Vulkan/OpenGL-Next the future of OpenGL and Games

General discussion about LÖVE, Lua, game development, puns, and unicorns.
jjmafiae
Party member
Posts: 1331
Joined: Tue Jul 24, 2012 8:22 am

Vulkan/OpenGL-Next the future of OpenGL and Games

Post by jjmafiae »

at GDC last week they show cased the successor to OpenGL and Mantle, which is an highly optimized low level API.

http://www.performancepsu.com/vulkan-ne ... rs-opengl/

http://www.kitguru.net/components/graph ... nd-drones/

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/20083 ... -microsoft

now is the question could love in the future get support for this ?
Last edited by jjmafiae on Wed Mar 11, 2015 6:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
BluBillz
Prole
Posts: 46
Joined: Tue Oct 29, 2013 6:02 pm

Re: Vulcan/OpenGL-Next the future of OpenGL and Games

Post by BluBillz »

If you are asking if love2D will be compatible for OpenGL then that would be pretty neat to see...but i don't see how it could be that much useful...Love2D is powerful for what it is!
User avatar
s-ol
Party member
Posts: 1077
Joined: Mon Sep 15, 2014 7:41 pm
Location: Cologne, Germany
Contact:

Re: Vulcan/OpenGL-Next the future of OpenGL and Games

Post by s-ol »

BluBillz wrote:If you are asking if love2D will be compatible for OpenGL then that would be pretty neat to see...but i don't see how it could be that much useful...Love2D is powerful for what it is!
You mean whether it will be ported to Vulkan. Löve is currently running atop the OpenGL graphics stack.

That being said I think it's very possible we get a newer GPU Api, but I'm not sure whether Vulkan will be the new standard, there might be a similar project emerging. OpenGL (and extensions) are a mess right now, and similarly to how X11 is slowly being replaced by Wayland.
Last edited by s-ol on Wed Mar 11, 2015 7:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

s-ol.nu /blog  -  p.s-ol.be /st8.lua  -  g.s-ol.be /gtglg /curcur

Code: Select all

print( type(love) )
if false then
  baby:hurt(me)
end
User avatar
slime
Solid Snayke
Posts: 3131
Joined: Mon Aug 23, 2010 6:45 am
Location: Nova Scotia, Canada
Contact:

Re: Vulcan/OpenGL-Next the future of OpenGL and Games

Post by slime »

It's Vulkan, not Vulcan. ;)
jjmafiae wrote:now is the question could love in the future get support for this ?
I don't have any plans to do that. Vulkan (and Metal and DirectX 12, which are all very similar) has high system requirements. My development laptop has an OpenGL 4.5-capable GPU but won't support Vulkan (on Windows and Linux at least) since its GPU's architecture is rather old and AMD isn't interested in creating Vulkan drivers for its pre-GCN architectures.

LÖVE wouldn't get huge performance gains from using Vulkan either, compared to OpenGL. Many of the performance improvements possible with the newer APIs (DX12, Vulkan, Metal) can only happen if the code calling those APIs has high-level knowledge of what each frame is going to do. LÖVE's API is intentionally not very controlling, so it doesn't have a whole lot of high-level knowledge compared to game engines.
User avatar
Jeeper
Party member
Posts: 611
Joined: Tue Mar 12, 2013 7:11 pm
Contact:

Re: Vulcan/OpenGL-Next the future of OpenGL and Games

Post by Jeeper »

slime wrote:It's Vulkan, not Vulcan. ;)
jjmafiae wrote:now is the question could love in the future get support for this ?
I don't have any plans to do that. Vulkan (and Metal and DirectX 12, which are all very similar) has high system requirements. My development laptop has an OpenGL 4.5-capable GPU but won't support Vulkan (on Windows and Linux at least) since its GPU's architecture is rather old and AMD isn't interested in creating Vulkan drivers for its pre-GCN architectures.

