In Rust land, the Rend3/WGPU stack is able to target Vulkan and Metal, pretty much invisibly to the application. Also Android and WebGL, although not as seamlessly, because the threading model is different in those worlds.
It's supposed to also support DirectX on Windows, but since Windows supports Vulkan, why bother? I have the same code running on Windows and Linux with no conditional compilation in my code.
The Bevy game engine reportedly runs happily on all those platforms.
In C++ land, Godot has similar portability. So do UE5 and Unity.
If it wasn't for Apple shooting themselves in the foot with Metal, we'd all be on Vulkan now, without these portability layers.
I know everyone likes to hate on Apple for doing their own thing (and often rightfully so) but Metal predates Vulkan by 18 months. They needed to do it themselves because something like Vulkan/DX12 didn't exist to adapt and the alternative was OpenGL ES.
I don't know if I agree with the conclusion. Are people choosing Vulkan because of Stadia, or because they want to deploy to the other platforms and Stadia is a nice bonus?
Yeah, he argues for causation using a correlation as evidence. I'm not an industry expert, but I sure never got the sense that developers relied on a Stadia release, or made it a main priority. He may be right, I just don't buy the argument in this article on its face.
Stadia's primary barrier to entry is that it's Vulkan-only. People are not choosing Vulkan because of Stadia, because Stadia has no actual incentive to develop for it due to having no playerbase and no market; but if you are already developing for Vulkan, supporting Stadia shrinks from an ask the size of supporting the Switch in addition to PC, to just the size of supporting Epic or GOG in addition to Steam.
Am I missing something here, or is there a huge gap in the author's logic?
As I understand it, the argument is like this:
* 407 games run Vulkan
* 270 of those games also support Stadia
* Therefore, direct quote here, "the entire gaming industry is better off because of Stadia and their partners paving the way here"
It's hard for me to believe that a writer who, to quote his own bio, "is an HPC professional with a PhD in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley" would make an argument that correlation implies causation. On the other hand, I've looked over this article a couple of times and that seems to be all the argument there is.
Considering how many tenuously related keywords the author stuffed into the article, I think a likely explanation is that this blog commissioned the article as SEO bait; a writer who doesn't know correlation from causation from their elbow and isn't being paid enough to find out wrote the article, concentrating mainly on keyword stuffing; the editor, who would have known better than to make this argument, posted the article after only the most cursory of readings, enough to satisfy himself that there were no blatant misspellings or racial slurs.
It's not an interpretation that's flattering to the putative author, but on the other hand, it also wouldn't be flattering to think of him as a scientist with such a poor grasp of logic.
Moot point anyway, I suppose, since though we might argue about how much Vulkan adoption Stadia was driving, I think we can all agree on how much more it will drive.
It seems to be a Stadia fan site so the reason for this article existing is that they need to keep a steady stream of Stadia news and puff pieces. They're just trying to come up with positive things to say about Stadia, not trying to actually come up with true insights about the broader industry.
I'm surprised more PC/Console AAA games aren't being written/ported for iPads and M1 Mac's since they have really good CPUs, GPUs and fast storage. Why is that? Is it because of Apple's insistence on Metal?
The mobile games market has exploded hugely, there's definitely a big market there.
The hardware is great for developing games, but the software experience is so cumbersome that it makes sense why game devs don't port to Apple Silicon:
- You need to port to ARM (not that bad, but now you're debugging two versions and increasing your dependency graph)
- You need to distribute on MacOS/iPad (not insurmountable, but kowtowing to Apple's ever-changing demands is a different game than jumping through Sony/Nintendo's hoops)
- You need to port to Metal (pretty hard, requires Mac-specific developers and a separate dev branch)
Of course, there are still devs who spend the extra time to make Mac-native games (Factorio and Rimworld), but compared to targeting Linux/Windows the effort doesn't make sense. For Apple to make their platform an attractive gaming platform, they can either a. Allow sideloading < or > b. Welcome third-party graphics APIs to Apple Silicon. Unless they sweeten the deal though, I doubt we'll see many AAA ports in the future.
Gaming on iOS is practically dead. No one wants to pay anything, so about all that gets made is freemium junk full of ads and IAPs. The glory days of amazing iPhone games is gone.
Apple Arcade is helping, but it’s never going to turn the tide. It’s a last bastion with a few games.
Port a recent game, sell it for $10, watch nothing happen. There are a few great ports out there (I just replayed SotN) but I doubt they make their cost back.
The game studio making Resident Evil series has announced just a week or two ago during their big presentation a native M1 port of Resident Evil VIII (the most recent one), among many other things. And not only that, they actually talked about it quite a bit in detail, and even showed some actual footage.
Overall I agree with you though, this is literally just a single datapoint, and I cannot think of another one. But that seems like a solid start, especially since it is a legitimate AAA game, and they are doing it a year after the (very successful sales-wise) release. So they clearly are doing it for reasons other than just boosting up the initial sales by promising the moon. Looks like they genuinely believe they might make enough money with that M1 port.
