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.

Aras Pranckevičius who was the presenter at SIGGRAPH this week on Unity's rendering topic and is Unity's main rendering expert, provided some additional commentary on the matter. Below are a series of tweets sent to us this morning by Aras Pranckevičius (Aras_p) about the whole DX12/Meta/Vulkan situation for this popular cross-platform game engine:

- He's not an "evil conspirator paid by Apple."

- Porting Unity to Apple's Metal that's the graphics API exclusive to iOS/OSX was quite an easy job. Aras wrote, "Metal port of Unity so far has been easier because Metal keeps the old binding model. Also it shipped 1st. Apple did not pay us."

- The Vulkan renderer isn't underway yet because the team responsible for that is busy still working on the OpenGL / OpenGL ES code-paths. Aras said in another tweet, "Vulkan port is not started just yet because everyone on that team has been busy doing GLES3.1/GL3/GL4 work."

- There's also the obvious matter that Vulkan isn't even officially released yet... No specifications nor driver implementations are public yet outside of the Khronos members working on this new low-level graphics API. Aras commented, " ...and since Vulkan is not shipped just yet, it kinda gets lower priority at this moment."

- When the Unity developers do start on the Vulkan port, however, he expects it to be relatively easy. With DirectX 12 and Vulkan have a lot in common in terms of design concepts, a lot of the work should already be laid. He concluded his tweets this morning with, "...I expect Vulkan port to be QuiteEasy(tm) though, since all the preparation work will have been done for DX12 already."