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What's the upsides of moving to Vulkan than if it's "slower". Obviously, the benefits out weighs the costs for you to consider it.

 

Although, these enhancements might not help with the game development, it might attract new users/get more people interested in Leadwerks. People can be weird.

Over time it would have the potential to be faster and provide me with more low-level access to the hardware, although the 1.0 spec doesn't allow anything that OpenGL can't already do.

Make any changes that you feel is the right way to go. But please don't release any of these until they are at least as fast as current solution is. But I guess that was you intention ("slowly in the background")

Why would it be any slower? There are many benchmarks showing substantial improvement speeds (50-90%).

 

Over time it would have the potential to be faster and provide me with more low-level access to the hardware, although the 1.0 spec doesn't allow anything that OpenGL can't already do.

 

That's not true at all. I just looked at the spec. There is a vast amount of new material.

 

Examples:

-You couldn't multithread with OpenGL rendering, but there are ways to do it with commands listed in the current Vulkan spec.

-You can assign things to individual cards. So now you could do VRAM stacking if you wanted in SLI. There should be many other uses for this too.

-Compute shaders. Yes this is in 4.3, but Leadwerks right now is 4.0.

-Precompiled shaders. I imagine this would improve game start-up time.

 

Unless the drivers are magically screwed up to the point that they are functionless, I can't see how you would have worse performance. Are there any specifics as to why you think this would be the case?

Will OpenGL be dropped entirely or will there be an option between the two? Maybe Vulkan will fix this, sigh.

I'm hoping Vulkan will make Leadwerks run and behave the same on both brand of cards.

 

Then again, it's up to their drivers so...

Valve are gonna be giving an interesting talk about developing with Vulkan at GDC soon http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/practical-development-for-vulkan-presented-by-valve-software

 

I am really excited to hear about what this is capable of.

 

I think now is the perfect opportunity to get this implemented into Leadwerks!

Well, at this point all they are offering is a harder-to-use alternative to OpenGL that doesn't work on Mac or iOS. It will be interesting to see what Apple does.

Does this mean that Linux and Windows versions of LE will soon be on the same level?

 

Isn't the linux version stuck around 3.0 or somewhere around there?

No, they both use OpenGL 4.0. I attempted a 3.0 fallback for Intel drivers, but it didn't work.

Hi, At first to have leadwerk running with Vulkan, I assume that Josh will have to translate what he have from OpenGL to Vulkan.

 

So it might be a little slower than openGL, but then he could check how to use the new options he have from Vulkan as multithreaded rendering. Can check here that is taking less CPU:

 

Apple will use its METAL api, for their product. Too bad for them. At least they still support openGL