5 ms·
To Microsoft it is. Vulkan and DX12 set out to achieve many of the same goals but DX12 has the added benefit of momentum and market lock-in. DX12 has been ava
by cptskippy 11y ago
To Microsoft it is. Vulkan and DX12 set out to achieve many of the same goals but DX12 has the added benefit of momentum and market lock-in. DX12 has been available since July where as support for Vulkan is spotty at best. Why drop DX12 for Vulkan besides warm fuzzies?
- shmerl 11y ago> Why drop DX12 for Vulkan Because they can make life easier for developers and also benefit from the shared effort. But their whole goal is to make life harder for developers (i.e. those who don't want to be limited to MS walled gardens) as a way of taxing them for not falling in line. A usual crooked monopolistic behavior that MS is so accustomed to.
- KirinDave 11y agoHow does Vulkan make life better for developers today? Isn't that more on hardware devs?
- shmerl 11y ago> How does Vulkan make life better for developers today? Assuming Vulkan drivers are ironed out (now they are still fresh), it makes life easier by removing the need to implement different APIs for each platform. By sabotaging such option, MS taxes developers which want to target their Xbox for instance requiring them to use DX12 instead.
- cptskippy 11y agoHow has Microsoft sabotaged Vulkan? They haven't, Windows is one of the very few places that Vulkan will actually run. They offered a competing technology, DX12, that works today... and 6 months ago. Vulkan might work in 6 months... or not.
- shmerl 11y ago> How has Microsoft sabotaged Vulkan? By not supporting it on Xbox which is a walled garden. Since Xbox has a significant market share, they essentially force developers not to use Vulkan (and use DX12) if they want to target Xbox. Compare it to browser wars of the past. MS did the same thing exactly, and the only reason they magically started supporting shared Web standards is because they lost those wars. Today it's a real wonder - they even decided to support free video codecs in the browser (while Apple still refuses).
- Delmania 11y agoI'm failing to see how that sabotages Vulkan. As far as I know, Vulkan has only recently reached 1.0, and nVidia JUST started supporting it. Until recently, there was nothing to support. Your entire complaint is that developers have to do more work if they want to support multiple platforms, which has always been the case. I don't recall the original Final Fantasy getting released on the Sega Genesis. There's never going to be a magical catch-all graphics API because technologies like Metal and DirectX take advantage of known hardware specs and OS features to make the games look good and run fast.
- shmerl 11y ago> I'm failing to see how that sabotages Vulkan. In order for cross platform solution to offer value of avoiding duplicate work, it should be really cross platform. MS prevents prevents it by not supporting it on Xbox. > which has always been the case Exactly because of such lock-in. > technologies like Metal and DirectX take advantage of known hardware specs and OS features Let's not try pretending that MS and Apple do it for any technical reasons. There are none.
- coldtea 11y agoI think you just blindly champion Vulkan, an unproven and not read for primetime technology. The two largest platforms, MS and Apple have their own stacks, Metal and DX12. And they have been maintaining those from years, especially DX12 which comes from decades of DX development. They should throw all this away (and lose any competitive advantage for their platform in the process) just because there's finally a competent new stack (that's not even ready yet)? >Let's not try pretending that MS and Apple do it for any technical reasons. There are none. Would wanting to offer the best possible experience for your platform, to control how and when any new feature is implemented according to your long term plans, and to not mess with lower-common-denominator cross-platform design-by-committee APIs counts as a "technical reason"? Let's not pretend you ask for this for any technical reason. It's all about developer convenience at best.
- cptskippy 11y agoPrior to Vulkan I would argue that it would make little to no difference. OpenGL is different on every platform you look at and each hardware vendor has produced a slew of proprietary extensions to support features not found in OpenGL. What you end up with is render code written per platform even with OpenGL and on Linux you have different implementations per driver. At least with DX you're only writing 1 renderer for Xbox/Windows. With Vulkan they finally dropped backwards compatibility, something Microsoft had been doing with each successive version of DX, so it would have been a good time for Microsoft to transition away from DX. But what motivation do they have at this point? OpenGL adoption isn't yet threatening their platform, and with Apple pushing Metal they have even less to worry about. Vulkan has only further fragmented the market because anyone that wishes to use it must also write fallback renderers because of the limited support. In any case if/when Vulkan does become the industry standard, Microsoft will only need to make an Xbox One API because Windows already has support for Vulkan, better support than any other platform at that.
- shmerl 11y ago> But what motivation do they have at this point? The motivation can be pretty simple - don't be a jerk. But it's MS. Lock-in is practically in their DNA already.