Totally. The Steam controller is just vapor even though they sold out all the pre-orders, and launching a new console platform, I mean why would they bother with any first party launch titles.
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Valve throws it's weight behind Vulkan.
- Thread starter cageymaru
- Start date
Totally. The Steam controller is just vapor even though they sold out all the pre-orders, and launching a new console platform, I mean why would they bother with any first party launch titles.
BravO)))
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I think with the release of the steambox and controllers, valve will be competing very hard with the console market. If it is widely adopted, I could see games getting even cheaper. Iinstead of having to port from pc to console and vice versa, steambox games will be the same as steam games on pc unlike xbone and ps4 to pc and vice versa. And the ability to constantly upgrade your console and run mods will be a huge plus too. Mark my words, steambox will be a huge deal once it is fully released.
Ashbringer
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I don't think this forum is aware of the outrage going around the internet over Nvidia omitting Async Computer in their hardware. This would explain the huge increase in performance AMD sees over Nvidia. So much so that Aquanox developers have talked to Nvidia and asked about them improving their drivers.
I know this forum hates AMD cause of the Fury Nano thing but the internet is going crazy over this Async Compute thing. Which is a problem cause as the developers have said 81% of GPU market is Nvidia. So they omit the feature all together which is a huge speed boost for AMD.
Semantics
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Except you still have to port a game from Linux to Windows granted it's abit easier but just because some of the apis are universal doesn't mean the game's software is.
dragonstongue
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unified does not mean it will NOT work for consoles new or older, if anything if it is robust enough allowing a multitude of things then it could and will eventually be this way, think the OS itself is the base, the engine for the many millions of games are generally using bits and pieces of many different things, anyways my point is, if they somehow simmer these things together then the devs can worry about making their product no matter if it is PC, PS4 or whatever.
Hell as an example baseline OS could be more or less the same "cookie cutter" with each version being uniquely their own UI to actually enforce IP and legal issues, this would allow far more cross platform as yes the base might be "PS4" but the base "XB1" is essentially the same "version" just difference in the UI, some hardware, maybe slight difference in the way it buffers the information etc.
Honestly I have no damn idea why modern consoles using very similar parts cannot be cross-platform, if all these companies are so interested in just making $ they would try to enforce that ability as there will always be platform exclusive, to the point where someone like me I love PS controller but hate XB controller so generally would get the PS version but why should I not be able to play against my buddy in the same game who hates PS but loves XB, even ensuring more simple things like controllers have to be able to be used PC, PC to console etc, see what I mean, open it up they could actually make far more $ and still stand out from each other.
I think Vulkan/DX12 are these things, the base API allows the actual design to stand on its own merit with less reliance on proprietary crap and more on the part in question, so it is a beast it will show it in raw performance probably in looks as well due to there being all these extra parts in motion.
anywho
just example
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OpenGL_programs
this is a very small number of the games/programs that are built or use OpenGL, while the older ones I agree were eventually lacking much vs DX they still generally followed the industry wants/standards albeit slower to incorporate them. The last few years however with the industry wanting more open style not proprietary locked to one API have pushed tons of development on refining the code etc,
Vulkan is one of these things that can be used on many OS not just 1, IMO this is a great thing as it (Vulkan) is nigh on identical to offering what DX12 offers, thanks to AMD and many HSA partners and such, not Nvidia, and certainly not MSFT.
I think overall that is and has been the problem with so many designs, not in the general doing X faster then competition but designing and implementing something YOU can do and locking others out of doing it, what they do need is standardize industry wide be it GL, DX or whatever that generally does not allow specific proprietary BS unless amendments are made to allow others to use it as well i.e open source, because I am an ass, I would have forced companies like Nvidia or whatever to not be allowed to use example PhysX unless it was opened up to others (or valid other versions implicitly enabled) to implement software/hardware versions of it as well for new OS/DX versions, i.e it actually force disables the acceleration because not everyone gets to "enjoy it"
This way here everyone gets to use the same massive "skeleton" but because it is so massive everyone`s product can also be different using similar nuts and bolts, game engines example Unity are much closer to being this way then general OS types seem to be.
