Vulkan

[swamp 1,017]

I'm starting to see a lot more people talking about how Vulkan (formerly OpenGL) will make Linux the new preferred platform for gaming. I personally don't believe it will ever mean that much attention to Linux, no matter how much I'd like to see it.

• How does this make Linux better and not multi-platform in general?
• What benefit does Linux get from Vulkan over Windows?
• Why should anyone consider switching to Vulkan with DirectX 12 right around the corner?
• Is DirectX being proprietary a good enough reason for game developers to consider Vulkan?

I'm curious to hear what you guys think about this.

[Btcc22 691]

OpenGL has been due a revamp for a long time; it was supposed to be done years ago but didn't materialise. There's just so much cruft and legacy code that they really needed a clean sheet.

 

Given that the specs aren't public, I think it's way too early to pit D3D12 and Vulkan against each other but it would please me if Vulkan ended up being at least as good as D3D12 and as widely and well supported. As things stand, D3D is just a better API than OpenGL in all but its proprietary nature.

 

Writing cross-platform code isn't that difficult and having an equally-as-good or better API supported on every major platform could be a nice boost to gaming on Linux and Mac. Having no good reason to pick D3D over Vulkan would just be one less barrier.

 

Having said all that, again, its too early to judge. Vulkan sounds like it'll be more work to get up and running initially, in exchange for more power and flexibility. I can understand why they went down this path though. If you want a pretty good post that explains the rationale, see this one.

Edited March 12, 2015 by Btcc22