At this year’s SIGGRAPH event, Valve’s Dan Ginsburg talked a bit about the new upcoming APIs that will offer low-level access to the GPU and CPU, thus improving performance in games, DirectX 12 and Vulkan.
Dan has been working for Valve on Vulkan since its inception and claimed (1:40:01 in the video at the end of the article) that there is really not much reason for developers to ever create a DX12 back end for their games, and stated that Vulkan is far superior than in DX12 in various areas.
“Unless you are aggressive enough to be shipping a DX12 game this year, I would argue that there is really not much reason to ever create a DX12 back end for your game. And the reason for that is that Vulkan will cover you on Windows 10 on the same class of hardware and so much more from all these other platforms and IHVs that we’ve heard from. Metal is single platform, single vendor, and Vulkan… we are gonna have support for not only Windows 10 but Windows 7, Windows 8 and Linux.”
Dan concluded that all IHVs are making great progress on drivers, believes that we’ll super rapid adaption, that Vulkan is the best choice for next-generation titles, and that he’s really proud of the current state of the API.
Do note that Dan is working on Vulkan and has every right to promote this particular API. And while we do have to agree that Vulkan seems a better choice for developers since it’s not restricted to one specific OS, it’s still behind as more and more developers announce support for DX12.
In the following video, you can also take a glimpse at the first Vulkan benchmark called Alien Beam (1:45:47).
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Vulkan FTW!
I will support/prefer Vulkan any day over DX12…
also will work on windows 7/8.1
avaiable too for Mac Os / OSx – PS4 and linux
Interesting concept.
Well its obvious vulkan will have more support. But for PC dev’s what’s easier and cheaper? The move from 11 to 12 or 11 to vulkan? Remember the fastest and easiest approach will win
Another factor is popularity. The most popular API is DirectX which means it’s the one developers are most familiar with.
I think its safe to assume that Half-Life 3 will be using only Vulkan whenever it releases and won’t be coming to the Xbox One and maybe not even on the PS4 as well.
Not sure where did you get the idea that it won’t come to consoles. It’s not like I want it, I just don’t see any problems with it.
lets hope it comes with Vulcan and not the next one 😛
well you guys think its coming out i dont.
It isn’t late to the game, it’s there already, but most devs can’t be arsed to use it.
you mean vulkan is 100% done today, looking online it says late 2015?
No, I mean the knowledge that lead to the creation of Vulkan was/is available, just didn’t get put to good use because is more convenient to lick M$ @rse.
So according to what should developers implement Vulkan when its specification isn’t done and API is still under development? The knowledge you mentioned is not enough. You must have closed specification to avoid re-implementations in the future because every re-implementation cost money.
What am I saying is that Devs should get behind it just like they should get behind OpenGL for example. It isn’t getting support because isn’t ready yet, it is because it’s “quick and dirty” to stick to the exclusivity of DX SDK no matter what.
DX isn’t better by default, it’s just convenient.
And we aren’t going anywhere if we keep depending on M$ for something.
I’m not judging DX or comparing it to Vulkan. My point is, that it’s not perspective to use API which implementation is not closed (in meaning at least first version). It’s not about quick and dirty. BTW youa are using word developers like it’s one closed group with access to everything which is not true. The most of them probably don’t have access to actual Vulkan API because it’s still under development. We have to wait until the first official version is done. Than we would expect it’s adoption by the most important game engines like UE 4, Unity, etc. And after that it will be on developers who use these engines, which API will be used in customer releases of their games. Vulkan is just not prepared for that right now.
More action… less talk.
So you rather have a APi that is stuck to Windows 10 sh’tty a$$, then a API that can work on ALL PLATFORMS. Yeah, complain more about it.
Dude I been reading these Low lvl API articles for years… It’s time for the freaking games all ready and not these pissing matches that are not showing any of this performance they want to bla bla bla about.
You’re missing the point. We don’t know the actual performance of either API, but already the fact that Vulkan is not tide down to just Windows 10 is a serious/major win in comparison to DX.