LÖVE wouldn't get huge performance gains from using Vulkan either, compared to OpenGL. Many of the performance improvements possible with the newer APIs (DX12, Vulkan, Metal) can only happen if the code calling those APIs has high-level knowledge of what each frame is going to do. LÖVE's API is intentionally not very controlling, so it doesn't have a whole lot of high-level knowledge compared to game engines.
If we got you a new computer, would the answer still be the same?

If not, then I suggest we start a donation campaign to fix that. :)
User avatar
slime
Solid Snayke
Posts: 3131
Joined: Mon Aug 23, 2010 6:45 am
Location: Nova Scotia, Canada
Contact:

Re: Vulkan/OpenGL-Next the future of OpenGL and Games

Post by slime »

The rest of what I said still applies (and the high system requirements would be a problem for users of LÖVE and people who want to play LÖVE games as well), so I still wouldn't have plans to do that.
jjmafiae
Party member
Posts: 1331
Joined: Tue Jul 24, 2012 8:22 am

Re: Vulkan/OpenGL-Next the future of OpenGL and Games

Post by jjmafiae »

slime wrote:The rest of what I said still applies (and the high system requirements would be a problem for users of LÖVE and people who want to play LÖVE games as well), so I still wouldn't have plans to do that.
can't we have old versions as well as new versions of OpenGL in the engine and use what is possible to use on each computer?

like say a user has a decent Vulkan enabled system then it would automatically switch to that but if the users is still let's say use OpenGL3 then it switches to that ?
User avatar
adrix89
Party member
Posts: 135
Joined: Fri Oct 15, 2010 10:58 am

Re: Vulkan/OpenGL-Next the future of OpenGL and Games

Post by adrix89 »

jjmafiae wrote:
slime wrote:The rest of what I said still applies (and the high system requirements would be a problem for users of LÖVE and people who want to play LÖVE games as well), so I still wouldn't have plans to do that.
can't we have old versions as well as new versions of OpenGL in the engine and use what is possible to use on each computer?

like say a user has a decent Vulkan enabled system then it would automatically switch to that but if the users is still let's say use OpenGL3 then it switches to that ?
There is no point.
It all boils down to performance and game makers probably will not push too much in that direction so that its available and the widest devices.
I use Workflowy but you can check out Dynalist as its the better offer.
User avatar
slime
Solid Snayke
Posts: 3131
Joined: Mon Aug 23, 2010 6:45 am
Location: Nova Scotia, Canada
Contact:

Re: Vulkan/OpenGL-Next the future of OpenGL and Games

Post by slime »

jjmafiae wrote:can't we have old versions as well as new versions of OpenGL in the engine and use what is possible to use on each computer?
Yes, and LÖVE already does that to an extent.

Vulkan is not OpenGL though. They're completely separate and independent APIs covering different levels of abstraction of the GPU hardware. The difference between OpenGL and Vulkan is similar to the difference between love.graphics and OpenGL, in many ways.

LÖVE could have a Vulkan backend separate from its OpenGL backend, but maintaining two separate graphics backends would be a lot of extra work even after the Vulkan backend is "complete" (not to mention anyone wanting to contribute to LÖVE's source code would have to be able to program for OpenGL and Vulkan if they want to touch love.graphics.)
And even if that were all done, what would be the gain? a little bit of extra CPU performance on systems that already have high-end specs and aren't bottlenecked by OpenGL's overhead in LÖVE games?
User avatar
T-Bone
Inner party member
Posts: 1492
Joined: Thu Jun 09, 2011 9:03 am

Re: Vulkan/OpenGL-Next the future of OpenGL and Games

Post by T-Bone »

If speed is the issue, I think there are more promising changes that could be made, like running on ANGLE by default on Windows (possible with Löve 0.10.0 which supports OpenGL ES natively), which would improve performance on computers with poor OpenGL driver support. Something like this would, unlike Vulkan support, really improve performance on devices that actually need it.

That said, if you feel like making a Vulkan port then go straight ahead! It might not get merged into the main Löve builds, but it could still be a fun project.
Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Nabeel, veethree and 74 guests