Comment by pjmlp
1 day ago
Vulkan only exists because DICE and AMD were nice enough to contribute their Mantle work to Khronos, otherwise they would still be wondering what OpenGL vNext should look like.
1 day ago
Vulkan only exists because DICE and AMD were nice enough to contribute their Mantle work to Khronos, otherwise they would still be wondering what OpenGL vNext should look like.
> otherwise they would still be wondering what OpenGL vNext should look like.
And the world would have been a better place. All we needed in OpenGL 5 was a thread-safe API with encapsulated state and more work on AZDO and DSA. Now, everyone has to be a driver developer. And new extensions are released one-by-one to make Vulkan just a little more like what OpenGL 5 should have been in the first place. Maybe in 10 more years we'll get there.
I used to be a big OpenGL advocate all the way up to Long Peaks, eventually I came to realise it is another committee driven API, and writing a couple of plugin backends was never that much of a deal.
Just see the shading mess as well, with GLSL lagging behind, most devs using HLSL due to its market share, and now Slang, which again was contributed by NVidia.
Also the day LunarG loses out their Vulkan sponsorship, the SDK is gone.
Oh, I agree that OpenGL 3 and 4 were absolute disasters, D3D11 is right there for how to do this mostly correctly, and OpenGL doesn't even stand close by comparison. But by the time 4.5 and 4.6 came out, things were going in the right direction. And then Vulkan killed the momentum.
Imagine a OpenGL which takes inspiration from D3D11 and dares to be even more user-friendly and intuitive. Instead, we got Vulkan, yay.
1 reply →
I can't imagine the world without Vulkan because while it is a lot lower level and more difficult to work with, it makes things like DXVK not only possible but quite performant. Gaming on Linux has been accelerated super strongly by projects like that.
Gaming on Linux is doing just fine on Android/Linux.
The problem is making gaming on GNU/Linux profitable, Vulkan will not fix that, while Proton is not a solution that will work out long term.
7 replies →
Hard disagree. OpenGL state management was unfixable if it had to keep compatibility with OpenGL 2. That's why OpenGL 3/4 ended up being such huge messes.
The main problem with Vulkan is that Apple decided to go with its own Metal API, completely fracturing the graphics space.
All alternatives to Vulkan predate it, and it only exists thanks to Mantle's gift.
2 replies →
IMO without SPIR-V, OpenGL 5 would still be at a disadvantage in many scenarios. It's possible we would have gotten widespread support for it even without Vulkan, though.
OpenGL supports SPIR-V: https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/SPIR-V