Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vivty 942 days ago
Maybe i am wrong, but this tweet and wikipedia directly contradicts what you say (id tech does indeed use vulkan on windows): https://twitter.com/billykhan/status/1028133659168186368

I am just doing game dev on the side but i think nowadays the graphics abstractions are fairly similar in how they work (the modern abstractions, i.e. Metal, D3D12, Vulkan). Of course ideally you choose the graphics abstraction that is "native" to the platform, but vulkan seems to be supported very well on windows (many AAA game use it and it works great, many games run even better with vulkan abstraction than with their d3d12 counterpart). I use vukan so my graphics can run on windows and linux (which is why i chose vulkan instead of d3d12).

1 comments

You are correct that idTech targets Vulkan (and they have some great GDC talks to boot)

They are however very much the minority.

I am suspect of your claim about Vulkan abstraction layers running better than DX12. If there is a performance difference, it’s likely elsewhere in the stack and just tangentially related.

I'm surprised by that as well.

I haven't done this stuff for quite a while, so my memory might be foggy, but the main advantage of Vulcan was that you can control all the CPU locking rather than the API doing it. This allows you to do stuff like prepare on one thread and submit on another, etc.

But that would be negated if you're using an abstraction layer.