While I give creds to MSFT with DX10-11-12 for being less and less allowing others to do as they see fit and instead requiring X for the baseline they still are off by being to "loose" in the definitions of what is acceptable and what is not where massive companies like Nvidia or Intel can bypass some of these things in software where others have to do it via hardware etc.
I think the days of the "old guard" doing as they see fit at the cost of everyone else is coming to a close, as it should have been many years ago, they had their fun and got very wealthy, but considering the shear cost of development product or otherwise they honestly should be playing "more nicely" there is no reason why they should not be when there are plenty of ways to play ball without shafting everyone but yourself
Hell as an example baseline OS could be more or less the same "cookie cutter" with each version being uniquely their own UI to actually enforce IP and legal issues, this would allow far more cross platform as yes the base might be "PS4" but the base "XB1" is essentially the same "version" just difference in the UI, some hardware, maybe slight difference in the way it buffers the information etc.
Honestly I have no damn idea why modern consoles using very similar parts cannot be cross-platform, if all these companies are so interested in just making $ they would try to enforce that ability as there will always be platform exclusive, to the point where someone like me I love PS controller but hate XB controller so generally would get the PS version but why should I not be able to play against my buddy in the same game who hates PS but loves XB, even ensuring more simple things like controllers have to be able to be used PC, PC to console etc, see what I mean, open it up they could actually make far more $ and still stand out from each other.
I think Vulkan/DX12 are these things, the base API allows the actual design to stand on its own merit with less reliance on proprietary crap and more on the part in question, so it is a beast it will show it in raw performance probably in looks as well due to there being all these extra parts in motion.
anywho
just example
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OpenGL_programs
this is a very small number of the games/programs that are built or use OpenGL, while the older ones I agree were eventually lacking much vs DX they still generally followed the industry wants/standards albeit slower to incorporate them. The last few years however with the industry wanting more open style not proprietary locked to one API have pushed tons of development on refining the code etc,
Vulkan is one of these things that can be used on many OS not just 1, IMO this is a great thing as it (Vulkan) is nigh on identical to offering what DX12 offers, thanks to AMD and many HSA partners and such, not Nvidia, and certainly not MSFT.
I think overall that is and has been the problem with so many designs, not in the general doing X faster then competition but designing and implementing something YOU can do and locking others out of doing it, what they do need is standardize industry wide be it GL, DX or whatever that generally does not allow specific proprietary BS unless amendments are made to allow others to use it as well i.e open source, because I am an ass, I would have forced companies like Nvidia or whatever to not be allowed to use example PhysX unless it was opened up to others (or valid other versions implicitly enabled) to implement software/hardware versions of it as well for new OS/DX versions, i.e it actually force disables the acceleration because not everyone gets to "enjoy it"
This way here everyone gets to use the same massive "skeleton" but because it is so massive everyone`s product can also be different using similar nuts and bolts, game engines example Unity are much closer to being this way then general OS types seem to be.
While I give creds to MSFT with DX10-11-12 for being less and less allowing others to do as they see fit and instead requiring X for the baseline they still are off by being to "loose" in the definitions of what is acceptable and what is not where massive companies like Nvidia or Intel can bypass some of these things in software where others have to do it via hardware etc.
I think the days of the "old guard" doing as they see fit at the cost of everyone else is coming to a close, as it should have been many years ago, they had their fun and got very wealthy, but considering the shear cost of development product or otherwise they honestly should be playing "more nicely" there is no reason why they should not be when there are plenty of ways to play ball without shafting everyone but yourself
rezerekted
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Down with the Microsoft proprietary monopolistic practices!
dragonstongue
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Nvidia dont care, as you pointed out, they hold X amount of market and have higher ASP to the point where a flat out claim of "full support" for DX12 is impossible for any card they have ever made as they are not even fully complete with previous 10-11 versions. Maybe they consider Async compute not worth it( just like so many other things) folks still buy them up, so then why should they care, they make $, people upset, they release next version still not fully complete probably cannot do some things the last card could do very well, people still pay an arm and leg for them anyways, smart business make it lean, charge to much, if it gets bought, you make more $.
