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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

It's not quite as bad as it used to be, various later additions to Vulkan like dynamic rendering have eliminated some of the complexity it originally had. Figuring out which subset you should be using is a challenge in itself though, especially since there's a lot of outdated introductory resources floating around which still promote the ultra-verbose Vulkan 1.0 way of doing things. If a tutorial tells you to use render passes, run away.

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Unfortunately, dynamic rendering didn't come about until "recently". Many devices are stuck on Vulkan 1.1. Go to http://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listextensions.php and search for dynamic_rendering. It's only supported on about 28% of reports.

If you want to support those other devices you have to have a non-dynamic rendering path, and then at that point dynamic rendering is just more code. VK_EXT_shader_object is even better, but availability is that much worse.

Edit: If you are able to find a tutorial using dynamic rendering, learn with that. Render passes obfuscate what's going on, and with dynamic rendering you can see exactly what's happening.

You really have to think of Vulkan on PCs and Vulkan on mobile as separate things, if you only care about running on the former then you can easily count on things like dynamic rendering always being available as long as your users drivers are up to date. If you need to target Android though, my condolences.

> only supported on about 28% of reports.

This information is misleading because it includes old reports from years ago, before this feature existed. It does NOT mean that 28% of devices out there have support. You will need Steam hardware survey results and cross reference gpuinfo.org or Android hardware survey results which directly list Vulkan versions.

Dynamic rendering is available on all desktop GPUs (Intel, NV, AMD), on all desktop OSes (Windows, Macos, Linux) as long as you've got drivers that are up to date (no older than 2023).

For mobile devices, the situation isn't as good. Updating mobile GPU drivers is an unsolved problem.

I get your point. But you might be surprised how many PCs are still in use that have pre-Skylake Intel IGPs. Some people just don't update their drivers, either.

Pre-Skylake Intel never had proper Vulkan support (on Linux at least) so it's a non issue.

I use a 2015 Skylake laptop for most of my graphics programming project and it's got full Vulkan 1.3 and wide set of features. The hardware doesn't do mesh shaders or Ray tracing but apart from that every new feature is available.

Not updating drivers is a problem, especially on mobile. Thankfully auto updaters are very common these days.

Do you have any recommendations for sources? I’ve used Vulkan Tutorial, which is a bit stale but I suppose still good for exposure. I’ve also used Vulkan Guide, before its latest overhaul. That one was educational. Not sure if I’ll be able to do their new guide, my laptop can’t run some of the more recent versions of Vulkan

Khronos overhauled their docs last year. I've found the "Vulkan Guide" easier to read than the spec.

https://docs.vulkan.org/guide/latest/index.html

Not to be confused with the tutorial you're referring to.

https://vkguide.dev

> Not sure if I’ll be able to do their new guide, my laptop can’t run some of the more recent versions of Vulkan

If your laptop got still GPU driver updates in 2022 or later, it should probably support Vulkan 1.3. You can install Vulkan SDK (or just extract the archive) and check your Vulkan version by running the supplied "vulkaninfo" program.

For example, my 5 year old Thinkpad T490 fully supports Vulkan 1.3 and it only has an iGPU! :)

Interesting, for a while the guidance for a while was to learn webgpu instead unless you needed all that extra control. Do you think these changes modify that guidance?

WebGPU (or Metal if you're in Apple land) still has a much gentler learning curve. The simplifications to Vulkan weren't really aimed at making it easier to use, just streamlining parts of the API which turned out to be needlessly complex, so the parts that are complex for a reason are still just as complex.

Thanks! Other than a project not running as fast as necessary, do you have any advice on how to know when/if I need to switch to vulkan?

Aside from performance there's also just more hardware features exposed via Vulkan, as a sibling mentioned if you want to do anything with raytracing for example then you will have to graduate to Vulkan in order to take advantage of hardware acceleration.

With WebGPU/wgpu you don't get mesh shaders, ray tracing or shader subgroup/wave/warp operations. Its feature set is comparable to Vulkan 1.0, and Vulkan has progressed a lot since.

And WebGPU still requires all the RenderPass setup code which is a lot of boilerplate that Vulkan no longer requires.

Subgroups have actually been added very recently. The rest, sadly missing (along with multi-queue and bindless) :(

Thanks for the update.

Subgroups may seem like a minor feature, but they can unlock huge performance. I recently had a 10x perf boost with a very basic subgroup trick to let neighboring pixels collaborate on some expensive operations in fragment shaders. And there's another 5x in there waiting for me to implement some subgroup quad tricks.

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