Path of Exile is going VULKAN. Most under-rated news out of Exilecon...

"

DivineChampion wrote:

I would say it is the most overrated news, as well as Vulkan itself.

In the very best case Vulkan will add 10% more FPS, but Vulkan support in PoE means GGG would have to split their time between dx11 and Vulkan which overall will reduce game performance. I.e. Vulkan support will give absolutely nothing to the average player.

I haven't seen the specifics of their plans, but they would more than likely dump DX for graphics altogether. It wouldn't make any kind of sense to continue developing for both.

dx12 has similar to Vulkan performance and features, and is developed by MS which means future compatibility and support of dx12 is guaranteed. There is no point to go all in and switch from well-known and supported by everyone DX to pig in a poke Vulkan which can become outdated and abandoned same way openGL was. Btw this is the reason why Vulkan support is only additional or experimental feature in all games who has it.

"

DivineChampion wrote:

dx12 has similar to Vulkan performance and features, and is developed by MS which means future compatibility and support of dx12 is guaranteed. There is no point to go all in and switch from well-known and supported by everyone DX to pig in a poke Vulkan which can become outdated and abandoned same way openGL was. Btw this is the reason why Vulkan support is only additional or experimental feature in all games who has it.

Vulkan has matured a LOT since it was released into the wild. The adoption rate still isn't that high, but that's largely because PC devs in general are far more experienced with DX and/or OpenGL.

And your last point is not true. No Man's Sky, which I've mentioned a couple of times already, dropped OpenGL outright and switched to Vulkan in one fell swoop with the Beyond update in August. They didn't even offer it up for player testing on their experimental branch beforehand (though they really should have).

There was at least one other game I played not too long ago that also made a full switch to Vulkan. Can't recall if it was during EA or after launch, and can't recall which game it was. If I can think of it I'll edit.

For a game like Doom which added Vulkan support shortly after launch, it was sensible to maintain support for both GL and Vulkan. A game like that only has a limited lifespan where updates and additions are concerned (it's been at least 2 yrs since it had a major update, not including a 4k support-only patch, but I think even longer).

But for a GaaS title like PoE, trying to maintain both DX and Vulkan could quickly turn into a developer nightmare. We're always beta testing for GGG, so I wouldn't be surprised if there is at least a league or two gap between the time it's introduced and the time it becomes permanent. It will almost certainly be an all-in situation if/when it becomes a finalized part of the live game though.


Edit: I remember now, it was Star Citizen. I'm not sure if they fully switched to Vulkan yet, but that was their announced intention a while back--no DX12 and phasing out DX11. Given the glacial and haphazard development of that game though, I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't fully phased out DX yet. Maybe someone else here knows?

"

Magn3th3ad wrote:

I'm hoping that Vulkan support means we'll finally get a native Linux client. That would make me a very happy little exile.

If I could play poe with a native gnu client on arch that would be almost too good! ;)

"

aggromagnet wrote:

NMS being a good example. Pretty decent performance at medium to medium-high settings on my wife's R9 295x before Vulkan pretty much evaporated overnight when they switched in August. It's playable but it's really subpar compared to before. Whereas on my 2080 rtx it's even better than it was before. And she's one of those not-so-serious gamers who doesn't feel like she should have to upgrade for a game that was just fine, so I often find myself getting chased away from my PC when she does want to play. Sigh...

Sounds as a perfect example where someone should have bought 2 RTX2060 instead and use the rest money for a nice dinner with his wife ;).

"

Schakar wrote:

"

aggromagnet wrote:

NMS being a good example. Pretty decent performance at medium to medium-high settings on my wife's R9 295x before Vulkan pretty much evaporated overnight when they switched in August. It's playable but it's really subpar compared to before. Whereas on my 2080 rtx it's even better than it was before. And she's one of those not-so-serious gamers who doesn't feel like she should have to upgrade for a game that was just fine, so I often find myself getting chased away from my PC when she does want to play. Sigh...

Sounds as a perfect example where someone should have bought 2 RTX2060 instead and use the rest money for a nice dinner with his wife ;).

Uhhh yeah, the money is a non-issue. She could buy whatever she wanted if she chose to. But she's Taiwanese and kinda stuck in between generations...she has her parents old-fashioned sensibility when it comes to holding on to money because reasons.

"

DivineChampion wrote:

I would say it is the most overrated news, as well as Vulkan itself.

In the very best case Vulkan will add 10% more FPS, but Vulkan support in PoE means GGG would have to split their time between dx11 and Vulkan which overall will reduce game performance. I.e. Vulkan support will give absolutely nothing to the average player.

10%? Maybe, if it was really, really, really, poorly implemented.

"

DivineChampion wrote:

dx12 has similar to Vulkan performance and features, and is developed by MS which means future compatibility and support of dx12 is guaranteed. There is no point to go all in and switch from well-known and supported by everyone DX to pig in a poke Vulkan which can become outdated and abandoned same way openGL was. Btw this is the reason why Vulkan support is only additional or experimental feature in all games who has it.

DirectX 12 has similar features to Vulkan *if* you're running Windows 10 v1909. Not all Windows 10 users are using the recently released v1909. Before v1909 there was no Shader Mesh support for DirectX 12 but it's been supported in Vulkan and OpenGL for 1+ years.

OpenGL hasn't been obsoleted by Vulkan either, just like how DirectX 11 hasn't been obsoleted by DirectX 12. It's way, way, waaaay easier to program for OpenGL and DirectX 11 than it is for Vulkan and/or DirectX 12 but you can't get close to the performance capabilities of a well optimized Vulkan/DirectX 12 implementation.

Why would you support both DirectX 12 and Vulkan when one is supported by one O/S (with features spread across multiple versions of that O/S...) while the other is supported by Linux, Macintosh, Android, iOS, Windows 7, Windows 8 and all versions of Windows 10 (Vulkan)?

I work in game development and have used Vulcan, DX11, DX12, OpenGL, etc.

Vulcan is not magically faster, as people seem to think. In fact, it can be much slower due to building shader states on the fly (DX11/12 get around this by letting you build those binaries before hand). That said, you can do the same for Vulcan by precaching during load time (at the expense of some additional loading time).

Vulcan's selling point is it's platform support (much like OpenGL) but with a more modern API (like DX 11). The actual underlying speed is pretty negligible between all the APIs.

"

Nicholas_Steel wrote:

Why would you support both DirectX 12 and Vulkan when one is supported by one O/S (with features spread across multiple versions of that O/S...) while the other is supported by Linux, Windows 7, Windows 8 and all versions of Windows 10 (Vulkan)?

And Android, as well as MacOS/iOS via Molten...which is what makes the upcoming Mac client and PoE Mobile possible.