. Vulkan itself is very different from OpenGL if you want to use all of its power. Vulkan is supposed to be used from multiple threads, which is in general not the case for OpenGL.
Having a switch may sound logical, but in practice it is not that easy, at least not if your intention is to use the graphics APIs as they are supposed to be used. This approach also has the overhead that multiple graphics APIs need to be maintained. This is a hell lot of work for just a few coders.

I am kind of hoping for Hydra, the soon to be released Pixar open source solution. It has OpenGL support and Vulkan support is on the roadmap. If Blender could change the viewport to Hydra, they might get Vulkan support almost for free in the future. Most likely it is going to be more complicated, but there is at least a chance for that.
Of course at the moment there is very little information about Hydra. It is being used on high end machines, but it is not known whether it can be used on older hardware at all. It is also unsure whether it could be adapted for the game engine in the future. There are a lot of question marks at the moment.