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Is Vulkan the future? - jomoengineer - 01-20-2020

Over the holidays I did a bit of searching and trying to view anything I could regarding OpenGL ES on YouTube, but this search always seemed to land on a vid about Vulkan. Most of the actual OpenGL ES vids or tutorials I found seemed to be focused on Android.  I suppose this does show a need for a book such as "The Fundamentals of C/C++ Game Programming"


With regards to Vulkan, one particular vid I found was from GDC 2018 titled "Getting explicit: How Hard is Vulkan really?" where a  group of folks from various studios described their adventure with Vulkan.  They all seemed to admit that it did take a bit more work to get something going with Vulkan, but once they had it up and running it was relativity easy to other functions working.  The interesting part was from the Dustin Land from id Software where he mentioned that idTech has been completely ported to Vulkan and they are no longer using OpenGL outside of legacy support.

The panel at the end of the vid was even more interesting where most of the folks on the panel mentioned that for any open positions that they had, they had no openings for OpenGL and are only looking for those with Vulkan experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R23npUCCnw


There is even an effort to get Vulkan support with the Raspberry Pi 4 and the VideoCore IV GPU but not much real progress here.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raspberry-Pi-Vulkan-Code-Drop

The NVIDIA Jetson Nano does have Vulkan 1.1 support and seems to work fine with some of the samples I have found. 
https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-products

Although there is a Mali-T760 support with Vulkan 1.0, I have yet to get it to work with the Tinkerboard running Armbian with manual installed Mali drivers.

It does seem like the industry is moving toward Vulkan so It will be interesting to see how this all progresses as more support is added to Vulkan.


RE: Is Vulkan the future? - Brian Beuken - 01-20-2020

My own pitiful attempts to get Vulkan working have just been frustrating, and at the moment I can't see the real benefit over OpenGL in any flavour. DirectX 12 is also painful stressful to use.

I can't honestly say at this point I know enough to give a valid opinion, but I do hear that it is being adopted more and more in engines, so will take hold soon. But what advantage it has over well written OpenGL  currently escapes me.


RE: Is Vulkan the future? - jomoengineer - 01-20-2020

From what I have seen the main advantage with Vulkan is that it utilizes less of the CPU and takes advantage of features in the GPUs. Most of vids I had seen just kept referencing that OpenGL (ES) is old and a new way of thinking is needed. It does a take bit more processing power to show any performance advantage though. For the Ray Tracing, a NVIDIA RTX is needed so that makes it a bit limiting.

They still do not have full Metal support at this point but are working on it.

Since it a bit more lower level than OpenGL, it does take more work to do the same thing OpenGL does.

It is supposed to be cross platform, so there is no ES version for embedded systems. A good example is Adobe Premiere Pro Rush which was built with Vulkan.

Vulkan is certainly something to keep an eye on.


RE: Is Vulkan the future? - Brian Beuken - 02-02-2020

its on the way

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/vulkan-raspberry-pi-first-triangle/


RE: Is Vulkan the future? - jomoengineer - 02-02-2020

Yeah, i had seen the mention of support for the VideoCore VI so it is cool that the RasPi folks are working on it now.

From what I am seeing, the push is to move new development from OpenGL(ES) to Vulkan since it is cross platform.

For the RasPi, it does seem like it will be sometime before we see any real libs to use though.