2016 will be remembered as the year of close-to-the-metal graphics APIs. I doubt your grandma will bring it up in conversation as you discuss the highlights of the year come Christmas, but you know, you can always try. If she wants examples, no worries granny, you’ll be able to fire up Dota 2 because it’ll be Vulkan-enabled by the end of the week.
That’s the plan anyway, according to Valve’s Fletcher Dunn, who posted the following comment on Dota 2‘s sub-reddit:
We’re going to release vulkan support soon, probably sometime next week. That DLC checkbox is an error and shouldn’t be visible yet. Sorry for the confusion.
Vulkan support arriving before DirectX 12 is in line with Valve’s comments last year that suggested Vulkan’s cross-platform nature would make implementing the latter, Windows-bound API a lower priority.
If you needed further proof Dota 2‘s Vulkan support is imminent, all you have to do is hit up SteamDB, which shows the latest update adding depots for “Dota 2 Vulkan Win64” and “Dota 2 Vulkan Linux64”. Great, unless you’re playing on OS X.
Much like glass coffins, whether Vulkan provides a significant performance boost remains to be seen, with Valve itself admitting that Dota 2 isn’t the “ideal candidate” to show off the API’s benefits.
Still, I can’t think of a better way for the company to battle-test its implementation than whacking it into the most-played game on Steam.
Dota 2 Update — MAIN CLIENT — May 18, 2016 [Reddit, via Neowin]
Comments
5 responses to “Valve: Vulkan Coming To Dota 2 ‘Sometime Next Week’”
As someone who doesn’t know what the big deal is, it would have been nice to add what it is in the article about it.
Thank you! Who writes an article and doesn’t even give a single sentence or link to explain the technology.
It would be like an article that says ‘Ford to add Gorlax to cars next week!’ and then talk about how Ford thinks Gorlax would be good on blue trucks.
Directx (by Microsoft) is a proprietary API for accessing graphics hardware on Windows. It has always been a bottleneck and it only services the windows platform meaning developers have to write extra code for each platform.
Since consoles have fixed hardware specifications, developers can code to much lower levels and get far greater performance consider consoles have mediocre hardware, this has caused a great deal of frustration for developers trying to support many platforms and be performant.
Microsoft’s answer is directx 12 which is once again proprietary and only is available on Windows 10.
AMD’s answer was Mantle which later evolved into Vulkan.
Vulkan is multi platform and supports multi processing (many CPU’s) and is supported by Nvidia and AMD drivers.
The performance benefits are predicted to be substantial but consumption of the API is still in its infancy.
The cost benefits for developers are probably more important as they will eventually have to code just for Vulkan and gain multi platform support for free as a byproduct.
Hope this helps 🙂
Thanks!
If we consult the Valve Time reference on the Valve Developer wiki, “next week” could be anything from actually next week to 9 months from now.