In practice, the word "open" in "Open Standards", such as OpenGL or Vulkan, doesn't mean very much. For example, being able to vote, participate in the specs' working group, or access the conformance tests costs a considerable amount of money[1].
APIs such as DirectX or Metal receive just as much or more input from developers, albeit mostly through back channels or explicit reach out by Microsoft, Apple, etc.
The conformance tests are open source and will be available from day 1 ;)
As far as participating in the design of the standard, are you really saying you'd want everyone and their mother to have their word? I think it's best to leave this to GPU vendors and engine implementers, as they're the ones who know how it can work.
Well OpenGL regardless of urban myths has been mostly ignored by the games industry, except on iOS, Android and indies before the rise of middleware due to lack of proper tooling.
Or it can be a very nice object based API instead of a state based API that made sense in 1992 as the slide deck said and certainly didn't make any sense in 2008 when the industry group Khronos sided with the commercial CAD industry to screw over Linux consumer gaming because there was no money in it. How was that DirectX's fault again?
I am guess you're not a game developer and your post is yet another case of [1].
I am a game dev and here are some links that show to non game devs why DirectX is more popular:
Not MS alone, but anyone who uses lock-in. And why should such despicable behavior be respected, because it's an "industry practice"? It is not. It's just common because various major companies in the industry are indeed jerks.
>NVIDIA will therefore provide a few Vulkan extensions from day zero, so that you as developer can enjoy less obstacles on your path to Vulkan. We will support consuming GLSL shader strings directly next to Vulkan's mandatory SPIR-V input
Nefarious intent aside. This will make it much easier to port large projects over piece by piece so its not an all or nothing proposal that requires a complete rewrite from day 1.
The lack of information about Vulkan is a bit concerning. For something that is about to be announced anyday now there is very little concrete information available about basic details like - what hardware that is currently shipping will support vulkan and how long after announcement will vendors have drivers out (weeks/months/years?).
> what hardware that is currently shipping will support vulkan
AMD will support it for all GCN GPUs (7000 series).
Nvidia will support Vulkan for Fermi (GeForce 400) and newer. I don't really believe them here, but they even talked about Windows XP support. Announced on SIGGRAPH 2015.
Intel is Haswell and newer. It's possible that Ivy Bridge may get it on Linux, but Windows driver looks unlikely as they don't even support OpenGL 4.3 in Windows.
> how long after announcement will vendors have drivers out
Valve demonstrated Vulkan driver developed by LunarG for Intel hardware back in March of 2015. It's will be released with source code once specification released.
Nvidia driver with Vulkan (358.66) leaked in November.
AMD employees confirmed they already have Vulkan working on top of new Linux AMDGPU driver.
>what hardware that is currently shipping will support vulkan
Khronos has committed to publishing an API which can be implemented on all OpenGL ES 3.1 capable hardware.
>how long after announcement will vendors have drivers out (weeks/months/years?).
AMD, NVIDIA, and intel have all committed to timelines, or do not need to.
AMD developed Mantle, and has been developing their Vulkan stack since the beginning. They haven't set a date, but I doubt it'll be more than a month past public API release.
NVIDIA has committed to same-day delivery of a compliant driver. The day that the spec comes out, NVIDIA says they will have a driver.
For intel, I'm not certain about their proprietary drivers. I do know, however, that Valve and LunarG have developed an intel Vulkan driver. They are committed to a same-day release with source code.
So no: not years, probably not months, maybe not even weeks.
Newest thing I've heard is that there will be games using Vulkan at launch. So, the specification, the drivers and some game ports will all go public the same day. Anything might be holding it up (most likely the ports), but GDC in March seems like a reasonable deadline considering the amount of talks about Vulkan.
I really think one of the important aspects is that it should be much easier to reverse engineer proprietary drivers now given how explicit the API is supposed to be.
More garbage from the same trash factory. Get back to me when you have an API that doesn't incentivize drivers to behave differently based on the name of the video game engine.
No one has such an API, as far as I can tell. You think drivers aren't activating special code paths and replacing shader code for games that use Direct3D? I suspect we'll have a short time period where drivers don't do this for Vulkan and D3D12 before we go right back to it because in the end, whoever runs the game and runs it faster wins, no matter how broken the game is.
I think he's referring to GR_APPLICATION_INFO, which in Mantle was a struct passed during initialization containing the string names of the game and engine plus their version numbers.
The intention probably is to make app specific driver paths easier to implement but as you say, driver developers would do that regardless using the name/path/checksum of the EXE if they had to.
Seriously Khronos, take a fucking page out of C++. They went two decades with awful broken language syntax until sometime between 2004 and 2008 they got together and decided to fix it.
Today, https://isocpp.org/ is a gold mine of how to do an open standard correctly. Everything is public, future features are discussed with the community, and all the working groups are on github. That is how you take a legacy standardization body and modernize it for the open source world, not make presentations at every event for over a year going "Hey guys its gonna be great! Just wait until you see it! Ooooonnnnnneeeee day! We just know you'll love it!"
Not only as drivers, but also documents, books, tools and graphical debuggers.
I hope this doesn't turn out into another Longs Peak.
[0] Yes, I know it is Mantle inspired and I have those PDFs.