Is Dolphin dropping DX12 in favor of Vulkan?

[Helios]

I forgot about that point

Um yes, please use Vulkan, everybody that can. report bugs lol

[magmarock64]

When I used D3D12/Vulkan I noticed a huge speed boost over openGL for F-zero GX

[Lioncash]

I wish we'd drop it, not gonna lie.

(01-24-2017, 07:03 AM)magmarock64 Wrote: While I'm on the subject I'd like to know from the devs what they think of DX12

Apply directly to nearest Sun.

(01-24-2017, 07:03 AM)magmarock64 Wrote: and Vulkan

[magmarock64]

(05-18-2017, 12:29 PM)Lioncash Wrote: I wish we'd drop it, not gonna lie.


Apply directly to nearest Sun.

So why is Vulkan preferred what makes it better also why the speed boost for so many games?

[Growlith1223]

Vulkan is preferred because of the fact that it's cross-platform. DX in general is not really cross-platform, and DX12 is Windows 10 exclusive, so anyone on for example, windows 7 or even 8, won't be able to get the benefit of DX12.

You can blame microsoft for that.

As for vulkan, it works somewhat the same, but it's able to work on most of the common Operating Systems.

EDIT: as for the speed boost, Vulkan(if i remember correctly also does this) and DX12 do a thing called Asynchronous rendering, basically the workload of the rendering is split onto multiple threads, to accomplish the same thing, but each thread works on different areas kind of thing, this allows for the same quality output but at a faster pace.

[magmarock64]

Isn't Vulkan an exclusive Nvidia thing though?

[JosJuice]

(05-18-2017, 01:25 PM)magmarock64 Wrote: Isn't Vulkan an exclusive Nvidia thing though?

No.

[degasus]

(05-18-2017, 12:50 PM)Growlith1223 Wrote: EDIT: as for the speed boost, Vulkan(if i remember correctly also does this) and DX12 do a thing called Asynchronous rendering, basically the workload of the rendering is split onto multiple threads, to accomplish the same thing, but each thread works on different areas kind of thing, this allows for the same quality output but at a faster pace.

No. Our D3D12 backend does so, our Vulkan backend doesn't. With Vulkan and D3D12, it is just possible to hit paths in the GPU driver which have lower overhead.

(05-18-2017, 12:50 PM)Growlith1223 Wrote: Vulkan is preferred because of the fact that it's cross-platform.

IMO this isn't *the* reason. The Vulkan backend was written and is still maintained by one very active developer. The one who wrote the D3D12 backend disappeared after merging.
There are no known bugs in the Vulkan backend, while there are known race conditions in the D3D12 backend for at least half a year.

[Fallcrest]

(05-18-2017, 12:50 PM)Growlith1223 Wrote: Vulkan is preferred because of the fact that it's cross-platform.

Except Apple decided to bail out of the Vulkan developer forum that they used to be a part of and isn't going to support it in macOS, iOS, etc. any time in the near future, and so those platforms are stuck with an outdated, poorly supported version of OGL. Dolphin is not likely to support Apple's Metal API any time soon, either.

Plus, drivers still aren't available on commonly used Intel iGPUs on Windows systems, because... no idea really. Intel has the drivers on those iGPUs for Linux. It really drives me nuts.

Vulkan would be absolutely much better than DX12 for all intents and purposes if not for those issues. Also, Android support is slow because it takes ages for Android phones to update to new versions of the operating system...

[Helios]

https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/4424


wooooooooo