Comments On The Unity Engine & Vulkan API Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Comments On The Unity Engine & Vulkan API Support

Following the SIGGRAPH story earlier this week about Unity working on DirectX 12 and Apple Metal support, but not Vulkan, there was -- as usual -- a colorful selection of comments in our forums about this situation. Of course, many theorized that Apple must be paying Unity to support Metal, Unity doesn't care about the desktop, and other alternate reasons why Unity isn't yet supporting Vulkan...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Unity-Vulkan-Will-Come

[tiwake]

If they are expecting to support Vulkan then why even bother with DirectX 12 at all? DirectX12 from what I understand is windows 10 only whereas Vulkan will be available for all major platforms. That is a lot of extra hassle programming that's unnecessary.

[Michael]

If they are expecting to support Vulkan then why even bother with DirectX 12 at all? DirectX12 from what I understand is windows 10 only whereas Vulkan will be available for all major platforms. That is a lot of extra hassle programming that's unnecessary.

That Vulkan is still months away?

[efikkan]

If they are expecting to support Vulkan then why even bother with DirectX 12 at all? DirectX12 from what I understand is windows 10 only whereas Vulkan will be available for all major platforms. That is a lot of extra hassle programming that's unnecessary.

Direct3D 12 was pretty much finalized in 2013 and is now shipping, while Vulkan is not yet finalized.

I don't see why people are going to care anyway. A cross API hevily abstracted generic game engine is not going to be heavily optimized towards any graphics API.

[Luke_Wolf]

If they are expecting to support Vulkan then why even bother with DirectX 12 at all? DirectX12 from what I understand is windows 10 only whereas Vulkan will be available for all major platforms. That is a lot of extra hassle programming that's unnecessary.

They're an engine developer, and like all engine developers they're incentivised to support everything so that they can add in all the checkmarks, if this was not the case they would not for example bother supporting Metal

[emblemparade]

How dare he be reasonable! This is a sure sign that he's being personally paid by zombie Steve Jobs and cyborg Bill Gates to use their APIs a few months before Vulkan. Thanks for killing Linux, Obama!

[humbug]

If they are expecting to support Vulkan then why even bother with DirectX 12 at all? DirectX12 from what I understand is windows 10 only whereas Vulkan will be available for all major platforms. That is a lot of extra hassle programming that's unnecessary.

I think it may have been a different story if Vulkan came out ahead of DX12, soon after mantle. Now that everybody has set DX12 milestones they don't seem to want to drop it and wait for Vulkan. Out of the big engine makers Valve are the only ones pursuing a Vulkan-only approach.

[dragorth]

If they are expecting to support Vulkan then why even bother with DirectX 12 at all? DirectX12 from what I understand is windows 10 only whereas Vulkan will be available for all major platforms. That is a lot of extra hassle programming that's unnecessary.

Wow, everybody is quoting you! Anyway, they support Window Phone, as well as Windows Store Apps. Vulkan is not slated to work with those platforms. They could just stick with DX11, but on phones at least, the performance/power trade off makes the case for DX12 support. And, they are competing with UE4 and the others, which are supporting DX12, UE4 with a preview right now. These market forces push their support into the limelight.

Also, if the port from DX12 to Vulkan is easy, the converse should also be true. Eventually, they would have supported both.

[efikkan]

I think it may have been a different story if Vulkan came out ahead of DX12, soon after mantle. Now that everybody has set DX12 milestones they don't seem to want to drop it and wait for Vulkan. Out of the big engine makers Valve are the only ones pursuing a Vulkan-only approach.

Are they? The newly released beta of Source 2 utilizes both OpenGL and Direct3D, even older API versions. They are planning to offer Vulkan support in the future.

[tuke81]

I'm not that worried about vulkan support yet. Spec is not even released and unity is one of the original opengl next initiative member. So they are one of the software houses, which develop vulkan api itself together with hw vendors.