Nvidia Vulkan GPU Driver

[toronto699]

Nvidia Has Released a Vulkan GPU Driver and demo gamepaly but u must roll back your nvdia driver to 356.39

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/art...pus-game-ready

[Nate152]

What in the world are you posting today toronto699, I have not heard of the vulkan driver and it has me curious, I will look into this now.

[Nate152]

Well if I understand correctly the vulkan driver is for people that have windows 7,8,8.1 which doesn't have the directx 12 feature. I have windows 10 with directx 12 so I don't think I need the vulkan driver.

If anyone can elaborate more that would be great.

[Nodens]

You're both wrong :P Vulkan is a new graphics API that is the evolution of OpenGL and is being developed by Khronos (the institution behind OpenGL and OpenCL) and partners. It is also the official tombstone of AMD's Mantle. Key benefits of Mantle were adopted by Vulkan (direct hardware access etc etc).
It is entirely crossplatform and OS agnostic so it is supported in any version of Windows, Linux, iOS, etc etc as long as the GPU manufacturer (namely Nvidia and AMD) provide drivers for it. There is absolutely no "production" software that uses Vulkan right now, that driver is aimed at developers so they can work and adopt the new API.
Vulkan adoption is expected to be very high due to it being supported by Nvidia as well and because one of the big players pushing for it is Valve (for obvious reasons). Due to it being crossplatform, it will be adopted for sure by the big licensed game engines that export to multiple platforms (eg Unreal, Unity etc).

So basically do not bother with that driver until you see at least a game or piece of software you use that actually uses Vulkan. Although by that time, the driver will be included by default in the standard driver package.

[Nate152]

Hey Nodens !

Thank you for the explanation, I been reading good things about vulkan, better performance better visual quality etc etc.

From what I've read it's like directx 12 but if it works with directx 12 it can only improve things. I'm looking forward to see how it's used and works with games and from what you wrote it looks like we will be waiting a while. It would be great if all game companies would start using it right away.

Do you think pascal will have any advantages with vulkan over maxwell or is it too early to tell?

[Nodens]

It doesn't work "with" DX12, it replaces it. A game or piece of software will use either one or the other (both can co-exist in a system if that's what you meant and software can support multiple renderers (eg a game with a toggle between DX and OpenGL in the graphics settings)). But only one graphics API can be used at a time.

DX12 is a step in the right direction as it also..umm "borrowed" features from Mantle. Vulkan aims to be superior than DirectX though. And most importantly, for a lot of the players involved, aims to "decouple" gaming from windows. This is why Valve is pushing it hard, due to SteamOS/Steamboxes being Linux based. Nintendo is also behind it 100%.

As far as performance goes, both Vulkan and DX12 aim to eliminate the CPU bottleneck by allowing an unprecedented number of draw calls. Vulkan goes even further by inheriting all the best parts of Mantle. Considering DX12 is Win10 only and Vulkan can be run on any Windows version and other OS as well, adoption rate for Vulkan by developers is a much safer bet. Remember the raise in DX11 adoption only happened when MS brought it to Win7 as well. And this is the reason why AMD's Mantle failed in the first place. While it did not limit itself to Windows versions, it did run only on AMD cards. Developers want bigger audience, no one will spend resources to adopt a technology that's being utilized only by a small percentage of the userbase. Unless you're being paid to do so or have software engineers on loan, working on it, without any cost for you
Vulkan though runs everywhere and on everything. It's supported by both Nvidia and AMD and I'm quite sure Intel will also jump onboard for their IGP. My personal prediction is that we'll start seeing titles utilizing Vulkan by fall 2016.

[Nate152]

That sounds great, this makes me look forward to Vulkan even more.

And after reading this, upgrading to windows 10 for directx 12 doesn't seem that big of a deal now. Microsoft wants their money too, I suppose this is why the "preview" for Vulkan was held off to get people to upgrade to windows 10 for directx 12. But either way you got me pumped for Vulkan now.

[Nodens]

Heheh. The developer "community", including myself, are even more pumped about it. Most of us hate working with DirectX, mainly for reasons that are very hard to explain to someone without a programming background *coughCOMcough* but most importantly because it's a proprietary API and Microsoft has complete control over it. And they pull some very questionable business practices with it (eg locking new versions of the API to new Windows versions to force gamers into upgrading--the DX10 fiasco for example).
Open APIs like OpenGL and Vulkan allow developers to not only extend their userbase by building versions of the software for other platforms (eg Linux, Android, Mac) but also at any time, features can be contributed to the project (eg developers of the Unreal Engine decide they want some really cool feature that is possible but not implemented, they can contribute code to the API and make it happen). If fact Unreal Engine is as far as I know the first big engine to adopt it.
Most of us see Vulkan as the holy grail of graphics APIs..one ring to rule them all :P

Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnKu7MLB7vQ

[Arne Saknussemm]

Everyone knows this was coded by Dr Spock shortly before he passed away so it's going to be pretty good.

Bones was overheard saying its Mantle Jim, but not as we know it...

Jim adked what happened to mantle and bones replied Mantle's dead Jim.

Incidentaly..another interesting detail from that day....Jim asked Spock about his gaming peripherals and Spock answered...that would be Logitec Captain....