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0 pointsroblabla6y ago0 comments

Vulkan was never meant to be directly used by people who “just want to draw stuff”. It was meant to give engine developers the tools required to squeeze more performance out of the GPUs.

This is a case of working as designed. The people trying to directly use Vulkan in their games without any middleware layer are just generally wrong here.

Regarding extensions, this is just what happens when you specify something that keeps evolving - there’s no getting around this. What you can do to minimise the complexity is decide to require certain extensions once they’ve been around for long enough. That’s what everyone does.

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pjmlp6y ago

It would help if Khronos would promote an API for people who “just want to draw stuff”, given that OpenGL 5.0 will never happen most likely and those people don't want to be stuck with OpenGL 4.6 forever.

That is not what everyone does, because Vulkan gets new extensions updates almost every week.

loup-vaillant6y ago

> It would help if Khronos would promote an API for people who “just want to draw stuff”

Would it?

What you really want is a stable API to talk to the hardware. It doesn't really matter if the API is nigh unusable, as long as it is stable. Only when such stability is reached, can we reliably build stuff on top of it. Including a "just draw stuff" engine.

We could for instance re-implement Flash on top of Vulkan. Such a thing wouldn't need a standard body to get done and be usable by a wide range of people. (Though in this particular case, we'd likely have some standard body involved anyway, since there's already so much Flash code out there.)

pjmlp6y ago

So where do OpenGL developers move to, when 4.6 moves into "this legacy thing we would like to drop"?

DiabloD36y ago

You implement OpenGL as a middleware that speaks Vulkan.

Basically, ANGLE it, but for desktop OpenGL instead of GLES.

As an aside, Google is adding a Vulkan backend for ANGLE, and Microsoft seems to be adding a DX12 (which is basically DXVulkan) backend (to match the DX11 backend they gave Google) at some point in the future.

So, GLES, in its entirety, is now a community supported, open source, Vulkan middleware. No reason why we can't do that with desktop GL too.

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pjmlp6y ago

That is not what everyone does, because Vulkan gets new extensions updates almost every week.

loup-vaillant6y ago

> It would help if Khronos would promote an API for people who “just want to draw stuff”

Would it?

pjmlp6y ago

So where do OpenGL developers move to, when 4.6 moves into "this legacy thing we would like to drop"?

DiabloD36y ago

You implement OpenGL as a middleware that speaks Vulkan.

Basically, ANGLE it, but for desktop OpenGL instead of GLES.

So, GLES, in its entirety, is now a community supported, open source, Vulkan middleware. No reason why we can't do that with desktop GL too.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse