in development Vulkan API Discussion

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

44 minutes ago, Silver_Dragon said:

Vulkan has nothing to do with MT....

I know, and never claimed it did. I only remember a few years ago saying on this forum that Vulkan needs MT in order to work to its fullest potential, but I don't think you're referring to that, are you?

[Berniyh]

1 hour ago, Raven (Elysian Angel) said:

There are plenty of problems with the current iteration of MT. ED decided to incorporate them into the last 2 builds of the Stable build because they are not game-breaking (although they can and do lead to crashes).
Going to Vulkan now/soon (before those issues are properly fixed) would be a troubleshooting nightmare for them, since they won't be able to tell if bugs/performance problems come from MT or Vulkan, or a combination of them.
Let them get MT stable (not DCS-lingo "Stable" but proper stable) before adding new stuff on top of it  

I never said that Vulkan is going to drop tomorrow. Just that this can be seen as an indicator that we're nearing Vulkan.

[Bucic]

Do you guys think that the planned introduction of Vulcan is the reason for postponing fixes to all those months/years longstanding rendering bugs in DCS engine? I mean, DCS 2+ is a stellar improvement over early DCS and late FC years in terms of the approach to graphics development but the current DCS is still an artifact galore.

[Rodeo]

1 hour ago, Bucic said:

Do you guys think that the planned introduction of Vulcan is the reason for postponing fixes to all those months/years longstanding rendering bugs in DCS engine? I mean, DCS 2+ is a stellar improvement over early DCS and late FC years in terms of the approach to graphics development but the current DCS is still an artifact galore.

Yes.. logically if I was in ED management I would focus more resources into implementing Vulcan than some “lower” priority bugs which would be hopefully addressed and resolved with Vulcan. Of course Vulcan will bring its own set of issues and problems but I for one will welcome those with hopefully the performance gains and benefits. At least ED is trying to move forward unlike say RockStar Games and their announcement yesterday of not remastering but rather porting the original Red Dead Redemption to PS4/Switch 

Edited August 8, 2023 by Rodeo

[Bucic]

1 hour ago, Rodeo said:

Yes.. logically if I was in ED management I would focus more resources into implementing Vulcan than some “lower” priority bugs which would be hopefully addressed and resolved with Vulcan. Of course Vulcan will bring its own set of issues and problems but I for one will welcome those with hopefully the performance gains and benefits. At least ED is trying to move forward unlike say RockStar Games and their announcement yesterday of not remastering but rather porting the original Red Dead Redemption to PS4/Switch 

 

I know it sounds logical (postponing instead of developing solutions that are probably not easily portable) but has anyone from ED stated that explicitly at any point?

[Rodeo]

11 hours ago, Bucic said:

I know it sounds logical (postponing instead of developing solutions that are probably not easily portable) but has anyone from ED stated that explicitly at any point?

Nope and I doubt they would.. in my own small business we keep strategies very closely held. I am purely speculating and presenting “what I would do”.
 

As a very distant observer I am just speculating upon the moves I would make if I was in ED positions based upon their previous actions which may lead up to the switch to Vulcan. 

[MAXsenna]

Lots of autocorrect mistakes regarding the name of this technology.
The header is correct. Just add it to the dictionary.
Apologies, couldn't help myself.

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[Bucic]

7 hours ago, MAXsenna said:

Lots of autocorrect mistakes regarding the name of this technology.
The header is correct. Just add it to the dictionary.
Apologies, couldn't help myself.

Sent from my MAR-LX1A using Tapatalk
 

Oh, Vulkan is it? Did KDE guys put their sticky fingers in it? OK, I'm going to give it a Polish treatment and Kall it Wulkan from now on

[MAXsenna]

Oh, Vulkan is it? Did KDE guys put their sticky fingers in it? OK, I'm going to give it a Polish treatment and Kall it Wulkan from now on

Perfect!

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[Zebra1-1]

Can we get an update on how Beta testing is going? Any chance we might get Vulkan (as preview) in 2.9?

[dsc106]

Back in April, ED commented that once MT Preview was getting sorted out, they would move focus to things like DLSS and Vulkan.

I too would be curious to know what the development timeline for Vulkan looks like today?

[kerlcat]

3 hours ago, dsc106 said:

Back in April, ED commented that once MT Preview was getting sorted out, they would move focus to things like DLSS and Vulkan.

ED just released 2.9 OB w/ DLSS/DLAA/SSS which is huge improvement besides MT released earlier this year. Believe Vulkan is their next big thing! And they seem not likely to share a timeline in advance.

More realistic wish could be having stable 2.9 released with major bugs fixed in a few wks. Then Vulkan by yr end, or 1Q’24.

Edited October 22, 2023 by kerlcat

[dsc106]

Yes, I have been enjoying 2.9 and DLSS. The last post mentioned that once MT was getting sorted, they could move onto DLSS & Vulkan. Now with DLSS here and MT 7+ months into preview, wondering how long the road to Vulkan might be. I'd love to see that in Q1 2024 but I fear that may be a bit optimistic, unless they have already been working on it in a separate branch for some time now.

[Zebra1-1]

On 10/23/2023 at 3:13 PM, dsc106 said:

Yes, I have been enjoying 2.9 and DLSS. The last post mentioned that once MT was getting sorted, they could move onto DLSS & Vulkan. Now with DLSS here and MT 7+ months into preview, wondering how long the road to Vulkan might be. I'd love to see that in Q1 2024 but I fear that may be a bit optimistic, unless they have already been working on it in a separate branch for some time now.

