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aeva

@preston the time to switch to Vulkan is when you have a problem that Vulkan solves but OpenGL does not

31 Mar 2023 at 19:24 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
9 comments
P
aeva

@preston for me the appeal of vulkan is having more control over when shaders compile, being able to use half precision floats, and potentially also dabble w/ hw ray tracing, but the overhead of rebuilding my engine around it is high enough that I haven't bothered yet.

31 Mar 2023 at 20:08 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
P

@aeva that’s actually really helpful for me! I’m very new to graphics programming so if I’m being honest, I still don’t know what I don’t know! Thank you for sharing :)

31 Mar 2023 at 20:31 | Open on octodon.social
aeva

@preston oh wonderful :D

I should also add then: one of the big big big benefits for APIs like Vulkan and D3D12 is the ability to record commands in parallel. For all practical purposes OpenGL is a single threaded API. For more high end stuff like AAA games, OpenGL can easily become a major CPU side bottleneck.

31 Mar 2023 at 21:12 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
aeva

@preston Vulkan gives you control over things that would have been managed automatically by the driver for OpenGL under the theory that application-specific implementations of things like resource management will be lighter weight than a general solution.

This increase of control comes at the cost of a major increase in labor. Which is fine for big studios, but maybe not so great for individuals working on custom stuff.

31 Mar 2023 at 21:15 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
aeva

@preston Right now we're seeing an interesting trend where the khronos group is standardizing extensions that add more and more high level conveniences back into the API, while simultaneously we're seeing high quality libraries emerge to provide production ready implementations for things you'd normally have to DIY w/ Vulkan, like device selection or memory management.

31 Mar 2023 at 21:18 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
aeva

@preston so my crystal ball here says that the longer you wait, the easier switching to Vulkan is going to get

31 Mar 2023 at 21:19 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
P replied to aeva

@aeva oh that’s good to know!! I love when things get easier for me when I do nothing too hahah!

31 Mar 2023 at 21:30 | Open on octodon.social
P

@aeva that’s really helpful! Thank you! I think a long way from needing that kind of control, but it’s great to keep in mind.

Thank you for sharing! It’s very kind of you!

31 Mar 2023 at 21:24 | Open on octodon.social
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