5 ms·
The article you linked to is advice from people who port games to Linux on how to make games more portable. It's not advice on how to ship them on time, how to
by cwyers 10y ago
The article you linked to is advice from people who port games to Linux on how to make games more portable. It's not advice on how to ship them on time, how to make them performant, how to minimize the amount of developer labor required to build them. Given what a small share of the market Linux is for games, developers have other priorities than what makes games easy to port to Linux. And it's not a chicken-and-egg problem; the Linux market for games isn't much smaller than the Linux market for any other commercial software.
- shmerl 10y agoPerformance is orthogonal issue to portability. You can make it portable, and perform well too (using something like Vulkan and proper engine design). Linux gaming market is growing. Not sure about other commercial software in this context, but I'd guess it can indirectly be affected too, since bigger gaming market makes Linux desktop usage grow in general.
- klodolph 10y agoSo, "Here, use a different API with worse developer support, and in return you get access to a market that's ~1-2% the size of the Windows gaming market?" I mean, I'm all for OpenGL. I use OpenGL. Hell, I develop OpenGL games on Linux and then port them to Windows afterwards (released ~10 made that way so far). But the choice to use it depends on what market you're going after.
- shmerl 10y agoIsn't it what MS is saying for DX12? Except Vulkan is not locked into MS only stuff.
- klodolph 10y agoThe cost of porting between DX12 and Vulkan is not so high, not anything like the cost of porting between OpenGL and DX11.
- Qwertious 10y agoVulkan has better performance than DX11, and it has literally twice the audience of DX12 - DX12 only supports Windows 10, so any W7/W8/etc users are SOL unless you use DX11 or Vulkan.
- pjmlp 10y agoThat is not what the lists of released AAA titles show. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_Vulkan_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_Vulkan_supp... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_DirectX_12_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_DirectX_12_...
- shmerl 10y agoThis is irrelevant. With all major engines gaining Vulkan support this list will baloon fast.
- pjmlp 10y agoA good gaming engine supports multiple graphics APIs, making specific ones irrelevant.
- shmerl 10y agoMy point was, adoption in engines is relatively slow, but once it happens, things become easier. So current usage lists aren't a reflection of general progress. Unity for example gained Vulkan support in the latest version which came out recently, and Unreal is still not there (but already close). Same goes for Lumberyard. Of course the tax on development imposed by lock-in freaks translates into that slowness. I.e. as you said, need for engines to support many balkanized APIs means slower releases to the market.
- cwyers 10y agoIn the abstract, performance may be unrelated to portability. But if tooling, drivers and expertise are all focused on DirectX, and if getting OpenGL to do everything DirectX can do requires using vendor-specific additions to the spec that are non-portable, then in practice, it may be harder to make OpenGL performant across multiple vendor's GPUs.
- douche 10y agoSeriously, anyone who cares about cross-platform compatibility is already using Unity or Unreal.
- shmerl 10y agoNot everyone, but probably quite many.