I know the freaking point and I know what Vulkan is all about.
And keep this in mind. It won’t take off if all we get is talk and no Action. MS controls the PC market. They control the fact that Dev’s use DX. Until KGroup makes big moves. Nobody is going to give a F about it. So how about Valve STFU and make some games with Vulkan. Show off some demo’s of BIG GAMES. Until then it’s all talk.
Every single version of DirectX has been tied to Windows. The cross-platform argument is weak given how many people game on Linux and Mac OS X. The fact is, Windows is the best OS for gaming and it’s here to stay. I highly doubt Vulkan will take off given how many people use Windows.
Also, Windows 10 adoption is good. It’s even better with PC gamers. Most developers are going to cater to the largest common denominator.
I see you’re quite biased though so none of this will change a damn thing in your mind. “Windows 10 sh’tty a$$” Hahaha! Keep dreaming about Vulkan. It’s pretty much dead on arrival.
Its funny you ask for that when you know Microsoft is pushing developers to make games for this “DirectX” aberration. You can compare this situation to any other outside gaming, why we are still using cars that works with gasoline instead of electricity? Because corporate greed. Obviously Microsoft will not support any other API that could make some people to move away from Windows, if they have to pay or give money to AAA developers to not support Vulcan and make the games exclusive to Windows, they will.
At the same time MS don’t give a F’K about PC gaming. If they Gave a F’K about PC gaming we would not see timed exclusives just for Xbox1. I mean come on Xbox1 get’s games 1st and PC 2nd? F’K MS they are only interested in Xbox1. And F’K you if you are a PC gamer.
Yet people are to stupid to see that. So they suck off MS for DX12 games. Yet DX12 was mainly only made to make Xbox1 catch up to PS4 Performance if not go past it in games.
And Developers are paid by Publishers to stay on the Ball with DX. So until the likes of Valve with KGroup make Big moves. PC gamer’s will continue to get S$$T on.
we hope to get some xbox games ti win10 but u never know 😀
they kinda give a f’ about pc gaming since many of their sales of windows are for that but they sell more xboxs so they give more f’s about that
i still dont get why tomb raider 1.5 needs dx12.
I did not know it was DX12… lol must be to give Xbox1 a advantage to make the game run 60 fps at 1080p.
Yes, Tomb Raider is potentially the first full Dx12 game. A hint from Phil’s tweet a while back being asked when full Dx12 games will be launched and stated the end of year 2015.
aaaah I see so 1st DX12 game will be on their precious console… Good for MS… Good for them..
It makes sense, I would say it would be a waste of time to create the first one for PC since it has no direct effect on …profits. ;D
MS tried to get in to the living with PCs then HTPCs then Xbox1. Each time it doesn’t work. They are really after a 1 stop shop for movies, games and entertainment. I have an Amazon Firestick for movies, Steam for games and iTunes for music. I use MS for Windows and Office…
why we are still using cars that works with gasoline instead of electricity? Because corporate greed.
The propaganda’s been effective, apparently.
We’re driving gasoline-powered vehicles because they’re less expensive to purchase and operate and they perform better. When someone produces an electric vehicle that beats traditional fuels in cost and performance, consumers will switch.
(By the way, the electricity still has to be produced somewhere; how much pollution are you really avoiding? And have you noticed that your so-called environmentalists vomit vast quantities of pollution traveling around the world?
They’re playing you.)
haha relax and btw so u know u do more harm to the earth by eating meat than driving a w/e car (and yes a gasoline car vs an electric car is WAY more harmful) since the meat industry is the highest source of polution in all of earth
the meat industry is the highest source of polution in all of earth
In what way(s)?
carbon dioxine 😉 also uses x9 more water and veggies (food for animals(unless its processed animal wastes) ) and that could feed all people few times over 🙂
Carbon dioxide? You’re a polluter, too, then.
And think about what you’re saying: If you deny that “x9 more water and veggies” to the animals, then they all die.
nice arguments
to the animals they gonna get slaughtered for you to eat, they gonna die if u do not feed them? really? haha nice one ty nice laugh
you are also getting played.
