Vulkan support - how serious?

[Clancy]

Despite being somewhat embryonic at this stage, I believe Vulkan represents the future of hardware-accelerated APIs and it's really nice to see that LWJGL provides some support for it already.

But how much effort and/or importance is being placed on enhancing Vulkan support?  It seems inevitable that in a few years, every OS & device will support Vulkan either as a first class citizen (like Windows, Linux and Android do now) or via some "facade" such as MoltenVK over Apple's Metal.

The current Vulkan support is lagging well behind the official releases so can anyone "in the know" elaborate on the plans for Vulkan and LWJGL?

-c

[Kai]

Current Vulkan release 1.0.58 (as of three days ago)
What LWJGL supports: 1.0.58

'nuf said?

[Clancy]

Is there a 1.0.58?  LunaXchange only has 1.0.57.

Impressive!

[spasi]

LWJGL has a dedicated project for Vulkan, lwjgl3-vulkangen. It parses the Vulkan registry and man pages from Vulkan-Docs and generates the LWJGL templates we use in lwjgl3. There are about 450 manually written lines in the Vulkan bindings, everything else is auto-generated. Which means it's always up-to-date. At least in LWJGL snapshots, the last official release (3.1.2) is a bit behind (1.0.49 vs 1.0.58).

[Clancy]

Thanks - that really is impressive and shows true "seriousness" :-)

Has anyone produced any demos of LWJGL apps with Vulkan and/or performed benchmarks versus other APIs?

[spasi]

The lwjgl3-demos repository contains a few Vulkan demos, here.

[Clancy]

Thanks, but it would be nice to see something "fresher" and a lot more complex.

Maybe, I have a job to do!

[Kai]

Alright. Besides accusing LWJGL's Vulkan support of not being up-to-date and the existing demos not being fresh and complex enough, I'd suggest you start working with LWJGL/Vulkan for once. And the existing demos and all the Vulkan documentation you must read to understand that should give you already some months worth of choking on it.

You are of course encouraged to provide more demos.

This nice repository contains more Vulkan demos: https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan

[Clancy]

Points taken :-)

I was referring to the latest *official* release of LWJGL lagging with Vulkan support so it's great to learn about what's happening in the new builds.

And yes, I will do all the "choking" I require and then try to release some more complex Vulkan demos for everyone to benefit.

I'm totally new to LWJGL so please forgive my ignorance in these matters...

[Kai]

Heh. I think I meant "chewing"
Have fun with LWJGL!