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I’m working with OpenGL in an indie game across Windows/Mac/Linux. I feel like in the games space, if you’re not going through Unity or Unreal then it still ma

by mewse 6y ago

I’m working with OpenGL in an indie game across Windows/Mac/Linux. I feel like in the games space, if you’re not going through Unity or Unreal then it still makes a lot of sense to target OpenGL for most games rather than going to Vulkan. I definitely still get a bunch of error reports from folks whose computers don’t have OpenGL drivers capable of a context >2.1 on Windows, and I expect that sort of problem would be even more common for Vulkan. Mac hasn’t been a problem thus far, as long as you don’t need advanced 4.x features (I’m just using a 3.3 core context) While the ‘average’ hardware shown in the Steam hardware surveys is pretty good (better than all of my dev machines, in fact), being the support contact for my game has definitely demonstrated that the standard deviation on that hardware goes down as well as up, and sometimes by quite a lot! I’d love to play with Vulkan someday, but I worry about support, especially on really old hardware. (Other thoughts: in indie spaces, it probably makes a lot more sense to use Unity or Unreal or Godot rather than rolling your own. And in AAA spaces, you’d be silly not to go Vulkan instead of OpenGL. It’s really only in my unusual “I happen to have already rolled my own engine and I’m using it to make an indie game” case where OpenGL makes a lot of sense to me)

baybal2 6y ago
I have a problem with Vulkan on linux. Vulkan wont work on Intel drivers if the display is using 10 bit colour. For some reason, OpenGL still works, and very well, including doing gradients in 10bit colour space.
badsectoracula 6y ago
> especially on really old hardware And it actually depends on what one calls "old". I have a laptop i bought around late 2012 with a GeForce 660M. It can run a lot of stuff, including some recent games at very low settings - but Vulkan is not supported at all since Nvidia stopped releasing new drivers for it. Similarly i have a GPD Win 1, it can only run lightweight games because it has an Atom CPU with integrated graphics - still for many smaller indie games (including some 3D games) that hardware should be enough. But under Windows there is no Vulkan support (the hardware can support it but Intel hasn't released any drivers). There is support under Linux, but then a lot of other stuff doesn't work. In my new engine i was considering going with Vulkan or sticking with OpenGL (with which i am already comfortable anyway) and even made a binding generator for Free Pascal but then i noticed that aside of my main PC no other computer i have in my house supports Vulkan - and i'd like to have at least an Nvidia and AMD GPU to test. So i decided to stick with OpenGL for the time being as i really want to be able to run it on my portable PCs. I might consider a Vulkan renderer in the future but that would be after Vulkan is available even on whatever is considered old low end devices at the time.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  You just have to look at Android, where Google had to make compulsory on Android 10 as no one was caring, and still it looks like this after 2 OS releases: https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards#Vulkan https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards#Vulkan And if one goes into the spaghetti extension soup that Vulkan carried on from OpenGL, the picture is even more sad. https://www.vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listdevices.php?platform=android https://www.vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listdevices.php?platform=andr... On a platform where Vulkan is nowadays the main 3D API, with a roadmap to run OpenGL on top of it.

by mewse 6y ago

baybal2 6y ago

I have a problem with Vulkan on linux. Vulkan wont work on Intel drivers if the display is using 10 bit colour. For some reason, OpenGL still works, and very well, including doing gradients in 10bit colour space.

badsectoracula 6y ago

> especially on really old hardware And it actually depends on what one calls "old". I have a laptop i bought around late 2012 with a GeForce 660M. It can run a lot of stuff, including some recent games at very low settings - but Vulkan is not supported at all since Nvidia stopped releasing new drivers for it. Similarly i have a GPD Win 1, it can only run lightweight games because it has an Atom CPU with integrated graphics - still for many smaller indie games (including some 3D games) that hardware should be enough. But under Windows there is no Vulkan support (the hardware can support it but Intel hasn't released any drivers). There is support under Linux, but then a lot of other stuff doesn't work. In my new engine i was considering going with Vulkan or sticking with OpenGL (with which i am already comfortable anyway) and even made a binding generator for Free Pascal but then i noticed that aside of my main PC no other computer i have in my house supports Vulkan - and i'd like to have at least an Nvidia and AMD GPU to test. So i decided to stick with OpenGL for the time being as i really want to be able to run it on my portable PCs. I might consider a Vulkan renderer in the future but that would be after Vulkan is available even on whatever is considered old low end devices at the time.

pjmlp 6y ago
You just have to look at Android, where Google had to make compulsory on Android 10 as no one was caring, and still it looks like this after 2 OS releases: https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards#Vulkan https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards#Vulkan And if one goes into the spaghetti extension soup that Vulkan carried on from OpenGL, the picture is even more sad. https://www.vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listdevices.php?platform=android https://www.vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listdevices.php?platform=andr... On a platform where Vulkan is nowadays the main 3D API, with a roadmap to run OpenGL on top of it.