Nope, you’re getting played. You obviously have no clue of how things are. Electric cars will truly be pollution free til we stop using rechargeable batteries and instead something along the lines of a compact fusion energy engine. Til’ then you’re kidding yourself.
It doesn’t look like you read my comment.
What evidence do you have of that?
No one do the switch because oil is what rules the world. Eletric cars are expensive because no government would be crazy to give up on the support that the majority of the cars and oil companies provide to invest in them.
So, it’s not “corporate greed,” but reality.
Maybe not corporate greed specifically but a much more nasty and overwhelming type of greed.
Do you mean that avoiding wasting the fruits of one’s labor is a “much more nasty and overwhelming type of greed”?
fruits of one’s labor.
Riiiight.
Riiiight.
So, you don’t deserve that for which you’ve worked?
Shame to those would be MS sellout developers/programmers. Not like I will be supporting them in any way. We all know DX 12 can work on Win 7. Go team Vulkan/Linux!!!!
Go and play with your command lines in Linux. I’m busy playing my thousands+ of games on “Sh**ty a*$” Windows. You’ll never get me to Linux as a gamer.
like i told him, GET OVER WITH IT.
so i can figure out what to buy.
Well since Windows 10 doesn’t really have a sh’tty a$$ I guess that makes it alright. If you don’t own a gaming console what is the serious gaming alternative to the Windows platform? It certainly isn’t MAC or LINUX.
First of all Windows 10 does suck, I mean come on, you know it does, admit it. And second of all, the only reason why Wondows has all the games is because of their monopoly. You act as if Windows is the only one that can do it. You know how devs are, they are always running after the biggest market.
First of all Windows 10 doesn’t suck, I mean come on, you know it doesn’t, admit it. And second of all, the only reason why Wondows has all the game is because of their great and wonderful platform.
There will be a lot of games on Vulcan, sadly any of those games would be the AAA sh ! t(games) people love.
So no Fifa, no COD, no Assasins Creed…
“Valve is all talk and very little action”
As MS, SONY aint the very same.
oh sony is full of crap but atleast they do something with it even if it is literally half of what is promised.
haha…” even if it is literally half of what is promised.”
haha…
yes GET OVER WITH IT.
so i can figure out what to buy.
People will get hooked if they’ll announce HL3 or L4D3. Dota 2 and CS:GO also will be most likely using it in the future.
MS could do the same, but of all games, they decided to re-master Gears of War, which was already on PC many years ago. Unbelievable.
I doubt you would be saying this if this was an Nvidia presentation.
Yes I would… Btw Async was 1st used in OpenGL and was 1st shown off on 400 GTX GPU’s and Intel HD 3000 igpu’s. At the time only the 6500/6800 AMD gpu’s were only on the market and did terrible at the CPU/GPU Asynchronous Buffer Transfers
Sorry Dan. That’s not what other developers are saying. Most are saying the complete opposite. Developers are already on their way in making DX12 games. Thanks for marketing commercial.
Bullsh’t, no developer is saying that. DX12 is only on W10, whereas Vulkan can be used on everything. But nice try, fanboy.
Well check Dice’s statement about DX12.
DX12 is already winning against Vulkan, that is obvious.
Umm, no its not, far more platforms will use Vulkan for gaming that DX12, that’s obvious
Dice said that by the end of 2016 all their games will support DX12.
So there you have it, the proof that you are wrong.
Its still behind as more developers announce DX12 support? Really? Is that the best you got? I swear people can be so petty and so side taking. What I want to know, is it really better. In other words, does it perform better?
Late to the game? So nobody cares whats best just whats first to the game? We reasoning.
Lol, Vulkan is only good for mobile crossplatform trash, aka the majority of indie games.
And DX12 is good for Windows 10 trash. Vulkan is useable on all platforms while Dx12 is locked to only Windows 10, hence why MS wanted to give it away to try and give it a fighting chance. But W10 is garbage! And mobile platforms are the future, not Windows, and notice how hard MS is trying to emulate them.
