At this year’s SIGGRAPH event, Valve’s Dan Ginsburg talked a bit about the new upcoming APIs that will offer low-level access to the GPU and CPU, thus improving performance in games, DirectX 12 and Vulkan.
Dan has been working for Valve on Vulkan since its inception and claimed (1:40:01 in the video at the end of the article) that there is really not much reason for developers to ever create a DX12 back end for their games, and stated that Vulkan is far superior than in DX12 in various areas.
“Unless you are aggressive enough to be shipping a DX12 game this year, I would argue that there is really not much reason to ever create a DX12 back end for your game. And the reason for that is that Vulkan will cover you on Windows 10 on the same class of hardware and so much more from all these other platforms and IHVs that we’ve heard from. Metal is single platform, single vendor, and Vulkan… we are gonna have support for not only Windows 10 but Windows 7, Windows 8 and Linux.”
Dan concluded that all IHVs are making great progress on drivers, believes that we’ll super rapid adaption, that Vulkan is the best choice for next-generation titles, and that he’s really proud of the current state of the API.
Do note that Dan is working on Vulkan and has every right to promote this particular API. And while we do have to agree that Vulkan seems a better choice for developers since it’s not restricted to one specific OS, it’s still behind as more and more developers announce support for DX12.
In the following video, you can also take a glimpse at the first Vulkan benchmark called Alien Beam (1:45:47).
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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