[News] AMD Actively Promoting Vulkan Beyond GPUOpen

[StyM]

https://www.techpowerup.com/225886/a...beyond-gpuopen

Vulkan, the new-generation cross-platform 3D graphics API governed by the people behind OpenGL, the Khronos Group, is gaining in relevance, with Google making it the primary 3D graphics API for Android. AMD said that it's actively promoting the API. Responding to a question by TechPowerUp in its recent Radeon Technology Group (RTG) first anniversary presser, its chief Raja Koduri agreed that the company is actively working with developers to add Vulkan to their productions, and optimize them for Radeon GPUs. This, we believe, could be due to one of many strategic reasons.

First, Vulkan works inherently better on AMD Graphics CoreNext GPU architecture because it's been largely derived from Mantle, a now defunct 3D graphics API by AMD that brings a lot of "close-to-metal" API features that make game consoles more performance-efficient, over to the PC ecosystem. The proof of this pudding is the AAA title and 2016 reboot of the iconic first-person shooter "Doom," in which Radeon GPUs get significant performance boosts switching from the default OpenGL renderer to Vulkan. These boosts aren't as pronounced on NVIDIA GPUs.

Second, and this could be a long shot, but the growing popularity of Vulkan could give AMD leverage over Microsoft to steer Direct3D development in areas that AMD GPUs are inherently good at - these include asynchronous compute, and tiled-resources (AMD GPUs benefit due to higher memory bandwidths). AMD has been engaging aggressively with game studios working on AAA games that use DirectX 12, and thus far AMD GPUs have been either gaining or sustaining performance better than NVIDIA GPUs, when switching from DirectX 11 fallbacks to DirectX 12 renderers.

[AliG]

Not surprised they're promoting it. The question is will developers actually budge? This would give them a real advantage over Nvidia, and I'm pretty sure NV provides big development support for a lot of companies.

[Sparky]

Well Mantle did give DX and OGL a shove, which they said originally even if that's all Mantle did then it did its job. Shoot, EA/Dice used Mantle in BF4. DX12 is far improved over DX11, Mantle seems to have had its intended effect to either replace or give a swift kick to other APIs to get them moving again.

[AliG]

True, but there's still far too many games that don't support DX12 yet. AMD really banked on low level APIs when they designed GCN and frankly I think they need more developer support to really compete against Nvidia (or have Vega be radically different).

[Darakian]

One big advantage vulkan has is that it runs outside of windows which makes porting games a lot easier.

[zanzabar]

One big advantage vulkan has is that it runs outside of windows which makes porting games a lot easier.

but the xbone runs DX and thanks to denuvo no game will come out on linux. so long as denuvo is viable i dont see publishers letting devs use it over dx since there is no benefit. the only reason doom is even in OGL is since it was supposed to be on steam OS but low sales penetration and denuvo killed that idea.

[Darakian]

but the xbone runs DX and thanks to denuvo no game will come out on linux. so long as denuvo is viable i dont see publishers letting devs use it over dx since there is no benefit. the only reason doom is even in OGL is since it was supposed to be on steam OS but low sales penetration and denuvo killed that idea.

Deus Ex just got confirmed for a linux port. Beyond that there are still some windows 7 hold outs and vulkan will run there too.