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Stadia Is a Major Driver of Vulkan Adoption
- fulafel 4y ago> If you look at the list of games (https://www.vulkan.org/made-with-vulkan https://www.vulkan.org/made-with-vulkan) that use Vulkan natively, as presented by the the Vulkan team itself, 270 of the of the 407 listed games run on Stadia! That is significantly more than half (though it is a little unclear how complete this list is).
- tekchip 4y agoLooks to me like you have it backwards. Many (most?) of those games predate Stadia. Seems Stadia/Google selected Vulkan for best compatibility with pre-existing games.
- smoldesu 4y agoFWIW, there are hundreds (thousands?) of DirectX games that also run on Stadia hardware, but won't because of licensing concerns. Google doesn't want to license DirectX through a copy of Windows, and I'm guessing that using DXVK would be considered "flying too close to the sun".
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- an1sotropy 4y agoThis is from July 2022. Now that Stadia is shutting down [1], does that mean anything bad for Vulkan, I’m curious? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33022768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33022768
- danielvaughn 4y agoI'm not super familiar with the space, but from what I know, I'd say it would have almost no impact. The industry seems to have been moving towards Vulkan for a while now. Stadia may indeed have accelerated it, but the shutdown isn't going to halt its progress. (IMO)
- pjmlp 4y agoOther than Linux, specially Android, very few game developers would bother with Vulkan per se. PlayStation and XBox were never found of Khronos APIs (other than GL ES 1.0 + Cg on the PS 1). Nintendo had a GL subset on the Wii, and while Switch supports GL 4.6 and Vulkan, those that want full control need to use NVN. Apple is going with Metal. And if one intents to use Vulkan abstraction layers as a kind of pseudo middleware, they are better of using classical middleware anyway.
- jonhohle 4y agoIs there an industry advantage to divesting from OpenGL and splitting into a device specific APIs with hugely overlapping features, yet I’m sure, an impedance mismatch? Since most devs are targeting Unity or some other batteries included game engine, does it just not matter anymore?
- morelisp 4y agoThe total impedance matches of all device specific platforms you might target is often less than the impedance mismatch of just OpenGL vs. the real world.
- pjmlp 4y agoIt never mattered outside FOSS circles, in the 8 and 16 bit days every platform was a special snowflake, so the industry grew porting contractors, platform specialized studios and middleware. If you dive into something like Ogre3D, you will see that actual 3D rendering API is a tiny slice of the whole cake, let alone in something like Unreal.
- Mikeb85 4y agoNo game developer is using raw Vulkan, Metal or DX12. these APIs aren't the same level of abstraction as OpenGL... Vulkan is AMD's Mantle open-sourced, it's far too low level for devs to waste time with, it's a target for game engines and renderers.
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- tomComb 4y agoHow can it not be bad for Vulkan?
- lake_vincent 4y agowas a major driver...
- smt88 4y agoThe service will be around for a while, and Google plans to sell it to other companies interested in streaming games. One could imagine Nintendo pushing into streaming to compensate for the weak Switch hardware.
- thejammahimself 4y agoI think Nintendo already did something similar with games like AC Odyssey (and probably others) though they never did it in the western market to my recollection. However it might be another company that operates the servers.
- goosedragons 4y agoIt's another company that operates the services and "ports" games over. There is now several "Cloud" games available in western markets for the Switch like the Kingdom Hearts Collection, Guardians of the Galaxy and Hitman.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jrm4 4y agoMore than Steam / Proton / Steam Deck?
- pjmlp 4y agoYes, why bother when they emulate Windows APIs.
- awill 4y agoProton isn’t perfect, and works much better on Windows Vulkan games vs Windows DirectX. So even windows developers are choosing vulkan just to ensure better compatibility.
- pjmlp 4y agoNumbers? Still looking forward how long it will stay relevant, specially with everyone and their dog releasing portable PC and Android handhelds. LG and Asus are arriving this year. Then there is the whole Geoforce Now and XBox Cloud, where those DirectX games can be streamed everywhere.
- hedora 4y agohttps://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... (Edit: GeForce Now apparently runs fewer of my steam games than Linux. Certain games detect and block it. Same with android, but for different reasons.)
- pjmlp 4y agoWhere does it assert AAA game studios are replacing DirectX with Vulkan?
