Comment by nomel
2 days ago
No, the main issue is a fundamentally different rendering pipeline (tile based deferred rendering) that makes "Vulkan support" a conceptually difficult square peg in a round hole problem, since everything is made for immediate rendering, like all the other mainstream GPUs use.
Loads of GPUs with Vulkan support use TBDR. The Adreno GPU in the Steam Frame's SnapDragon SoC, for one.
There is also a Vulkan driver for the M1/M2 GPU already, used in Asahi Linux. There's nothing special about Apple's GPU that makes writing a Vulkan driver for it especially hard. Apple chooses to provide a Metal driver only for its own reasons, but they're not really technical.
No. For best performance, you have to batch your calls/memory access patterns with TBDR in mind. Dropping in a Steam PC game (indy, AA/AAA) game render pipeline, specifically optimized for Nvidia/AMD/Intel, to a TBDR GPU, is going to give poor performance. That's the context of this discussion. Round pegs DO fit into square holes, you just have to make sure the hole is bigger than would normally be necessary. ;)
Steam frame is more for streaming PCVR than running existing PCVR games natively.
The entire reason vulkan didn't ship with dynamic rendering and instead had its entire renderpass system is because it was to support tile based rendering.
I'm aware it supports tile based rendering. I put it in quotes because support doesn't mean performance. Good TBDR performance requires the developer/engine have the concept of TBDR in mind. 99.9% of the PC games out there do/did NOT have TBDR in mind.