Huh. I thought Vulkan was supposed to be the new portable 3D standard from Khronos. Now we need a new new standard on top of the old new standard?
Supposed to be, but Apple and probably parts of Microsoft don't want to play ball.
3D Portability Initiative
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Re: 3D Portability Initiative
#12Isn't the de-facto answer to this 'Unity' or 'Unreal Engine' ?
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, those aren't the answer. I think the article title is a bit too vague. They're talking about probability of 3D for hardware accelerated rendering. Unity and Unreal Engine are complete game engines. Hardware accelerated rendering gets a lot of focus on games, but is used quite a bit elsewhere; apps for video editing, sound editing, 3d content generation (Maya, Houdini), CAD (the originator of OpenGL), and I think the UI on all major platforms are all hardware accelerated. Also, many game studios write their own engines in house because those game engines are big and a lot of "baggage" can come with that.
Re: 3D Portability Initiative
#13Is Khronos going to implement something? Because AFAIK they only write the specs for others to implement them - so it is up to each vendor to make the API available. If Apple and Microsoft aren't going to implement Vulkan, why would they implement something else?
Re: 3D Portability Initiative
#14I'm not sure why Vulkan couldn't work on windows: isn't it mostly in the hands of driver developers (i.e. Nvidia/AMD) rather than Microsoft?
Re: 3D Portability Initiative
#15Is Khronos going to implement something? Because AFAIK they only write the specs for others to implement them - so it is up to each vendor to make the API available. If Apple and Microsoft aren't going to implement Vulkan, why would they implement something else?
It could be that this is a specification on how to implement some new API which operates consistently across the trio; i.e. "this function invokes X with parameters Y in Vulkan, X with Y in Metal, X with Y in DirectX" since that is no trivial task to do right and extensively.
But I'm sure that'd also include a real implementation.. so.. yeah.
Re: 3D Portability Initiative
#16Re: 3D Portability Initiative
#17I'm not sure why Vulkan couldn't work on windows: isn't it mostly in the hands of driver developers (i.e. Nvidia/AMD) rather than Microsoft?
Microsoft is not just Windows, some mobile devices and more importantly the XBox as well. On Windows, the GPU makers can (and do, at least partially/beta) provide drivers with Vulkan support, yes.
Re: 3D Portability Initiative
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Supposed to be, but Apple and probably parts of Microsoft don't want to play ball.
So why would they play ball with this?
I understand this proposal as suggesting to build an API that can be implemented efficiently on top of the vendor-specific APIs, without the vendors doing anything. E.g. similar to how the ANGLE library offers OpenGL on top of Direct3D APIs, for Windows PCs without/with bad OpenGL support.
Re: 3D Portability Initiative
#19Is Khronos going to implement something? Because AFAIK they only write the specs for others to implement them - so it is up to each vendor to make the API available. If Apple and Microsoft aren't going to implement Vulkan, why would they implement something else?
The point of Khronos was never to implement anything. It serves as a coordination mechanism among industry players, where the specs for OpenGL, Vulkan etc. are debated, hashed out and formalized.
I'm not exactly sure what your last question means. Vulkan will be available on Windows. I think it may be more correct to say NVidia/AMD/Intel are implementing Vulkan APIs in their graphics drivers and Windows will expose the API to applications. At the same time, they do seem to see benefits in creating other APIs at the same time, i.e. DirectX 12 and Metal. So we'll see I guess.
Re: 3D Portability Initiative
#20This sounds like a response to Apple's WebGPU initiative?[1]