- BuckRogers 4y agoYour posts have always been so clear minded, and well-informed. If there were a way to follow a user on HN, you would be one of the few if not the only person on that list for me. Every post I see from you, it’s clear you’re informed on the market, you know how everything works, and you are very rarely wrong. I just wanted to say that in my opinion having used HN for many years, you’re in the top 1% of users for contributions. I think you would be successful as some sort of IT and business analyst. Or maybe a blog or YouTube channel commenting on industry events.
- phaedryx 4y agoI don't know if I agree with the conclusion. Are people choosing Vulkan because of Stadia, or because they want to deploy to the other platforms and Stadia is a nice bonus?
- dagmx 4y agoShould be easy to verify against growth of Vulkan in the same timeframe as stadia vs the growth of Linux in the same time frame.
- karaterobot 4y agoYeah, he argues for causation using a correlation as evidence. I'm not an industry expert, but I sure never got the sense that developers relied on a Stadia release, or made it a main priority. He may be right, I just don't buy the argument in this article on its face.
- rowanG077 4y agoYou don't have to assume companies rely on stadia primarily to argue stadia is responsible for adoption. You just have to argue stadia brings more to table then it costs to target Vulkan. Which is orders of magnitude easier.
- karaterobot 4y agoGranted, but the linked article doesn’t do that either.
- Someone 4y agoPossibly neither. We’re missing data on games not using Vulkan. As an simple example, let’s say it turns out that - out of 407 games running Vulkan natively, 270 run on Stadia (from the article) - out of 407 games not running Vulkan natively, also 270 run on Stadia (numbers the article doesn’t mention that I made up to make a point) Then, the two “runs Vulkan natively” and “runs on Stadia” are 100% independent.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Mikeb85 4y agoI think the biggest driver of Vulkan adoption is the fact that since all the graphics APIs are so low level nowadays, everyone is writing abstraction layers. Plus, Vulkan is a hedge against all the proprietary APIs. Also, 2/3 major consoles are on AMD, Vulkan was originally AMD Mantle, gonna guess there's some common tools and functionality... Anyhow, Vulkan will survive for the same reason as Linux; no one truly trusts MS, Apple, Sony, etc...
- ribit 4y agoJust a minor nitpick: Vulkan might have Mantle DNA but it severely limited some of the original functionality (no pointers in resource binding). Funnily enough the closest API that matches what Mantle could do is Apples Metal.
- pjmlp 4y agoOnly one console supports Vulkan, the Switch. Somehow there is this urban myth about Sony caring about Khronos APIs, when they only did such a thing with the Playstation 1, using GL ES 1.0 + Cg as alternative to their own API, as the adoption was very low, they eventually dropped it. Even on the Switch, if you want all the low level features, you are better served using NVN.
- spatulon 4y agos/Playstation 1/Playstation 3/
- pjmlp 4y agoThanks for the correction, should have looked into my own comments for that. By the way here is one of the public sources on the matter, http://sandstormgames.ca/blog/tag/libgcm/ http://sandstormgames.ca/blog/tag/libgcm/
- capableweb 4y agoSteam Deck also supports Vulkan, asks developers to add Vulkan support if it isn't already added, and if it isn't enabled, will try to automatically shim it: > Vulkan API: We recommend targeting Vulkan as your primary graphics API for best performance and battery life. If you use an engine like Unity or Unreal, enabling Vulkan in your build for all users will result in the highest performance/longevity. (Note: Proton includes a DirectX-to-Vulkan translation layer. If your game or engine has high-quality DirectX support but no Vulkan support, it's likely that this automated translation layer will exceed the performance of doing a custom Vulkan implementation.) https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/recommendations https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/recommendations
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoAm I missing something here, or is there a huge gap in the author's logic? As I understand it, the argument is like this: * 407 games run Vulkan * 270 of those games also support Stadia * Therefore, direct quote here, "the entire gaming industry is better off because of Stadia and their partners paving the way here" It's hard for me to believe that a writer who, to quote his own bio, "is an HPC professional with a PhD in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley" would make an argument that correlation implies causation. On the other hand, I've looked over this article a couple of times and that seems to be all the argument there is. Considering how many tenuously related keywords the author stuffed into the article, I think a likely explanation is that this blog commissioned the article as SEO bait; a writer who doesn't know correlation from causation from their elbow and isn't being paid enough to find out wrote the article, concentrating mainly on keyword stuffing; the editor, who would have known better than to make this argument, posted the article after only the most cursory of readings, enough to satisfy himself that there were no blatant misspellings or racial slurs. It's not an interpretation that's flattering to the putative author, but on the other hand, it also wouldn't be flattering to think of him as a scientist with such a poor grasp of logic. Moot point anyway, I suppose, since though we might argue about how much Vulkan adoption Stadia was driving, I think we can all agree on how much more it will drive.
