14 DAY TRIAL // The famous John Carmack, co-founder of id Software and developer of games such as Doom or Quake, says that he’s really impressed with some of the early Vulkan drivers.
The new Vulkan open standard API is in the making as we speak, and in time, it should replace the old OpenGL API. Unlike OpenGL, Vulkan has seen accelerated progress, and developers have moved really fast. We only started to hear about Vulkan for about two years, and they are already considering pushing for a stable release in 2016.
The fast pace of development for Vulkan is not without good cause. The developers are from the Khronos Group, the same ones that worked on OpenGL, and they now have support from most of the big players in the industry, like AMD, Intel, Apple, Qualcomm, Sony, Google, Adobe, Amazon, Pixar, Valve, and many others. Interestingly enough, Microsoft is one of the supporters, which is weird since Vulkan will be a direct competitor to DirectX.
John Carmack is not alone in this
The big backer in this new effort is Valve, which is putting a lot of effort and money into the project. They want this to work because it would greatly benefit the Linux-based SteamOS.
In fact, only recently Valve developer Dan Ginsburg has said that “unless you're aggressive enough to be shipping a DirectX 12 game this year, I would argue that there isn't much reason to ever create a DirectX 12 backend for your game, and the reason for that is that Vulkan will cover you on Windows 10.”
From the looks of it, Vulkan is already quite good, and it has made an impression on John Carmack, who has praised its drivers with native code. He has also said that, once game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine provide support for Vulkan, it will really take off. We should also add Valve’s Source 2 to the list of engines that will most likely get Vulkan support really quick.
Seeing some really impressive improvements on early Vulkan drivers with native code, will win big when Unity and Unreal get support.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) January 19, 2016