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by shmerl 3344 days ago
> That rhetoric about "the dark ages" is doing nobody any favors

I'm calling it what it is. Their refusal to support Vulkan shows they intend to remain in the dark ages, and continue forcing developers to operate with balkanized non portable APIs. It's like some browser maker would refuse to support HTML and would require you to use ActiveX, Flash or whatever.
1 comments
klodolph 3344 days ago
"I'm calling it what it is," is a poor excuse for poor rhetoric. Balkanized APIs are a historical fact. Khronos wasn't exactly quick to support modern hardware in the 2000s, everyone paid the price for it, Microsoft picked up the slack, and here we are with developers entrenched in the Direct3D ecosystem. Vulkan arrived about a year ago and that's not exactly a lot of time to sweep away all the inferior APIs before it. These things take time. The engine developers are figuring out how to use Vulkan, and Vulkan support is spreading. It's going to take more than a couple years.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is managing their profitable Windows business by supporting key app developers, including game studios, who are already happily using Direct3D. Are they going to axe it and piss off a valuable segment of developers? No.

The analogy with Flash is a pretty good one. Flash was used everywhere on the web for years and years. Then the iPhone sucked all the oxygen out of the room and Flash died.

Just like everyone switched from Flash to JavaScript so they could get their websites to run on the iPhone, maybe everyone will switch from Direct3D to Vulkan for the same reason. Flash took a long time to die. After Apple announced the iPhone would not support flash, it was five years later that YouTube stopped using it for video. And yes, there were a lot of good reasons to require Flash in the meantime, until the open web caught up.

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shmerl 3344 days ago
> Balkanized APIs are a historical fact.

Dark ages were long and historic too, which doesn't mean they didn't have a lot of problems :) So I find it a proper comparison. Those who insist on keeping things balkanized today (MS, Sony and Co), are slowing down the progress.

> maybe everyone will switch from Direct3D to Vulkan for the same reason.

I definitely hope so. Current messed up state shouldn't exist forever.

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