[gambiting]

I work for a large video games company and we usually write two backends - DirectX for Windows and Xbox, and a special one for PlayStation. That is changing slightly with Stadia, because that forces us to write a Vulkan renderer too. But on the few games that have it, the DX12 performance is better on windows than that of the Vulkan renderer backend - so we haven't released it to the public.

[shrewduser]

you should release vulkan for proton / linux users i think

[KitDuncan]

Please do release it to the public! Just for Proton and to experiment/bechmark.

[monsieurbanana]

As much as I'd like that, I can hear from here the outcries from the gaming community.

"Your game is bugged! It doesn't work! I want a refund!"

"But the vulkan renderer is only tested on Stadia, it's not officially supported and the game is free."

"I. Want. A. Refund."

[MaxBarraclough]

Put another way, then: doing so would mean taking on a considerable support burden.

[jhasse]

Make it a command line flag ;)

[MaxBarraclough]

Not a bad idea, especially if it's something like --experimental-vulkan. Unlikely to get blamed if it goes wrong, that way.

[gambiting]

So.....no, because gamer press is ruthless :P We've had one graphical bug in one of our games(which I'm certain everyone on the internet has seen by this point), and in reality it was only happening if you played on one specific GeForce card, and only when using beta Nvidia drivers. But of course no one cared that the bug only happened when using experimental drivers - it was somehow a proof of how broken our games are. If this(the vulkan backend) lead to any graphical bugs in our games, I can almost guarantee that they would be paraded everywhere, no matter how clearly we mark it as experimental and unfinished.

[rawbot]

Or a beta branch in Steam.