Those seem like de-facto work-arounds for the absence of 3D portability. Using an engine locks you into the constructs of that engine, though. It seems like it'd be kind of backwards to do that if you're using an API to get closer to the hardware, for performance purposes.
And a full-blown game engine is a very heavyweight solution for a lot of lightweight 3D problems, especially if you're looking at Web delivery. (One of the stated goals for this initiative is a next-gen WebGL.)
Could work as a preprocessor on the dev side for quickly outputting each native API code from a more general form, probably designed as a superset above SPIR-V (bound to be a bit more verbose than pure native code, but even a 100% larger project is better than 2+ discrete ones). Maybe even JIT if they can essentially extend LLVM (or at least generate direct hooks through the preproc).
I don't see much 'impossible' on the tech front, however politically... it's just my intuition but somehow I see Microsoft and Apple not cooperating much beyond WebGL efforts, and actually baking progress into their own proprietary APIs/platforms.
The matter of the fact is that as of today it's still profitable to develop 3D applications even under the restrictions posed by proprietary APIs, and OpenGL/Vulkan are still optionally usable too (though generally worse performing on Windows or Mac, notably because there's no efforts by MS or Apple to help). So there's really not much incentive for opened platforms. Essentially users are absorbing the costs (more money and/or less features, e.g. cross-platform game which sunk costs in porting/licenses rather than content), but so far don't complain much about it (probably because there's no comparison to be made in the real-world with opened platforms since none of the commercially successful OS is truly open at the consumer level).
As so often, nice spirit by Khronos, unfortunately they're so lonely on that road, surrounded by giants with conflicting interests and much wider preoccupations (read: emphasis on building an ecosystem + verticality of control). See Surface lineups, or even Google, now making Pixels. Actually the latter is a prime candidate to further Khronos' goals, I wonder what the 3D API landscape will look like on their alleged x86 efforts.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, those aren't the answer. I think the article title is a bit too vague. They're talking about probability of 3D for hardware accelerated rendering. Unity and Unreal Engine are complete game engines. Hardware accelerated rendering gets a lot of focus on games, but is used quite a bit elsewhere; apps for video editing, sound editing, 3d content generation (Maya, Houdini), CAD (the originator of OpenGL), and I think the UI on all major platforms are all hardware accelerated. Also, many game studios write their own engines in house because those game engines are big and a lot of "baggage" can come with that.
HN folk doesn't like to hear it, but that is how the game industry has worked since the early 80's where each gaming platform was a special snowflake.
There is a thriving industry of game engines and middleware that grew from there and the majority of game studios doesn't spend more than the time required to select which middleware they want to use.
Even for those that build their own engines, the graphics abstraction layer is a tiny portion of the engine, versus everything else that isn't covered by Khronos standards. Meaning GUI support, font, texture and shaders loading, mesh rendering, scene descriptions, game editors,....
Usually adding a new rendering backend to an engine doesn't take more than around one month, the biggest time slice being consumed by time to first triangle.
Given that Vulkan specification already has 74 extensions and is only at version 1.0.42, already bringing up the fun of "write once, port multiple times" from OpenGL, I am not confident this is going anywhere.
> Given that Vulkan specification already has 74 extensions and is only at version 1.0.42, already bringing up the fun of "write once, port multiple times" from OpenGL
This is a dishonest and decieving way of putting things.
The difference between Vulkan and OpenGL here is that most of the functionality extensions are software only additions and are available everywhere with up-to-date drivers.
Mobile is a bit of a pain point because they don't get driver updates as nicely.
If you look at Vulkan extensions qualitatively (not just the numbers) you'll see that it's nothing at all like the OpenGL extension mess. The vast majority is window system integration (WSI) and extenral memory and multi device stuff. Platform specific stuff which would exist in WGL/GLX/EGL for OpenGL and can't reasonably be put in "core" (because everyone must support all of core).
It was perhaps a mistake to attempt to release Vulkan 1.0 as early as they did, it might have been a better idea to put out 0.9 beta version and accept that there will be API changes.
However, very few changes have been made to the core apis.
Yes, yes it is. If the extensions would be anything like the OpenGL extensions which make changes to the core api functionality, you'd be right. But take a look at the extensions and tell which one(s) would cause a "write once, port everywhere" situation.
I can't name a single extension that would be causing any friction in Vulkan, unlike OpenGL where there's lots of code paths that need to be implemented to do even basic stuff (and all the core/ARB/EXT variations).
Yeah, Vulkan has some extra complexity stemming from being cross-vendor and designed by a commitee. But it's nowhere nearly as bad as you imply.
In my experience with Vulkan, it's all the optional features and device capabilities that need to be queried at runtime and decisions made based on that that's causing complexity with portability (you don't need to care about most of the extensions, and the ones you do have to care about are simpler than their OpenGL counterparts, ie. WSI vs. GLX/WGL/EGL). And apart from a few pain points (like numbers of queues exposed), it's relatively straightforward and comparable to D3D or Metal in complexity.
Yes, but Unity, Unreal and the other engines need a 3d API to run on. They can use Vulkan, D3D or Metal on native desktop/mobile platforms but that's already 3 separate backends and there's no good API for the browser (WebGL being suboptimal in many ways and about 15 years behind the native platforms).