Except DX12 has WORKING tech demos (recompiled kite,inflitrator, ue4), and an API overhead test, AND a game which actually uses a DX12 feature (async compute). What does Khronos have? All talk.
Its not like W10 is spyware trash. Once you disable the data logging, and the updates, stick to branch updates only, there is a great OS hidden. Anway enjoy your old retundant linux and stick to indie trash. I’ll enjoy my AAA and make use of the 2000$ poured into my PC, not play solitaire grade games with a 5000$ PC.
??bile is the future? For AAA gaming no. AAA gaming is on pc and consoles and will continue be this way forever. Mobie are only for some kiidy casual games. If it was the future then why sony and ms releeased new consoles in 2013 and why we are getting new gaming pcs and accesories evry year?
Who f*cking gives a rats äss over what API is used, all i care about is which one gives me the highest framerate and best visual effects. Everyone can start trash talking each other once they’ve both showed results.
You know, Vulcan can bring any game to many platforms, you cant argue with that. But people feels special when they have “exclusivities”. PS4 owners feels special and better that the rest of the mankind because “Bloodborne”, XBONE because Halo, and now for some reason some PC gamers does the same because DX12. I dont get it, if Vulcan could make that I can still play the latest games with the best graphics on Windows 7, its more than welcomed for me. With DX 12, its moving to a new OS I dont feel comfortable with because M$ said so…
He seems salty. Vulkan might be better or not, but it will eventually still loose to DX12 in popularity.
i hope everybody adopt vulkan and devs start using it, at least they didn’t wrote EXCLUSIVE all over it.
isn’t that the exact same thing some people were saying about openGL for decades?
OpenGL never ran substantially better and was often lagging when it comes to supporting standard features.
what i like about Vulkan its that will work on all OS even on 7/8.1.
Sorry i like Windows 10 but at this moment have some serious issue with recent drivers from Nvidia and you can’t get back to older drivers or iCafe drivers so thats why i am staying with Windows 8.1 for better performance and stability
No issues here. It’s your end.
sadly its Windows 10 !
my end works great with windows 8.1 and i cafe drivers !
20%+ FPS boost over Windows 10
Either disable windows update, or disable driver updates (tricky, infact insanely tricky to pull off). Otherwise wave 2 builds have rock solid performance, and finally memory compression. It feels like I got a free ram/vram upgrade.
Yay, keep Win 7/8.1 alive. Who needs progress! /s
F’ you dan, f’ Valve garbage
Could this be because VALVE’S Steam OS doesn’t support DX12? Hmmm. Sounds fishy to me son.
Linux doesn’t support any DX, don’t know why you singled out 12 there.
Yea. I hate how DX12 is W10 only. He has a good point.
Now we need some games running on Vulkan to eyewitness the superiority of this api!
Games are far from it. Right now DX12 has 3 tech demos recomplied via UE4, a game which uses Async Compute, and an Overhead test. What does vulkan have? Charts and only talk.
#SteamOSftw
Its ok. Gaming development aint dying until end of this year…so VULKAN has a lot of time to catch up and surpass it.
And for PC gaming good…I hope VULKAN wins…
As MS only does care about Xbox gaming.
“Halo, Forza, Scalebound, Quantum?
MS: “nope…not for you yours stink master race! “
no one wants to force linux and s**ty win10 doesnt mean s**ty windows. do you see that ALL PLATFORMS in his comment ?
I’d prefer devs support Vulcan, but keep in mind DX12 is also used on Xbox One, so I imagine that’s what a lot of major publishers will choose.
Idk why all the hate for DX12 because it is Win10 only, if you remember DX10 was Vista only on Release -_- I wish Vulcan all the best , but i think it is way to late for them. DX will take big part or whole pc market before you even notice.
Vulkan is coming like a storm over the ocean. Time is irrelevant.
Oh promising, so when is it releasing. Till then what are we supposed to do, so dx12 it is.
