Comment by jsheard
2 months ago
Those requirements more or less line up with the introduction of hardware raytracing, and some major titles are already treating that as a hard requirement, like the recent Doom and Indiana Jones games.
2 months ago
Those requirements more or less line up with the introduction of hardware raytracing, and some major titles are already treating that as a hard requirement, like the recent Doom and Indiana Jones games.
Only if you're ignoring mobile entirely. One of the things Vulkan did which would be a shame to lose is it unified desktop and mobile GPU APIs.
On the contrary, I would say this is the main thing Vulkan got wrong and the main reason whe the API is so bad. Desktop and mobile are way too different for a uniform rendering API. They should be two different flavours with a common denominator. OpenGL and OpenGL ES were much better in that regard.
It is unreasonable to expect to run the same graphics code on desktop GPUs and mobile ones: mobile applications have to render something less expensive that doesn't exceed the limited capabilities of a low-power device with slow memory.
The different, separate engine variants for mobile and desktop users, on the other hand, can be based on the same graphics API; they'll just use different features from it in addition to having different algorithms and architecture.
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It is not unified, when the first thing an application has to do is to find out if their set of extension spaghetti is available on the device.
> One of the things Vulkan did which would be a shame to lose is it unified desktop and mobile GPU APIs.
In hindsight it really would have been better to have a separate VulkanES which is specialized for mobile GPUs.
Apparently in many Android devices it is still better to target OpenGL ES than Vulkan due to driver quality, outside Samsung and Google brands.
Mobile is getting RT, fyi. Apple already has it (for a few generations, at least), I think Qualcomm does as well (I'm less familiar with their stuff, because they've been behind the game forever, however the last I've read, their latest stuff has it), and things are rapidly improving.
Vulkan is the actual barrier. On Windows, DirectX does an average job at supporting it. Microsoft doesn't really innovate these days, so NVIDIA largely drives the market, and sometimes AMD pitches in.
Where do you think many DirectX features came from?
It has been mostly NVidia in collaboration with Microsoft, even HLSL traces back to Cg.
Eh, I think the jury is still out on whether unifying desktop and mobile graphics APIs is really worth it. In practice Vulkan written to take full advantage of desktop GPUs is wildly incompatible with most mobile GPUs, so there's fragmentation between them regardless.
It's quite useful for things like skia or piet-gpu/vello or the general category of "things that use the GPU that aren't games" (image/video editors, effects pipelines, compute, etc etc etc)
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I feel like it's a win by default. I do like to write my own programs every now and then and recently there's been more and more graphics sprinkled into them. Being able to reuse those components and just render onto a target without changing anything else seems to be very useful here. This kind of seamless interoperability between platforms is very desirable in my book. I can't think of a better approach to achieve this than the graphics API itself.
Also there is no inherent thing that blocks extensions by default. I feel like a reasonable core that can optionally do more things similar to CPU extensions (i.e. vector extensions) could be the way to go here.
I definitely disagree here. What matters for mobile is power consumption. Capabilities can be pretty easily implemented...if you disagree, ask Apple. They have seemingly nailed it (with a few unrelated limitations).
Mobile vendors insisting on using closed, proprietary drivers that they refuse to constantly update/stay on top of is the actual issue. If you have a GPU capable of cutting edge graphics, you have to have a top notch driver stack. Nobody gets this right except AMD and NVIDIA (and both have their flaws). Apple doesn't even come close, and they are ahead of everyone else except AMD/NVIDIA. AMD seems to do it the best, NVIDIA, a distant second, Apple 3rd, and everyone else 10th.
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If the APIs aren't unified, the engines will be, since VR games will want to work on both standalone headsets and streaming headsets
Doom was able to drop it and is now Steam Deck verified.
Little known fact, the Steam Deck has hardware ray tracing, it's just so weak as to be almost non-existent.