The Future Of Vulkan On Linux

Two years after its introduction, the Vulkan api is beginning to gain momentum as a serious competitor for MS Directx and I expect big performance boosts by the end of this year as they adapt it for even better multicore rendering. Some 16 of the most demanding and popular AAA games already released or in development have incorporated the api, Valve supports it as part of their Steam OS based on the Denubian architecture with AMD, Bethesda, and who knows who else rushing to adapt it for use with the free Liquid Sky cloud gaming system, for virtual reality, and for playing games on what would otherwise be way.... too wimpy a computer for playing games. They are all attempts to leverage as much bandwidth as possible using free and open source software in order to minimize the advantages of using more expensive Microsoft Directx, Intel processors, and Nvidia graphics cards. So far, Directx has been the more competitive graphics api to openGL that has pushed the development of modern graphics cards and rasterization, Intel has lead in the development of higher single core cpu speeds, and Nvidia has lead the development of ever more powerful graphics cards but, all of that could soon become a mere footnote thanks to multicore rendering finally maturing to the point where you don't require the latest bleeding edge technology to produce fantastic results including 4k resolutions at 50fps or better.

The video game industry is currently shooting for at least 50fps and around 30fps for a minimum, but a better compromise in the not too distant future would be around 90fps - 120fps which is enough, for example, to eliminate almost all motion blurring of the background that occurs when you pan the camera real fast. In the meantime, the industry is already adopting hardware and programs like Vulkan that can significantly improve the minimum frame rates in particular which is exactly what the developers and gamers want for a smoother experience on any device. These sorts of open source initiatives are allowing developers and others to focus more on memory issues than exactly how fast anyone's cpu is or how powerful their gpu happens to be bringing down the price of the hardware required to produce really nice results. Its all about fooling the human eye and the price of being able to fool it in video games without a lot of stuttering or low resolution graphics is about to drop dramatically explaining why Valve, Bethesda, AMD, and so many others are suddenly investing a great deal of time and money into Vulkan and AMD's High Bandwidth Controller system that requires half the memory of traditional architectures.

It means next year could be the year when Vulkan and Linux start to make serious inroads into producing a significantly cheaper alternative and encouraging the first real competition for Intel, Microsoft, and Nvidia in the last decade or so. Valve were the first to see that Windows was a trap that would neither benefit them nor gamers and just cost everybody more money. John Carmack, a legend among developers, laughed at Gabe Newell's developing a Linux gaming operating system, but it looks like Gabe will have the last laugh along with Bethesda when they show what optimizing the hardware and software for bandwidth can accomplish on Linux and lower cost AMD systems. Newell did the same thing with developing the Steam distribution system which many laughed at or were puzzled by and had no clue what advantages it conferred upon gamers, but he was just providing what the gamers themselves wanted which was a way to eliminate the problem of every developer coming up with their own crazy half-baked DRM solution to protect their intellectual property rights. Now it looks like he and other in the industry are about to flex their muscles to ensure Microsoft doesn't monopolize gaming quite so badly in the future.

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