When does it become viable for a small developer to design a purely Vulkan render backend and use that across all major platforms/deployments that a small dev is likely to have access to? You may exclude Android from this discussion because it's horrible.
-
-
Because platform holders don't want graphics API standard. Everyone needs some way to lock in into platform, so there is no motive to create portable environment.
-
On fixed hardware like consoles not having custom API that doesn't have to conform to standard also unlocks optimization potential.
-
So the reason has nothing to do with Vulkan as API itself, rather than business motives. Even from middleware engine company, more APIs the better, because they can pay multiple people to work and optimize for different APIs/platforms, where small developers can't afford this.
-
Regardless of whether platforms want to support it, Vulkan Portability is happening already and has made significant progress https://www.khronos.org/blog/khronos-announces-the-vulkan-portability-initiative … This is a great option for OP’s use case
-
When I talk about portability I'm talking in context of commercially viable platforms for game development (Windows/D3D1x, XboxOne/D3D1x, PS4/GNM, Switch/NVN, OSX/Metal, iOSX/Metal, Android/GLES2).
-
If you can't support all platforms limiting your game to D3D1x only is way saner approach than any other API. Most of people, in case they need to trim platforms, decide to use middleware engine (or rendering library like bgfx), at which point you don't care about underlying API.
-
Sorry, I don't follow. Vulkan Portability is low-overhead implementations of Vulkan on top of Metal, D3D1x, GL/ES (as much as possible), and ideally GNM and NVN too. So you can target Vulkan and run it on UWP for example.
-
You don't even need an api like MVK for Switch portability, as the Switch has full Vulkan 1.1 support courtesy of the work of Nvidia and Nintendo. In regards to other games offering MVK on Macs, ESO and the FPS game Forsaken use it. Plus MVK works on IOS.
- 1 more reply
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.