Hacker News Reader

Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

> Why not use the one supported by Google, and MS, Vulkan?

https://www.lunarg.com/faqs/microsoft-support-vulkan/

"Microsoft has not expressed intent to support Vulkan."

and the next sentence goes "However, there are well defined mechanisms by which IHVs can ship a Vulkan driver on any version of Windows. But it will be as it is the case now with OpenGL. That is, it is up to the application to negotiate with the implementation to install an appropriate Vulkan driver for the hardware that is on the machine."

Also "Vulkan is available on all versions of Windows that are on DirectX 12, so there is potentially some value to the developer community to having a single API that spans multiple Windows versions."

Vulkan is fully supported on Windows with semi-recent GPUs (e.g. its supported by Nvidia with Geforce 6xx - released in 2012!) by all vendors.

The article is only saying that MS defers what API is supported to GPU manufacturers. Its not supported by Xbox and Windows Phones, but Xbox is a very different market and no one cares about Windows Phone.

> by all vendors

NVIDIA and ATI are hardly "all" vendors I care about. I'm personally not interested in the big desktop PCs. YMMV of course. But I'm personally very against "winner takes it all" and I'd really like some more universal web API, especially one that consumes less power on the iOS devices.

Edit: the answer to the question below by sydd: I'm honestly and pragmatically interested in iOS and Apple devices, not Microsoft, and not the Google-controlled ones. All these comments are about Apple's proposal for a standard for Web. I'm with the ones having the smaller market share here. I'm still sad Opera Presto is no more. I consider such "smaller" players extremely important for the web.

Then which vendors do you care about from the Microsoft ecosystem (which this thread is about)? Vulkan is supported by Nvidia, AMD and Intel, I think this covers >99% of the Windows landscape. Windows phone? or Xbox? Hololens?

Intel does not support Vulkan. They had some beta drivers for devs to test on, but no further plans

This is not true. Intel has (unofficially?) said they will deliver production quality Vulkan drivers for their iGPUs. https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/developing-games-and...

Someone else mentioned that they don't care about Nvidia and AMD both advocating for Vulkan because I'm personally not interested in the big desktop PCs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan_(API)#Compatibility

In addition to Nvidia and AMD, Intel, Imagination Technologies, Qualcomm (!!!), and ARM support Vulkan. Hardware wise, there is absolutely no problem whatsoever.

Intel has only released beta/test drivers for Windows, and this was their statement as of August:

The current Plan Of Record is that Intel® is not supporting Vulkan on Windows drivers. The drivers that were made available on Developer.com are intended for Vulkan developers.

So, it is expected that some Vulkan drivers may not work for end users.

Intel GPUs power at least 50% of Windows PCs, and I'd guess the number is closer to 70%. Unless this situation changes, Vulkan is not the single cross-platform answer.

Windows 8 and older power more than half of Windows PCs, so Direct3D 12 is no more widely deployed than Vulkan.

It is, given that Vulkan only has quality drivers on Android 7, currently 0.7%, and GNU/Linux, currently 2% of the desktop market, as per Steam dashboard.

Windows 10 is at around 25% currently.

However, those Windows 7 and 8 machines with AMD and Nvidia GPUs do support Vulkan.

Yes, with these wonderful set of games:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_Vulkan_supp...

Versus these ones:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_DirectX_12_...

And game availability relates to GPU API support available at the platform... how exactly?

The fact that game studios decide to use one API or another is no factor in evaluating API availability. (Also note how many DX12 games not published by Microsoft are DX12 exclusives - that says something about Microsoft motives, but not about API qualities).

> And game availability relates to GPU API support available at the platform... how exactly?

When given the option, professional game developers choose the one that better helps them achieving their goals.

There's a reason why DX had almost zero adaptation outside games. Maybe it is not that good API, if you need to support your app for a few years too. Games are fire and forget.

Actually 2D and text rendering, WPF rendering, UWP Composition API, UI animation support.

All of them used by most desktop applications on Windows, including image, video and 3D editing applications.

Not explicitly. It is used by platform libraries that these application use. Given that they are provided by the platform vendor - the same that pushes DX - it's no wonder, that it was being pushed there.

CAD, GIS, or other applications that need to use 3D explicitly, on the other hand.... Basically only Autodesk ventured there, with 3ds Max and AutoCAD (since 2015).

Well, Autodesk products are market leaders, probably Catia is the only alternative.

There are actually many CAD packages, with different levels of complexity, from Siemens NX to VariCAD, plus myriads of domain-specific ones, like ArchiCAD.

For example, most of our customers prefer MicroStation, for some reason (no, we are not Bentley shop ;).

I'm sure you can see that 2/5 (approaching half) of the Direct3D 12 titles were published by Microsoft themselves.

And actually, by the numbers there are more titles on Vulkan than there are titles not released by Microsoft on D3D12.

Intel has (unofficially?) said they will deliver production quality Vulkan drivers for their iGPUs. https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/developing-games-and...

Thanks for providing the link. The relevant quotes:

"Vulkan support right now is for 6th Generation and newer products and we are targeting developers not consumers. Thus why the releases are beta and are listed in the Game Developer Zone and not anywhere else."

is full Vulkan support planned for consumers: "To my knowledge yes, but I do not know when and would not want to hazard a guess"

They don't need to support it, because the GPU vendors have done so in their drivers, so it works fine on Windows without Microsoft's assistance.

Not on UWP applications, which are the future.

They've been saying that for a few years, but nobody seems to be buying it. The store is still a wasteland of mobile-style shovelware, and none of the real Windows applications have made the jump, far as I have seen.

Many of the Windows 10 applications like the file explorer and Edge are UWP.

Also the majority of all the new OS APIs are UWP only.

I dontknow, what are you trying to prove? Its a fact that from the new, low-level APIs (Vulkan, Metal, DX 12) Vulkan has the most widespread support:

Vulkan: Its on most Windows PCs, most Linux PCs, on newer Android devices, and on the Nintendo Switch. Also there are rumours of the next PS going with Vulkan too.

DX12: most Windows PCs, XBox One.

Metal: iOS/OSX only.

So its clearly the future on the desktop market. Obviously it will take a few years for it to spread, since AAA game companies go for the proven solutions.

On mobile, we will see, I cant imagine Google adopting Metal or DX12, and Apple sadly seems to be sticking to their proprietary API.

> Vulkan: Its on most Windows PCs, most Linux PCs, on newer Android devices, and on the Nintendo Switch. Also there are rumours of the next PS going with Vulkan too.

The most Windows PCs have Intel cards, which only have a beta driver available.

The majority of AMD and NVidia owners with Vulkan support, are on Windows 10, which supports DX12 anyway.

Newer Android devices, means Android 7, which thanks to how update process works, a whooping 0.7% market share, composed of Google Pixel, Smasung S7 and LG v20.

Nintendo has added Vulkan support to Switch, but they are only testing waters, the actual API that allows to make full use of the available hardware is called NVN.

Sony, I really doubt it. The PS4 APIs, the successor of LibCGM is actually quite close to DX 12 and the PS 3 experience with OpenGL ES wasn't that great.

http://sandstormgames.ca/blog/tag/libgcm/

Vulkan is still catching up with DX12 for stuff like multi-GPU processing.

Linux PCs are just 2% on Steam, and drivers are kind of working, hardly a value proposition to make to most professional game studios.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynyO3O3zd3E

Reply on news.ycombinator.com