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I think that's quite a reasonable question. 1. Less CPU usage than an equivalent game in OpenGl. This is especially true for games which want to draw lots of

I think that's quite a reasonable question. 1. Less CPU usage than an equivalent game in OpenGl. This is especially true for games which want to draw lots of different individual things to the screen, so you may be seeing more of those. 2. Smaller drivers, which means more consistently performant and bug free. There's far less of a chance of getting weird things from having an unusual operating system or graphics card setup. 3. More cross platform. There are many different pieces which change on different platforms (consoles vs desktops vs mobile), but depending on what platforms choose to support Vulkan, it's one less thing to worry about when porting over. 4. Maybe better games. There's a bunch of things which help with development, so as long as a sufficient majority of graphics cards get vulkan drivers, it may help reduce some coding cost. Games which use common engines (ie, Unity) will likely get these features for free. Others will have to work harder for it.

WorldMaker 11y ago
That's the big question I have: how well does Vulkan seem to be bridging the divide between API and GPU semantics? Will we finally see a time where graphics drivers no longer monkey-patch per game? (I'm still somewhat skeptical as the monkey patching is a value-add secret sauce that seems likely to continue solely because it's such a weird competitive thing between the two biggest vendors and a galvanizer for the brand loyalties they try to maintain, but perhaps I'm just feeling pessimistic about the capitalist drives here.)
- snuxoll 11y ago
  > how well does Vulkan seem to be bridging the divide between API and GPU semantics? That's the entire point behind Vulkan. OpenGL was created back when we still had fixed-function rendering pipelines in GPU's, and while it has evolved to support the massively parallel supercomputers GPU's have become it doesn't have much low-level control over it. Vulkan gives the engine developer the thinnest abstraction possible over a modern GPU, from everything from explicit resource sharing and even explicit access to multiple GPU's (no more relying on nVidia and AMD to add SLI/Crossfire profiles).

WorldMaker 11y ago

That's the big question I have: how well does Vulkan seem to be bridging the divide between API and GPU semantics? Will we finally see a time where graphics drivers no longer monkey-patch per game? (I'm still somewhat skeptical as the monkey patching is a value-add secret sauce that seems likely to continue solely because it's such a weird competitive thing between the two biggest vendors and a galvanizer for the brand loyalties they try to maintain, but perhaps I'm just feeling pessimistic about the capitalist drives here.)

snuxoll 11y ago
> how well does Vulkan seem to be bridging the divide between API and GPU semantics? That's the entire point behind Vulkan. OpenGL was created back when we still had fixed-function rendering pipelines in GPU's, and while it has evolved to support the massively parallel supercomputers GPU's have become it doesn't have much low-level control over it. Vulkan gives the engine developer the thinnest abstraction possible over a modern GPU, from everything from explicit resource sharing and even explicit access to multiple GPU's (no more relying on nVidia and AMD to add SLI/Crossfire profiles).