At its GDC 2019 keynote, Google announced Stadia, a cloud streaming service allowing graphically-intensive games to be available to anyone who can run Chrome. Doom Eternal will be one of the first games on the platform, streaming at 4K resolution, 60 fps. Google has partnered with AMD to design a custom GPU with “more than ten teraflops of power,” which is paired with a custom CPU for each Stadia rendering instance. Those instances will run on Linux and use the Vulkan API. Google has partnered with Unreal and Unity to “bring full support to the most popular and familiar game engines to our development community.”
DXVK, the Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 10/11 which allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine, has reached v1.0. This version includes a number of new features and fixes. A detailed overview of the changes is written up at Gaming On Linux as well as a list of improvements and bug fixes can be found on the GitHub tagged release.
Vulkan Memory Allocator (VMA) is AMDs single-header STB-like library for easily and efficiently managing memory allocation for your Vulkan games and applications. The last three months of VMA development since the release of v2.1 have mostly focused on significantly improving and fleshing out the memory defragmentation support, adding support for sparse binding, and making sure the library had a rich and robust set of allocation strategies for games and other Vulkan applications to use. For all the details, read the GPU Open blog.
Vendetta Online, the MMO from Guild Software Inc that has supported Linux for a long time is going to add Vulkan support alongside some other fun sounding advancements. For Vulkan support, they’ve already had it working since early 2018 and it recently became optional for Windows players. As they make improvements, it will be rolled out for Linux too. They will still support OpenGL, for now, until some time in future when all development is going into the Vulkan renderer.
The AMD Radeon RX 590 graphics card is built upon 12nm process technology and the advanced AMD “Polaris” architecture, including 4th Gen GCN graphics cores, display engine and multimedia cores to enable exceptional performance in low-level APIs like DirectX 125 and Vulkan. It also provides stunning HD gaming experience running at up to 60 FPS or higher in the most popular AAA games, and up to 100 FPS in some of the most popular eSports titles.
Magic Leap has made the session on Seedling from Insomniac Games available to the public. Featuring Joel Bartley, lead gameplay programmer for Insomniac Games, and Michael Liebenow, lead software engineer for Magic Leap, the session examines how to integrate a 3D engine into an app using the Vulkan API. “We support two low-level rendering APIs, both Vulkan and OpenGL, but we feel that Vulkan provides more opportunities for optimization, which is especially important when you’re trying to get all the performance you can out of a mobile system, and that is one of the main reasons why we recommend Vulkan for your development,” said Liebenow during the session.
Unreal Engine 4.21 continues their pursuit of greater efficiency, performance, and stability for every project on any platform. With the help of Samsung, Unreal Engine 4.21 includes all of the Vulkan engineering and optimization work that was done to help ship Fortnite on the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 and is 100% feature compatible with OpenGL ES 3.1. Projects that utilize Vulkan can run up to 20% faster than the same project that uses OpenGL ES.
Stardock Entertainment announced the extension of their technology and gaming partnership with AMD. As part of the ongoing partnership, Stardock will optimize the upcoming Star Control: Origins for AMD technologies including AMD Ryzen processors and Radeon FreeSync 2 technology, as well as update the game post-launch with support for the Vulkan™ Graphics API.
Valve released the Beta of a new and improved version of Steam Play to all Linux users. The Beta version includes a modified distribution of Wine, called Proton, to provide compatibility with Windows game titles. Windows games with no Linux version currently available can now be installed and run directly from the Linux Steam client, complete with native Steamworks and OpenVR support. DirectX 11 and 12 implementations are now based on Vulkan, resulting in improved game compatibility and reduced performance impact. There are a lot of details in this announcement, be sure to read the entry over on the Steam Community website.
Adam Sawicki, a member of AMD RTG’s Game Engineering team, has spent the best part of a year assisting one of the world’s biggest game studios in porting one of their AAA games to the Khronos Vulkan API. That kind of experience — embedded with the game developer and working hands-on in their codebase alongside their own engineers — is always worth sharing whenever possible. Adam has turned what he learned into a general presentation aimed at those looking to port a game engine to either Vulkan or DirectX 12.
The X-Plane cross-platform flight simulator has been depending upon OpenGL for nearly two decades since the program first came into existence, but a port of its rendering engine to use the Vulkan API has been a work-in-progress. It looks like their Vulkan support is getting squared away as the company has tweeted this weekend they will be talking about Vulkan integration this weekend at the Flight Sim Expo in Las Vegas.
Vulkan support for DOTA2 on macOS is now available. Yielding improved performance and frame time stability. You will need to enable the “Vulkan support” DLC in Steam, switch to Vulkan in the game video settings, and then, if you experience any issues, please report them on Github.
F1 2017 is coming to Linux and Feral Interactive are porting it. The plan is to release it on November 2nd. More information is available from the Feral mini-site and Gaming on Linux. The game will be powered by the Vulkan API, as confirmed by Feral Interactive in another tweet. This will be their third Linux game to use Vulkan!
RedGamingTech recently posted Part I of an interview with Neil Trevett - ‘CUDA, AI, Self Driving Cars, GameWorks & Deep Learning’, President of The Khronos Group. Part II ‘Vulkan, Game Development & VR & Graphics Technology’ of the interview is now online.
Neil Trevett and Paul from Red Gaming Tech discuss the plans with Vulkan, game development, virtual reality technology, mobile gaming, optimization and game development, hardware and a whole lot more.