Valve’s Dan Ginsburg spoke on the new approaching APIs at the SIGGRAPH 2015, Vulkan and DirectX 12. Both APIs offer low-level access to the GPU and CPU, but APIs can provides applications direct control over GPU acceleration. The main difference is Vulkan being open-source whereas DirextX 12 isn’t. This leads to Vulkan capable of being used in many operating system such as Linux whereas DirectX 12 is locked down to Windows 10.
Dan taken care of porting the Source 2 engine to Vulkan. He has openly said that there isn’t a reason to create a DirectX 12 backend when developers can use Vulkan right away. Click on the play button above or just go to 1:40:53
Here’s why we think Vulkan is the future. Unless you are aggressive enough to be shipping a DX12 game this year, I would argue that there is really not much reason to ever create a DX12 back end for your game. And the reason for that is that Vulkan will cover you on Windows 10 on the same class of hardware and so much more from all these other platforms and IHVs that we’ve heard from. Metal is single platform, single vendor, and Vulkan; we are gonna have support for not only Windows 10 but Windows 7, Windows 8, we’re gonna have it on Android and all of the IHVs are making great progress on drivers, I think we’re going to see super rapid adoption. If you’re developing a game for next generation APIs, I think it’s clear that Vulkan is the best choice and we’re very pleased with the progress and the state of the API. We think it’s gonna power the next generation of games for years to come.
This argument, we heard numerous times in the past, and of course we are going to hear this from the guy that working on Vulkan. The main reason why Vulkan is attractive is that games can be ported to Linux. But honestly, we have to see the bigger picture, how many publishers really care? Currently the PC ports have kinder sucked, we just seen a recent improvement just because of the release of the PS4 and Xbox One. Even though I want Vulkan to succeed, we won’t be seeing this any time soon. Especially when we only have data as the only game to be supported by Vulkan on release, whereas DirectX 12 will have numerous titles.
In my opinion (I could be wrong), the way for Vulkan to compete against DirectX12 is when consumers can move away from Windows 10. The only things that are stopping me and many others is Linux not having the program for my needs, for example office and Photoshop
