The Rust Vulkan "Gfx-rs" Portability Layer Can Now Run vkQuake3

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Rust Vulkan "Gfx-rs" Portability Layer Can Now Run vkQuake3

The Rust-written gfx-rs portability initiative that has similar goals to MoltenVK for allowing the Vulkan API to be supported/translated on non-native platforms can now run the Vulkan-ized Quake game...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Gfx-rs-Portability-vkQuake

[bpetty]

If Redox can leverage this, and hence play vkQuake3... it would be really interesting to get some performance measurements. I am really more interested in seeing the performance characteristics of RedoxOS, than anything. I know they got Doom working a while back via SDL2.

[kvark]

To correct a little, both gfx-portability and MoltenVK are part of Vulkan Portability working group (also sometimes referred to as Vulkan Portability Initiative, or even just VkPI). Differences with MoltenVK are many:

• code base is pure Rust, takes advantage of the library ecosystem
• abstraction-wise, we have an internal API (gfx-hal exposed to Rust clients) that maps to backends, and the portability is a layer on top of it
• we target more than just Metal on macOS/iOS, we also develop D3D12 and D3D11 backends, as well as GL/WebGL
• our Metal backend has less lazy state and tries to do as much work up-front as possible

Finally, it's still a long way before this would have anything to do with Redox. It needs to get hardware acceleration (drivers!) at all to start.

[chinoto]

It might be possible to use Kazan for CPU based Vulkan, just to see some stuff working until Rust based GPU drivers are written. I'm not sure how much, if any, work is required to get Kazan ported to Redox.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Kazan-Vulkan-Rust