They have been working on it for a long time. If I remember correctly, the 2022 video was done with MT and Vulkan. 

[dsc106]

3 hours ago, Zebra1-1 said:

They have been working on it for a long time. If I remember correctly, the 2022 video was done with MT and Vulkan. 

Not quite. The 2023 video was done with DLSS and multithreading.

[Zebra1-1]

Not quite. The 2023 video was done with DLSS and multithreading.

2022.

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[dsc106]

24 minutes ago, Zebra1-1 said:

2022.

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I was suggesting you were confused and thinking of the 2023 video which was tagged as being produced with DLSS and multithreading. I can find no indication the 2022 was created on Vulkan. I will be very happy to be shown otherwise, do you have a source/link/reference?

certainly, I hope you are correct as it would bode well for seeing vulkan sooner than later.

[Zebra1-1]

I was suggesting you were confused and thinking of the 2023 video which was tagged as being produced with DLSS and multithreading. I can find no indication the 2022 was created on Vulkan. I will be very happy to be shown otherwise, do you have a source/link/reference?
certainly, I hope you are correct as it would bode well for seeing vulkan sooner than later.

I just watched it (2022) and couldn't find any reference either. Maybe I dreamed it or something, but I could have sworn there was a video (could have been a map or aircraft release too) posted by ED that said it was made using Vulkan.

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[SkateZilla]

You're not going to get any type of release window announcement from ED because this community is bi-polar.
If anything is delayed due to game breaking bugs, has a stroke, and if it's released w/ them, they'll also have a stroke.

With that being said, if you check off the things like MT, DLSS/DLAA, etc etc.

The focus is likely on stabilizing those before adding another major change.

MT and DLSS Being stable will only make Vulkan integration quicker and more stable.

 

Edited October 31, 2023 by SkateZilla

[Zebra1-1]

For those that haven't seen the News article that was published on the DCS website last month,

Quote

 

"With the release of multi-threading and DLSS/FSR, the next big core DCS task is the support for the Vulkan Application Programing Interface (API). Multi-threading was a prerequisite to support the Vulkan API backend and enhance system performance/efficiency. 

Much of the Vulkan API work over the past several years has focused on adapting the DCS internal tools to seamlessly integrate with optimized functionality to ensure peak performance. This has been a challenging endeavor to rectify all validation errors, streamlining graphics and processing tasks, improving compatibility with Nvidia, AMD, and Intel hardware and a diverse set of drivers, and creating and refining the groundwork for rendering across multiple threads that will allow even more advanced graphic capabilities.

As we move into 2024, we continue to optimize and refine performance to exceed what is possible with DirectX 11. It is important that we continue to push graphic standards whilst maintaining excellent performance for both 2D, and even more so, VR. 

However, like multi-threading and DLSS/FSR, results will vary between players based on their hardware and settings."

 

Wishful thinking, but I hope it will make an appearance in the upcoming update which will merge the OB and Stable releases. 

Edited February 3 by Zebra1-1

[Bucic]

What I hope for with the Vulkan is a start of a proper glitch and artifact hunting and fixing. Especially the color banding which is frankly hard to even believe in this day and age.

 

Edited February 11 by Bucic

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

On 3/8/2024 at 11:06 PM, DigitalEngine said:

I'm assuming the "single tread" mode is going to be depreciated before the Vukan API is implemented (DCS World 3.0)?

That is probably the plan, but since Vulkan and DX11 are going to co-exist for at least a while (same as currently MT and ST co-existing) we don't know how ED is going to implement things - at least initially.
But it's safe to say if you want to run ST, Vulkan won't be available as MT is a prerequisite.

[SkateZilla]

On 3/13/2024 at 9:12 AM, Raven (Elysian Angel) said:

That is probably the plan, but since Vulkan and DX11 are going to co-exist for at least a while (same as currently MT and ST co-existing) we don't know how ED is going to implement things - at least initially.
But it's safe to say if you want to run ST, Vulkan won't be available as MT is a prerequisite.

There's been no confirmation that DX11 and Vulkan will run side by side.

as for ST, all the new effects (ScreenSp, Ray tracing etc) and the Upscaling have been coded for MT and do not work in ST.

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

21 minutes ago, SkateZilla said:

There's been no confirmation that DX11 and Vulkan will run side by side.

There have been several official announcements about the shaders working on both Vulkan and DX11. Is that purely to ensure backwards compatibility then?

For example, from the 2023&beyond newsletter:

Quote

In our endeavor to unify DirectX and Vulkan renderers, we have developed a mod state where both backends produce identical results. We now have two fully compatible implementations that run under the same API. This means that all our applied graphics modules (the code that renders our skies, clouds, models, effects, etc.) will work the same way on both renderers. To achieve this, we ensured that all our shaders could be converted into Vulkan format in addition to implementing a shader converter available from within DCS permitting to compile any shader on the fly. It is interesting to note that the shader conversion has taken an inordinately large amount of time.

The main achievement in 2022 is that DCS now works under Vulkan producing the same visuals as under DirectX. This result is fully ‘transparent’ for our graphics programmers, allowing them to write the same code for both platforms without the need to have separate code paths for Vulkan and DirectX11 and beyond.

 

[SkateZilla]

Let me rephrase, there are no indications or confirmations that they will run side by side in the consumer release state.

Having them run side by side in a development environment is a different story.