Vulkan #102
Description
While it probably won't make the game any faster since it's not API bound, I think Vulkan does offer some advantages:
- better tooling (there is a GPU profiler from AMD that only works with Vulkan)
- better platform support: with MoltenVK there is apple support. And Vulkan also supports mobile GPUs, which at the moment would require OpenGL ES
- better error detection with validation layers. OpenGL is really inconsistent with errors and warnings, which appear to be driver dependant.
- Vulkan does provide more consistent performance. For example on my intel laptop the OpenGL driver creates a copy of a given buffer when doing glBufferSubData.
- Vulkan is probably more future-proof at this point.
- Vulkan allows for larger buffers (SSBOs can be up to 4GB instead of 2 GB like in OpenGL)
But all that comes at a heavy development cost.
I heard that this guide should be useful: https://vkguide.dev
There is an official documentation now: https://docs.vulkan.org/spec/latest/index.html
Here are some examples, which might be helpful to look at: https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan/tree/master
Here is a Zig project that I'd like to reference for all the Vulkan infrastructure, since it doesn't use the SDK: https://codeberg.org/ssmid/zeppelin
Prerequisites:
- Update to OpenGL 4.6 with SPIR-V #101 would make porting easier