At the recently completed Siggraph event, Valve’s Dan Ginsburg talked, among other things about the new and upcoming APIs involving DirectX and Vulkan. Ginsburg said these APIs are set to offer low-level access to the GPU and CPU, thus improving performance in games. Ginsburg has been working very closely on Vulkan for Valve and talks about the fact that he doesn’t see any reason for game developers to create a DX12 back end for their games. He added that in general he feels as though Vulkan is far superior technology.
“Unless you are aggressive enough to be shipping a DX12 game this year, I would argue that there is really not much reason to ever create a DX12 back end for your game. And the reason for that is that Vulkan will cover you on Windows 10 on the same class of hardware and so much more from all these other platforms and IHVs that we’ve heard from. Metal is single platform, single vendor, and Vulkan… we are gonna have support for not only Windows 10 but Windows 7, Windows 8 and Linux.” Ginsburg said at the event.
It should be pointed out that Ginsburg might not stand alone in this opinion, but he’s certainly still in the minority. More and more developers are looking to support DX 12 than ever before. He’s also got an inherent bias since he’s worked so closely with Vulkan over the past few months. Whether you agree with Dan or not, you can watch his entire talk about these APIs in the video below. it is a rather long video but Ginsburg gets to the heart of the matter at the 1:40 minute mark.