Combo of Apple’s insistence on Metal and biz model mismatch. You can either make gambling for children or have apple throw pity money at you. No one is buying $70 apps.
The GPUs on macOS and iOS are incredible for mobile processors, especially in terms of power efficiency, but they don't compete with the GPUs in gaming PCs or current generation consoles.
i think it's probably because the people who tend to play AAA PC or Console games already have a PC or console. Could developers really make more money, or would it just be people who already bought the game for PC on steam downloading an additional version for free?
the mobile game market has exploded, but AAA games are a different dynamic and a different audience to the casual games popular in the mobile market.
and for iPad specifically, apple's 30% cut probably factors into the decision in a big way.
It’s insane to me that after all these years apple is still somewhat ignoring the gaming market. I basically haven’t played any pc games in like 6y due to that. Thanks god there’s the steamdeck now
How many games on AppStore can you see costing 69.99$ and how many people would pay that?
The only mobile platform with any adoption is Switch where the audience is used to paying much more for games than on PC/Consoles (equivalent games tend to be even up to twice the price there after awhile).
The other, potential mobile competitor, is Steam Deck which shares prices and game library with its desktop counterpart.
I'm not super familiar with the space, but from what I know, I'd say it would have almost no impact. The industry seems to have been moving towards Vulkan for a while now. Stadia may indeed have accelerated it, but the shutdown isn't going to halt its progress. (IMO)
> If you look at the list of games (https://www.vulkan.org/made-with-vulkan) that use Vulkan natively, as presented by the the Vulkan team itself, 270 of the of the 407 listed games run on Stadia! That is significantly more than half (though it is a little unclear how complete this list is).
FWIW, there are hundreds (thousands?) of DirectX games that also run on Stadia hardware, but won't because of licensing concerns. Google doesn't want to license DirectX through a copy of Windows, and I'm guessing that using DXVK would be considered "flying too close to the sun".
Looks to me like you have it backwards. Many (most?) of those games predate Stadia. Seems Stadia/Google selected Vulkan for best compatibility with pre-existing games.
I would almost view Proton as a risk factor for Vulkan as it discourages the devs to use cross-platform approaches. Much easier to write only for Windows and let Proton folks to figure out the compatibility problems. This also results in Vulkan losing initiative and being forced to closely follow DX. I’m a bit worried that the way things are Vulkan is going to become “that API libraries use to emulate DX12 on Linux”…
Proton uses DXVK to translate DirectX calls to Vulkan. I don't know if that counts as adoption, but its still the resultant API of Windows games running in Proton.
I think the biggest driver of Vulkan adoption is the fact that since all the graphics APIs are so low level nowadays, everyone is writing abstraction layers. Plus, Vulkan is a hedge against all the proprietary APIs. Also, 2/3 major consoles are on AMD, Vulkan was originally AMD Mantle, gonna guess there's some common tools and functionality...
Anyhow, Vulkan will survive for the same reason as Linux; no one truly trusts MS, Apple, Sony, etc...
Somehow there is this urban myth about Sony caring about Khronos APIs, when they only did such a thing with the Playstation 1, using GL ES 1.0 + Cg as alternative to their own API, as the adoption was very low, they eventually dropped it.
Even on the Switch, if you want all the low level features, you are better served using NVN.
Just a minor nitpick: Vulkan might have Mantle DNA but it severely limited some of the original functionality (no pointers in resource binding). Funnily enough the closest API that matches what Mantle could do is Apples Metal.
Again, your understanding of how Mantle evolved into Vulkan is incorrect as is your understanding of which consoles support Vulkan and how much the graphics APIs for both those consoles differ from Vulkan.
Consoles are far from a driving factor for Vulkan other than the need for these engines to abstract anyway.
The service will be around for a while, and Google plans to sell it to other companies interested in streaming games. One could imagine Nintendo pushing into streaming to compensate for the weak Switch hardware.
[+] [-] Animats|3 years ago|reply
The Bevy game engine reportedly runs happily on all those platforms.
In C++ land, Godot has similar portability. So do UE5 and Unity.
If it wasn't for Apple shooting themselves in the foot with Metal, we'd all be on Vulkan now, without these portability layers.
[+] [-] Veliladon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dagmx|3 years ago|reply
Plus you’d still have different graphics backends needed for the consoles.
[+] [-] Already__Taken|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lights0123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phaedryx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karaterobot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pie_flavor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Someone|3 years ago|reply
- out of 407 games running Vulkan natively, 270 run on Stadia (from the article)
- out of 407 games not running Vulkan natively, also 270 run on Stadia (numbers the article doesn’t mention that I made up to make a point)
Then, the two “runs Vulkan natively” and “runs on Stadia” are 100% independent.
[+] [-] dagmx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ElfinTrousers|3 years ago|reply
As I understand it, the argument is like this:
* 407 games run Vulkan
* 270 of those games also support Stadia
* Therefore, direct quote here, "the entire gaming industry is better off because of Stadia and their partners paving the way here"
It's hard for me to believe that a writer who, to quote his own bio, "is an HPC professional with a PhD in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley" would make an argument that correlation implies causation. On the other hand, I've looked over this article a couple of times and that seems to be all the argument there is.