Anarchist4000
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I've seen the outrage, but it's a bit misplaced IMHO. If the cards are synchronously working at close to 100% of their theoretical maximum there is no real room for improvement from async. AMD cards have had much better math performance for a while, but as it didn't often show up in games nobody cared It's also a performance feature, not a capability like say tesselation.
crusty_juggler
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Not a chance in hell.
morningreis
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I'm not surprised this is happening. It's a natural and logical decision for Valve to do this. I am only surprised it has taken this long for a real rival for Direct X to come about.
griff30
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Native 4K support will bring in quite a lot more than you would think.
crusty_juggler
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People are clamoring for 4K gaming under Linux?
How much would such a console cost and what type of performance would it have in comparison to a traditional Windows gaming PC?
rezerekted
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OpenGL was a real rival but most game developers chose not to support it and went with proprietary crap instead.
Except OGL was a convoluted mess since it placed way too much overhead and burden on devs and IHV's, whereas Vulkan is on equal or better footing as D3D12 since they're both derived from Mantle.
Unless you're a closet MS employee or shareholder, I can't think of a single downside to developing for Vulkan since it makes porting easier and opens the door to billions of mobile devices.
Valve still hasn't REALLY caught on to what gamers want.
What we WANT is an API to make Linux or other platforms viable for high-end gaming.
If Valve could put half a dozen AAA titles that everyone plays under the Vulcan API, make damn sure it works under super easy under SteamOS and several of the most common Linux distros and then incentivize the hell out of it for a little while (nearly free) to get gamers to actually try it... they would have a full on revolution on their hands.
I'm a Windows guy. I like Windows. I don't like some stuff MS does but for the most part they make things easier than any other option including and especially any flavor of Linux.
If Valve could just get SteamOS and Vulcan together with some big games cheap as a proof of concept then MS would finally have competition in the OS market again.
Windows 10 is doing fine. My new system is a beast. But I would not mind having a SteamOS / Vulcan API alternative for serious gaming. Less bloat. Less privacy issues. Less is more on a gaming system.
Come on Valve. Get it going. We want it.
What we WANT is an API to make Linux or other platforms viable for high-end gaming.
If Valve could put half a dozen AAA titles that everyone plays under the Vulcan API, make damn sure it works under super easy under SteamOS and several of the most common Linux distros and then incentivize the hell out of it for a little while (nearly free) to get gamers to actually try it... they would have a full on revolution on their hands.
I'm a Windows guy. I like Windows. I don't like some stuff MS does but for the most part they make things easier than any other option including and especially any flavor of Linux.
If Valve could just get SteamOS and Vulcan together with some big games cheap as a proof of concept then MS would finally have competition in the OS market again.
Windows 10 is doing fine. My new system is a beast. But I would not mind having a SteamOS / Vulcan API alternative for serious gaming. Less bloat. Less privacy issues. Less is more on a gaming system.
Come on Valve. Get it going. We want it.
TheOneKnownAsMe
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As a game developer, yeah, their reputation is a bit shot. As a platform developer, they are very relevant. Vulkan interests them because it isn't just a single game, it's an entire platform that thousands of developers can use as a launching pad and backend for their programs.
If they take it seriously and honestly push it, I could see Vulkan doing for cross-platform gaming what steam did for online sales. It could be a complete game changer.
Most of the major engines are already multi-platform, so this is trivial.
Unreal Engine : DX12/Vulkan in development
Frostbite: DX12/Vulkan in development
Source 2 (obviously) Vulkan
Cryengine is rumored Vulkan in dev, but unconfirmed
But really the biggest game changer I see that will motivate fence sitting devs and publishers is Google choosing Vulkan for Android back on August 10. That alone is likely to create the needed floodgate effect given the billions of mobile devices that completely eclipse the 100million Windows 10/DX12 devices.
