Microsoft will never support Vulcan on the web either. For the same technical re...

modeless · on April 12, 2017

> Microsoft will never support Vulcan

People said the same about WebGL. Today Microsoft is a member of Khronos.

Vulkan can be implemented on anything. It's just a matter of performance. And since Microsoft defines DirectX, they can add any features they need to improve the performance of a Vulkan implementation if they so choose.

kvark · on April 12, 2017

In a way, Vulkan is already implemented on top of Metal (https://moltengl.com/moltenvk/). Porting it to DirectX12 should be a little easier.

johncolanduoni · on April 13, 2017

What are the issues with Vulkan-on-DX12? Metal is missing geometry shaders and the tesselation shaders are kind of weird, plus GPU heap allocation is iOS only so I understand the difficulties there (although as kvark mentioned there is a decent Vulkan-on-Metal implementation for the rest of the API in the works). AFAIK DX12 has all of that.

Also Windows GPU drivers already support Vulkan (all the way back to the 600 series in Nvidia's case IIRC), so I don't see why that would be a technical deal breaker. And it definitely won't be a "political" deal breaker for Firefox or Chromium on Windows.

awalton · on April 13, 2017

> Vulcan cannot be implemented on top of DirectX12 or Metal.

Ehh I don't believe this for a second; somewhat more correctly, "Vulcan may not be able to be efficiently implemented on top of other APIs."

I also believe that Apple has a vested interest in keeping Metal around, so of course they're going to push hard and fast for their standard...

AlphaSite · on April 21, 2017

Well yes, anything can be done, but doing it in a way that doesn't throw away all the potential gains of a low level api is hard.