Considering how many tenuously related keywords the author stuffed into the article, I think a likely explanation is that this blog commissioned the article as SEO bait; a writer who doesn't know correlation from causation from their elbow and isn't being paid enough to find out wrote the article, concentrating mainly on keyword stuffing; the editor, who would have known better than to make this argument, posted the article after only the most cursory of readings, enough to satisfy himself that there were no blatant misspellings or racial slurs.
It's not an interpretation that's flattering to the putative author, but on the other hand, it also wouldn't be flattering to think of him as a scientist with such a poor grasp of logic.
Moot point anyway, I suppose, since though we might argue about how much Vulkan adoption Stadia was driving, I think we can all agree on how much more it will drive.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mattnewport|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intelVISA|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|3 years ago|reply
The mobile games market has exploded hugely, there's definitely a big market there.
[+] [-] smoldesu|3 years ago|reply
- You need to port to ARM (not that bad, but now you're debugging two versions and increasing your dependency graph)
- You need to distribute on MacOS/iPad (not insurmountable, but kowtowing to Apple's ever-changing demands is a different game than jumping through Sony/Nintendo's hoops)
- You need to port to Metal (pretty hard, requires Mac-specific developers and a separate dev branch)
Of course, there are still devs who spend the extra time to make Mac-native games (Factorio and Rimworld), but compared to targeting Linux/Windows the effort doesn't make sense. For Apple to make their platform an attractive gaming platform, they can either a. Allow sideloading < or > b. Welcome third-party graphics APIs to Apple Silicon. Unless they sweeten the deal though, I doubt we'll see many AAA ports in the future.
[+] [-] MBCook|3 years ago|reply
Apple Arcade is helping, but it’s never going to turn the tide. It’s a last bastion with a few games.
Port a recent game, sell it for $10, watch nothing happen. There are a few great ports out there (I just replayed SotN) but I doubt they make their cost back.
Consumable IAPs ruined everything.
[+] [-] filoleg|3 years ago|reply
Overall I agree with you though, this is literally just a single datapoint, and I cannot think of another one. But that seems like a solid start, especially since it is a legitimate AAA game, and they are doing it a year after the (very successful sales-wise) release. So they clearly are doing it for reasons other than just boosting up the initial sales by promising the moon. Looks like they genuinely believe they might make enough money with that M1 port.
[+] [-] wilde|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steeleduncan|3 years ago|reply
The GPUs on macOS and iOS are incredible for mobile processors, especially in terms of power efficiency, but they don't compete with the GPUs in gaming PCs or current generation consoles.
[+] [-] notatoad|3 years ago|reply
the mobile game market has exploded, but AAA games are a different dynamic and a different audience to the casual games popular in the mobile market.
and for iPad specifically, apple's 30% cut probably factors into the decision in a big way.
[+] [-] fulafel|3 years ago|reply
iPad native ports are kept back by the small share of users who have a compatible gamepad and AAA games don't work with the touchscreen interface.
[+] [-] baby|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] izacus|3 years ago|reply
The only mobile platform with any adoption is Switch where the audience is used to paying much more for games than on PC/Consoles (equivalent games tend to be even up to twice the price there after awhile).
The other, potential mobile competitor, is Steam Deck which shares prices and game library with its desktop counterpart.
[+] [-] an1sotropy|3 years ago|reply
Now that Stadia is shutting down [1], does that mean anything bad for Vulkan, I’m curious?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33022768
[+] [-] danielvaughn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomComb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fulafel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smoldesu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tekchip|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jrm4|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ribit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nazgulsenpai|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] CodeArtisan|3 years ago|reply
AMD pushing Vulkan while their GPU are powering both the Xbox and the PlayStation.
ID Software adding Vulkan support to DooM (2016), resulting in a >30% FPS boost.
[+] [-] izacus|3 years ago|reply
Is this the same disinformation as people claiming that PS3 used OpenGL?
[+] [-] okpx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mikeb85|3 years ago|reply
Anyhow, Vulkan will survive for the same reason as Linux; no one truly trusts MS, Apple, Sony, etc...
[+] [-] pjmlp|3 years ago|reply
Somehow there is this urban myth about Sony caring about Khronos APIs, when they only did such a thing with the Playstation 1, using GL ES 1.0 + Cg as alternative to their own API, as the adoption was very low, they eventually dropped it.
Even on the Switch, if you want all the low level features, you are better served using NVN.
[+] [-] Telemoto|3 years ago|reply
Engine is a totally different topic as they do have experts to just support both in parallel.
And when you look how DirectX is the default for tons of games on windows you wouldn't say what you said.
The DirectX sdk and documentation is also really good.
[+] [-] ribit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dagmx|3 years ago|reply
Consoles are far from a driving factor for Vulkan other than the need for these engines to abstract anyway.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lake_vincent|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smt88|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]