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by om2 3417 days ago
We expect DirectX 12 drivers to be more complete, more performant, and more likely to be available out of the box without a separate install. We expect Windows browsers will want to build on top of DirectX, not Vulkan.
3 comments

https://www.lunarg.com/faqs/microsoft-support-vulkan/

Microsoft won't support Vulkan officially, and apps would have to install their own Vulkan drivers.

Not true, Vulcan drivers are included in drivers of the GPU manufacturer.
No, Nvidia and AMD including Vulcan drivers. Intel isn't and said they don't plan to. Intel has a HUGE market share thanks to integrated graphics. There are other companies too.
> https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2016/03/14/new-intel-...

"DATE: March 11, 2016" "-NEW- Intel® Vulkan BETA 15.40.20.4404 Graphics Driver for Windows® 7/8.1/10 [15.40]"

> https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2016/06/29/new-intel-...

"DATE: June 24 2016" "-NEW- Intel® Graphics Test Driver for Windows® 10 and Windows 7/8.1 [15.40.4473]"

https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2016/06/23/intel-open...

"In his blog published on February 16, 2016, Imad Sousou shared that Intel was selected as one of the leading graphics platform suppliers with Vulkan* 1.0 drivers certified by the Khronos Group Consortium."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsOTVpepS44

"We are demoing Intel’s implementation of the API available on the latest hardware from Intel on 3 major operating systems: Windows, Linux and Android." Intel Engineer: "This really shows the industry is moving towards Vulkan."

https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-prod...

Intel sure seems to have been making sure all of their chips are now Vulkan capable. All I can find for "they don't plan to" are what seems like rumors on one forum that are spawned by the current drivers being "unsupported" (but given that they are in beta, that makes sense to me: the storyline here is that they were provided for Vulkan developers to start testing their products and likely testing this driver). It really seems like Intel is at worst being "a little slow" to push Vulkan, but they are definitely not unsupportive.

According to https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/developing-games-and... Intel DOES plan on releasing official production quality drivers at some point.
Planning and actually releasing is not the same thing.
They HAVE released drivers, I've used them on both Windows and Linux.
> There are other companies too.

In addition to what people have said about Intel, Qualcomm, ARM, and IMG are all behind Vulkan. Who else is making GPUs these days?

I don't see why this would be the case. The vendors (i.e. NVidia) are providing the drivers, I see no reason why they would porposely cripple them.
It's the current reality with OpenGL on Windows, which is why Windows browsers do not implement WebGL with OpenGL, but rather by translating to Direct3D.

Maybe it'll be different for Vulkan, but that would be a surprise.

Because they have been doing so with OpenGL (an identical situation) for years.

Besides, "purposefully cripple" is inaccurate. They just put more effort into Direct3D because there's no reason to support OpenGL as fully.

Including the SDKs, AMD and NVidia SDKs for a long time used to have better DirectX tooling than OpenGL.
Care to back up those assertions with real world evidence?
Chrome and Firefox felt there were sufficient problems with OpenGL driver availabity that they implemented WebGL using DirectX (via the ANGLE project), despite the more obvious mapping to OpenGL.

Is there any reason to believe that, unlike OpenGL, Vulkan drivers will be sufficiently widespread for browser vendors to use it on Windows?

That's really fascinating and I didn't know that.
Intel has no stated intention of releasing production-quality Vulkan drivers for Windows. Forum statement from August:

The current Plan Of Record is that Intel® is not supporting Vulkan on Windows drivers. The drivers that were made available on Developer.com are intended for Vulkan developers.

So, it is expected that some Vulkan drivers may not work for end users.

A quick google finds an Intel representative providing clarification: https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/developing-games-and...

So, they ARE planning full Vulkan support on Intel iGPUs.

Good find, it's a shame that the only info is buried in forums and there's no timeline or official statements.