Nice to see Intel, AMD, and Nvidia working together on an open standard. Do Apple's in-house GPUs have Vulkan support or would something like this have to go through a Vulkan-on-Metal translation layer instead?
The more the API situation evolves, I can see Google, Microsoft and Sony going all in all Vulkan for performance graphics. Only if MS is willing to part ways with D3D12
For cross platform I could see WebGPU + WebAssembly being the choice, where it abstracts both Metal and Vulkan.
That leaves Vulkan for Linux games. The 1% of the market that no savvy business person would touch with a 10 feet pole.
In Linux land, you'll meet people who feel suspicious of you in the first place for charging for your game, and people who have compiled their GPU driver from scratch, yet blame your game for being incompatible with their wrong compiler flags.
So for almost every game studio, there is no viable market where you could sell a Vulkan game.
This pretty much only leaves out macOS and iOS, for which a Vulkan compatibility layer exists anyways.
Nintendo uses Vulkan on the Switch, but they also have their own Metal like API, NVN.
Vulkan is mostly used by PC ports into the Switch.
Exclusive Switch titles do so via NVN, Unreal or Unity bindings to NVN, not Vulkan.
Android has optional support for Vulkan, since only flagship devices ever bothered to actually provide it, with Android 10 Google has changed it into compulsory API. So only Android 10 or later devices are guaranteed to actually have proper Vulkan drivers available.
Windows supports Vulkan on the classic OpenGL ICD driver model, not available in Win32 and UWP sandboxes, which only allow for DirectX based code.
This is the actual reality, and not that typical Vulkan sales pitch.
I like this. I will use the word "sales pitch" next time other companies does it, which to me is flat out lying. ( Cough; AV1 )
I still dont get why the hype on Vulkan, if you want Android support you will still need to use OpenGL for the majority of devices, given their slow replacement cycle and I doubt it will be mainstream anytime soon.
That would limit Vulkan as a good cross-platform choice to the few developers that do not use Unity or Unreal Engine under the hood.
Vulkan is a PC thing, without any impact on consoles, even on the Swift, NVN is what gets mostly used unless it is a PC port.
Also the subject of this thread, Ray Tracing, was developed by Microsoft and NVidia together and took two years to reach Vulkan.
How long will Vulkan now take to adopt shader meshes?
On top of that, Vulkan is much hard to actually use in practice. It's much more low-level than OpenGL and DirectX.
this might be why WebGL2 never really shipped on Safari. They added a flag but there is no actual implementation.
If this actually the reason, I don't know, corrections welcomed.