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Comment by Vanayad | Hacker News Reader

Vulkan is the evolution of Mantle (get it... get it :)) ?) AMD contributed a lot to the development of this API and then collaborated with Microsoft to create DX12. Mantle will remain as a testbed of future technologies

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I get that AMD wants this because it will make CPU performance less important for gamers, as they can't currently compete against Intel here. AMDs APU concept would become more attractive that way.

Valve etc. want this because OpenGL sucks, but DX is Win only.

Microsoft will want to defend its DX stronghold - can they, on a technical level? Will Nvidia play along?

NVIDIA will totally play along. They already have something that looks a lot like Vulcan, called NV_command_list, in their beta 346-series drivers.

Apologies for the SliderShare link, I hate SlideShare.

<http://www.slideshare.net/tlorach/opengl-nvidia-commandlista...

Sample code here:

<https://github.com/nvpro-samples>

> Valve etc. want this because OpenGL sucks

Actually Valve labeled OpenGL to be "shockingly efficient" in one of their presentations (postmortem of porting the Source Engine to Linux).

I went back and checked, it was actually an nVidia guy who said that. Rich Geldreich from Valve was also there but he's expressed nothing but disdain for OpenGL since he left the company:

> "I know it's possible for Linux ports to equal or outperform their Windows counterparts, but it's hard. At Valve we had all the driver devs at our beck and call and it was still very difficult to get the Source engine's perf. and stability to where it needed to be relative to Windows. (And this was with a ~8 year old engine - it must be even harder with more modern engines.)"

http://richg42.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/state-of-linux-gaming....

> I went back and checked, it was actually an nVidia guy who said that.

Hmm, makes sense. But then NVidia really loves OpenGL.

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