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Twisted Kidney
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Aw nuts, you beat me to it.
I do hope Vulkan is a success, I love the shit out of working with Linux. I really want to game with Linux as well. It's just such a damned mine field to get so many things running.
Missed Unity, they are Contributors too and don't plan to miss it.
https://www.khronos.org/members/contributors
Diablo or WoW ring a bell? Two enormous titles without any research.
Funny, since you can just as easily invoke Diablo II, which had it's best feature set using Glide, and highest resolution using Direct X.
Remember, DX prior to DX7 pretty much stank. So prior to the 2000's, Glide was king, followed by OGL, with DX typically using a higher resolution, but lower feature list. It wasn't until DX8 that DX basically ran away with things. It certainly didn't help that Unreal 2 was better in DX, and the IDTech 4 engine was such a disaster.
False arguments remain false. Let's not forget all those engines you listed happen to already support DX to start with; Vulkan support is being tacked on after the fact. Secondly, Android has supported OGL for some time now, but despite all the MILLIONS of applications using it, developers still use DX on Windows, because, well, OGL sucks.
Nevermind the sorry state of AMD's OGL driver, which certainly doesn't help. [Seriously, ATI/AMD has sucked at OGL historically].
And certainly nevermind the PS4/XB1 will continue to use their low level graphics libraries rather then higher level APIs, simply because the extra performance matters. So you'll get something that looks like this:
Mobile: OGL ES/Vulkan
Linux: OGL/Vulkan [Binary drivers only, MESA support sometime between 2050 and hell freezing over]
Windows: Mostly DX11/DX12, with some Vulkan thrown in
XB1: The low-level DX11 layer
PS4: The libgcm graphical library
Wierdo
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No "technical" reason maybe, but certainly allot of "business" reasons.
Would be nice.
Would be nice.
KickAssCop
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Valve needs to shut the fuck up and make a game worth playing first. Bunch of tools. Made one
great game (Half Life), another half assed game (Half Life 2) and think they are kings of industry.
great game (Half Life), another half assed game (Half Life 2) and think they are kings of industry.
I'm not sure what you're really disputing but I don't think we're disagreeing. I've repeatedly said OGL is a rat's nest that gives developers nightmares. Which is why Vulkan breaks from OGL completely and contains no legacy code. So is your contention that "OGL is on millions of devices and yet devs continued using DX on Windows anyway, therefore replacing OGL with Vulkan won't change anything"? If so I'd strongly disagree. The API's for mobile and desktop are separate with OGL. Vulkan's API on the other hand is unified across desktop/mobile/console/embedded, and only needs to ingest the SPIR-V intermediate language on any platform.
Also, anyone that hasn't seen this demo of Vulkan vs. OGL-ES running on a $60 Android device (Nexus Player), well the difference is obscene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_I8an8jXuM
Article on it: http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/gnomes-per-second-in-vulkan-and-opengl-es
As for PS4 and XB1, they can adapt or die. With 25 and 14.5 million units worldwide respectively while mobile is in the Billions (and ARM processors get ever more powerful), the day is coming where game development will no longer revolve around them. PC gamers are headed for the day we bitch about "mobile ports", and wishing we could go back to the days of "shitty console ports".
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Vercinaigh
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Vulkan has my vote, especially since I'm ditching Windows in the next year. Anything i -have- run via Windows will be done via VM and VT-D/IMMOU device passthrough.
Hornet
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Funny how some people thinks that just because Valve isn't making another game they want anytime soon, Valve should not get involve in pushing Vulcan? How do you even come up with such reasoning.
Vulcan needs all the push it can get. It is something that can benefit us, as Vulcun is an API that works everywhere, regardless of whether you are a Windows or Linux user. It's not an API that is intentionally restricted to a single OS for no good reason.
