Hacker News Reader

Comment by kayoone | Hacker News Reader

Considering that Vulkan is faster and should be well supported on all platforms by the time this game finally comes out, i think it's a good decision. I guess only possible since they don't plan console support.

View on HN

It's faster than OpenGL or older DirectX versions, but DX12 was pretty much on the same level of abstraction as far as I understood it.

Yes, DX12 is very similar to Vulkan but the major difference is Vulkan is present on most gaming platforms except iOS, so it makes sense if you have to choose one of those two you will choose Vulkan.

Isn't Vulkan AMD only though?

No. Mantle, on which Vulkan is based on, was AMD only. AMD gave it to Khronos and it evolved into Vulkan.

Vulkan is based on Mantle from AMD, but the code was donated to Khronos. Both Nvidia and Intel have Vulkan drivers.

Does Intel have a vk driver?

AFAIK, they only have a Linux one, but only for Broadwell and newer. Do you know something about the Windows driver?

And except Xbox One...

How much faster is it? I saw a few random videos comparing Vulkan vs. DX11, and the difference was usually in the 10% range in both ways (sometimes Vulkan won, sometimes DX won).

This was the most polite jab at their long dev cycle in this thread. I wish people would be more forgiving of the trial-and-error process that goes into designing genre-breaking games with a small staff and tight budget. The devs are committed to artistic quality however long it takes.

I'm not sure Star Citizen qualifies as having a small staff and a tight budget. Three or four offices in major cities, dozens of developers, a whole art department. Hardly a scrappy little garage studio.

I didn't realize they had grown so much. I don't follow the development closely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com