- mattnewport 4y agoIt seems to be a Stadia fan site so the reason for this article existing is that they need to keep a steady stream of Stadia news and puff pieces. They're just trying to come up with positive things to say about Stadia, not trying to actually come up with true insights about the broader industry.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoI see it the same way. My point is just that this one particular puff piece contained an error, and that the nature of this error and the background of the (putative) author make it seem unlikely that he could have made that error. So it seems to me that the most likely explanation is that the "author" had this ghostwritten, and didn't read it over as carefully as he might have before posting it.
- Synaesthesia 4y agoI'm surprised more PC/Console AAA games aren't being written/ported for iPads and M1 Mac's since they have really good CPUs, GPUs and fast storage. Why is that? Is it because of Apple's insistence on Metal? The mobile games market has exploded hugely, there's definitely a big market there.
- wilde 4y agoCombo of Apple’s insistence on Metal and biz model mismatch. You can either make gambling for children or have apple throw pity money at you. No one is buying $70 apps.
- notatoad 4y agoi think it's probably because the people who tend to play AAA PC or Console games already have a PC or console. Could developers really make more money, or would it just be people who already bought the game for PC on steam downloading an additional version for free? the mobile game market has exploded, but AAA games are a different dynamic and a different audience to the casual games popular in the mobile market. and for iPad specifically, apple's 30% cut probably factors into the decision in a big way.
- vageli 4y ago> i think it's probably because the people who tend to play AAA PC or Console games already have a PC or console. Could developers really make more money, or would it just be people who already bought the game for PC on steam downloading an additional version for free? Which services give you the game on any platform? In my experience, you have to buy the game on each platform (and for some games, I have purchased them on multiple platforms because they were that good).
- smoldesu 4y ago> Which services give you the game on any platform? The Microsoft Store generally will, ironically. Buying a game on Xbox will often net you the PC version as well (so long as you get it from the Microsoft Store). I think Sony tried a similar thing with the Vita a while ago, but I'm presuming that was a failure.
- Animats 4y agoIn Rust land, the Rend3/WGPU stack is able to target Vulkan and Metal, pretty much invisibly to the application. Also Android and WebGL, although not as seamlessly, because the threading model is different in those worlds. It's supposed to also support DirectX on Windows, but since Windows supports Vulkan, why bother? I have the same code running on Windows and Linux with no conditional compilation in my code. The Bevy game engine reportedly runs happily on all those platforms. In C++ land, Godot has similar portability. So do UE5 and Unity. If it wasn't for Apple shooting themselves in the foot with Metal, we'd all be on Vulkan now, without these portability layers.
- lights0123 4y agoDoes Android not support standard Vulkan as well?
- Animats 4y agoAndroid does support Vulkan. Although I don't think you can do graphics from outside the main thread, which is a major feature of Vulkan. A key idea in Vulkan is that the main thread is just doing refreshes, while other threads are changing what's in the GPU. This allows keeping the frame rate up even when the scene is changing. (We've had a split on concurrency. Web devs think in terms of callbacks and async, but not real multiple threads running on multiple CPUs with explicit locking. Game devs doing high performance games think in terms of multiple CPUs and the GPU all working in parallel, pumping huge amounts of graphics content. WASM and Android follow the web model. There's kind of a hack involving multiple processes with some shared memory, but it's not general purpose threading.)
- fulafel 4y agoIt would be interesting to see some data on how good the Vulkan support coverage is. And early Vulkan devices may have buggy or poorly performing drivers. Apps usually go for the API that works on all devices.
- Already__Taken 4y agoNo RPi vulkan I believe for the embeddable world.
- CodeArtisan 4y agoI would say that the major drivers was AMD pushing Vulkan while their GPU are powering both the Xbox and the PlayStation. ID Software adding Vulkan support to DooM (2016), resulting in a >30% FPS boost.
- izacus 4y agoNeither of those consoles use Vulkan as their API and the AMD GPU there is pretty much just an implementation detail. Is this the same disinformation as people claiming that PS3 used OpenGL?
- okpx 4y agoWill people refund their Stadia controllers?