So even if Valve's endorsement alone will not make it a huge success, it is still a crucial part of the collective effort needed. I doubt there's any company that can make Vulcan a success on their own anyway. Only a collective effort can do it.
Vulcan needs all the push it can get. It is something that can benefit us, as Vulcun is an API that works everywhere, regardless of whether you are a Windows or Linux user. It's not an API that is intentionally restricted to a single OS for no good reason.
So even if Valve's endorsement alone will not make it a huge success, it is still a crucial part of the collective effort needed. I doubt there's any company that can make Vulcan a success on their own anyway. Only a collective effort can do it.
And drivers that interact directly with the OS graphical layer, which is one reason DX will outperform Vulkan on Windows. So you immediately go into the age old problem of "are you willing to accept a 10% performance penalty so a theoretical mobile version of some PC title can be more easily ported"?
Android is a interesting case, since the primary bottlenecks are actually CPU side, so the enhancements in Vulkan will have a much larger effect on mobile platforms then you'll get on the PC for the most part.
See my first point: Can consoles afford a 10-20% performance penalty of using a higher order API then they are currently using? I think not.
What I remember is that John Carmack pushed Microsoft into a corner and forced them to care about DirectX. Carmack was like the god of game development at the time and was about to start telling eveyone opengl was the only way and then all of a sudden MS started pushing out new versions of direct x at epic speed.I think we were only on DX3 at that time, direct x4 and 5 were developed at the same time, DX5 took the win for a short time and before long we hit DX6. I think it was at this point where the devs shifted to DX and opengl became a thing of the past.
Agreed 100%. Valve is nothing more than a content delivery company at this point and should have no say in how games are developed in the industry. They made it clear a while ago that they were heading that way. It's preposterous that they haven't either made more HL games or sold the rights to someone who can and will.
Compared to, say, the libgcm library the PS4 has,yes, Vulkan is a higher order API in the same way that C (not ++) is a high level language. It's lower level then before, but still a higher level API then to the metal libraries that consoles use.
Secondly, Vulkan isn't the same as DX12; there's some pretty key architectural differences between the two. Sure, they do pretty much the same things, but they do some of them differently. This effects design, and at the end of the day, Windows is the lead development platform, and devs will pick and choose whichever API is easier to develop for, and that's where DX12 has a pretty massive edge. Say what you will, MSFTs development tools are top notch.
Make no mistake: Vulkan will be used about as much as OGL is used now.
Hornet
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Valve do develop games, just not the ones you care about. To put it bluntly, the gaming world doesn't revolve around your gaming needs.
They've recently ported DOTA 2 over to Source 2 engine. Sooner or later, CS too will head that way. These are huge franchises in the gaming industry.
TheBlueChanell
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Why would they do that? We'll get a new HL release when it can blow us away. Valve understands the amount of hype behind the game and they won't release anything until it'll blow your socks off.
I would imagine once the Vive is out and they've got their new engine up to snuff we'll see a new HL game but not until then.
If they released any form of Half-Life anything within their current "ecosystem" if you will, it'd be pitch forks and torches and the internet would melt.
Why not... Microsoft and the Japanese conglomerate did create a unified system in the 80's early 90's with the MSX plateform. Technically they were computers but they were mostly bought for the gaming side of it. Hell some of the biggest franchise in videogames started on the MSX liike Metal Gear... Panasonic, JVC, Sony and other all created and sold MSX computers and they made money doing so.
The main things that will push the use Vulkan over Direct X is the tools and compiler languages, both consoles right now use HLSL and so Vulkan's SPIR-V will have to be able to translate HLSL and it won't right now. Also the GPU debugging tools for DirectX are solid, as of right now Vulkan can't come close to them, I'm sure they will improve in the future though. As of right now, its not in the best interest of developers to just shift over to Vulkan because of these two areas. Tools are very important and this was the main reason why Direct X adoption took off.
And of course Vulkan drivers forgot about them, big part of the equation.
griff30
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If Valve releases HL3 in SteamOS I think people would change their minds. Especially if it ran rings around the same game in Windows.