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Microsoft doesn't need to support Vulkan, because Windows is flexible enough that GPU vendors can expose other APIs like OpenGL or Vulkan without Microsoft's pe
by jsheard 10y ago
Microsoft doesn't need to support Vulkan, because Windows is flexible enough that GPU vendors can expose other APIs like OpenGL or Vulkan without Microsoft's permission.
It's a very different situation to macOS, where Apple are the sole gatekeepers of the graphics stack and nothing can ever happen without their direct support.
- vlozko 10y agoNot every GPU vendor or all the cards of a vendor support Vulkan. Even new ones being sold today. The adoption is broad but not complete for Windows. I guess the argument can be made that vendors ought to support it but that would vastly expand the scope of any web API Vulkanization efforts.
- jsheard 10y agoSupport for Vulkan on Windows is pretty extensive - AMD and Nvidia are retroactively supporting their hardware back to 2012, and Intel back to 2015, all of them on Windows 7 and up. Considering the lengthy turn-around time for these APIs (WebGL 2.0 took four years to get from a draft spec to enabled in some browsers by default), any Windows machine that couldn't run WebVulkan would be rather long in the tooth by the time the standard sees any real world use.
- msie 10y agoOk, thanks. Although I'm curious about the exact details preventing it.