People don’t even have DX 12 so waiting it is….might as well go with Vulkan since it will run on all OS, even Win10…you can use both….
Thank AMD
clearly Vulkan is the best choice. unfortunately popularity depends on the developers. if more developers onto DX12, how good vulkan is, will be useless
Not if the majority of customers/demographic don’t have Win10. The industry is already backing Vulkan. Look up the list of who is involved…Blizzard, EA, Valve, Pixar, Nvidia, AMD, Android just to name a few. The choice has been made, Vulkan Specification is nearly complete and ready to go.
good luck to nvidia with VULKAN
openGL games suffer on nvidia cards already
Anything that means more Mad Max or Metal Gear V (in terms of optimization) and less Mortal Kombat X or Arkhman Knight, the better.
Magician? Remind me of the last time a DirectX version brought a feature that is now in all games. Oh wait, you can’t. Barely any games use tesselation to this day. All we see are alleged performance improvements that fail to materialize because console ports are still built on DX9. Vulkan might fail but DX12 WILL fail (to bring anything new into games).
“Water, hair, clothes, grass/vegetation, rocks etc can all use tessellation and do in fact water is 100% tessellated.”
Water is a 2D surface + more or less complex shader applied that makes it look 3D from certain angles. There is no tesselation involved at all in most games. Crysis used a shader and most games have inferior water to Crysis 1 still. Crysis 2 used the same shader until the DX11 update. Then they made the water tesselated geometry and the result was that performance plummeted while the water looked just about the same. Crysis 3 then used tesselation to make faces slightly rounder. You’ll only notice this in screenshots though. I’m using Crytek as an example because they have a history of shilling for DirectX so if anyone uses DX features you’d think it would be them and yet no “beyond DX9” feature ever improved visuals OR performance in a Crytek game.
The main problem with tesselation is that it fixes something that wasn’t broken. Polycount has continued to go up since tesselation was introduced, to the point where what devs thought they would need tesselation for in 2009 can now be done without tesselation. And more detail than we already have isn’t apparent to the player, or at least it is less apparent than other improvements. Even in open world games polycount is not the main bottleneck anymore.
Tesselation is a theorist’s feature. People love to talk about what it could do but when it comes to shipping a game noone actually does anything with it. If you know of a game where tesselation is used efficiently (!) and makes a real visual difference then provide a source. I don’t think you can, it’s all just marketing.
Speaking of which, then you listed tons of other features without naming a single game. Great to know all these ideas are being worked on by someone out there but where’s a game that puts them to use?
“Hope AMD support 12_1 features in the 400 series so be much higher chances to have much better effects and raytraced shadows.”
Yeah, the 400 series. Which will become relevant target hardware for games when, 2020? But oh wait, by then we’ll have Win12 coupled with DX13 and the scam continues. Again, that’s theorist talk. You think because there’s a GPU out there that supports a feature someone will make a game with that feature. But games are actually made for the majority of gaming PCs. Most 2017 games will still run on DX11, and few of them will use tesselation.
Vulkan only has a shot if it simplifies things for devs. Every new version of DX adds a bunch of clutter that noone ends up bothering with. If Vulkan can offer a way out of THAT then I’m optimistic.
Yes because let’s trust something that’s based upon Mantle from AMD. AMD, the company that still can’t even get their own driver issues solved.
Show me the money. Don’t talk about what it will be like or what it could be like… AMD do that all the time and invariably their products fail to meet the hype on release. Stop talking about it and show me the freaking money.
F**k you M$.
i hope most game use vulcan since i love windows 8.1 than 10….
Valve is like the North Korea of the video game universe. All talk, no action.
They don’t make games anymore, as a result I could care less what their ‘expert’ says.
DX12 is the future of PC Gaming and any engine that embraces DX12 will benefit plain & simple.
I read a rumor Valve still has instructions to reject Microsoft due to Gabe’s shady past there, as well as throwing trash at Windows 8 for no reason at all. They still haven’t posted system requirements for Steam recommending Windows 10 or 8.1.