Outerra forum

Outerra Engine => Technology => Topic started by: zombie00 on February 16, 2016, 04:27:23 pm

Title: Vulkan is already among us!
Post by: zombie00 on February 16, 2016, 04:27:23 pm
So Vulkan is finally out, took them sometime, but if it delivers what it was promised, it should be more than worth the wait.
https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-releases-vulkan-1-0-specification

I was wondering if you guys (the dev team of Outerra) was going to implement it into the engine. If I'm not wrong, Vulkan was built around Mantle, so implementing Vulkan could come around with an improvement on the performance with AMD drivers (that perform sort of poorly with OpenGL).
Title: Re: Vulkan is already among us!
Post by: HiFlyer on February 16, 2016, 05:28:44 pm
So Vulkan is finally out, took them sometime, but if it delivers what it was promised, it should be more than worth the wait.
https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-releases-vulkan-1-0-specification

I was wondering if you guys (the dev team of Outerra) was going to implement it into the engine. If I'm not wrong, Vulkan was built around Mantle, so implementing Vulkan could come around with an improvement on the performance with AMD drivers (that perform sort of poorly with OpenGL).

I will be curious as to how this affects their ongoing performance testing.
Title: Re: Vulkan is already among us!
Post by: cameni on February 17, 2016, 02:41:03 am
We don't expect big performance gains from switching OT to Vulkan (not CPU bound), and even if we very much liked to switch to a clean modern API, it's hard to justify the switch that would take us several months. For us it's mainly the question if Vulkan can really bring in better quality drivers, so we'll follow it closely and evaluate it.

I will be curious as to how this affects their ongoing performance testing.

Our perf tests aren't struggling on the CPU side at all, it all seems to be on the GPU side. Similarly whole OT is rather GPU bound, and the agreement is that Vulkan won't help much here. However, since it's a simpler and more explicit model, the drivers *might* be better optimized. On the other hand, explicit model is more complex, and if coders start to emit bad code, vendors will likely try to optimize (https://twitter.com/nothings/status/699776486547415040) it in their drivers to gain over their competition ... that would be bad.


(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CbUg4_5WEAANwhc.jpg:large)
Title: Re: Vulkan is already among us!
Post by: HiFlyer on February 17, 2016, 02:47:04 am
Interesting.
Title: Re: Vulkan is already among us!
Post by: ddenn on March 17, 2016, 02:52:26 am
There's a very interesting post about Vukan (http://developer.x-plane.com/2016/03/what-vulkan-means-to-developers/) from Ben Supnik, Laminar Research lead developer (X-plane).
Title: Re: Vulkan is already among us!
Post by: HiFlyer on March 17, 2016, 04:26:15 am
There's a very interesting post about Vukan (http://developer.x-plane.com/2016/03/what-vulkan-means-to-developers/) from Ben Supnik, Laminar Research lead developer (X-plane).

Hmmmmmmm.