Title says it all, and I'm sure Frontier would love to have a functioning vulkan version, and I won't discount the challenges involved in getting your graphics programmers learnt on it either.
The thing is, though, that a vulkan version will benefit everyone. It benefits your console users as you'll be uncovering and optimizing the Cobra platform, building your own command buffers will highlight areas you can optimize your instructions per GPU tic, which you'll be able to measure against your Xbox DirectX and PS4 GMN code paths (and you'll be able to apply a lot of the frame timing improvements to the PS4 GMN version).
It'll benefit the PC platform immensely as nVidia and AMD have great vulkan ICD's and more documentation is coming out all the time for SPIR-V (and how awesome the shaders are to write for once you have the initial setup outlay completed). The shader caching on Vulkan for cloud platforms like Steam will also tremendously benefit everyone that has like GPU's (eg everyone with a 2070 can have a cloud based shader cache that runs like a rockstar for their cards, and Steam will maintain the caches for you). You'll also be able to extend a HUGE olive branch to the Linux community and virtually have a whitelisted Linux supported platform release that'll give players more choice.
It can also bring the Mac port back to life thanks to MoltenVK, granted you'll have some relatively steep system requirements, a lot of Mac's today would be able to wring more performance out of a MoltenVK version than you could get out of OpenGL (even current OpenGL).
Elite has a lot of bugs, and don't get me wrong, fixing those has their place of importance. I can't put the pen to paper to see if it's really worth the business decision to make, as I'm not seeing the insider perspective. At some point, however, Frontier will want to add Vulkan support to the Cobra platform. If anyone from Frontier sees this and reads it, you've got my thanks.
I love Elite, and I am very excited to see where Frontier takes it later this year with fleet carriers as well as the "next era" to be talked about in 2020.
o7, and thanks for a wonderful game. Vulkan support doesn't make or break it, it's just something I really hope to see some day.
The thing is, though, that a vulkan version will benefit everyone. It benefits your console users as you'll be uncovering and optimizing the Cobra platform, building your own command buffers will highlight areas you can optimize your instructions per GPU tic, which you'll be able to measure against your Xbox DirectX and PS4 GMN code paths (and you'll be able to apply a lot of the frame timing improvements to the PS4 GMN version).
It'll benefit the PC platform immensely as nVidia and AMD have great vulkan ICD's and more documentation is coming out all the time for SPIR-V (and how awesome the shaders are to write for once you have the initial setup outlay completed). The shader caching on Vulkan for cloud platforms like Steam will also tremendously benefit everyone that has like GPU's (eg everyone with a 2070 can have a cloud based shader cache that runs like a rockstar for their cards, and Steam will maintain the caches for you). You'll also be able to extend a HUGE olive branch to the Linux community and virtually have a whitelisted Linux supported platform release that'll give players more choice.
It can also bring the Mac port back to life thanks to MoltenVK, granted you'll have some relatively steep system requirements, a lot of Mac's today would be able to wring more performance out of a MoltenVK version than you could get out of OpenGL (even current OpenGL).
Elite has a lot of bugs, and don't get me wrong, fixing those has their place of importance. I can't put the pen to paper to see if it's really worth the business decision to make, as I'm not seeing the insider perspective. At some point, however, Frontier will want to add Vulkan support to the Cobra platform. If anyone from Frontier sees this and reads it, you've got my thanks.
I love Elite, and I am very excited to see where Frontier takes it later this year with fleet carriers as well as the "next era" to be talked about in 2020.
o7, and thanks for a wonderful game. Vulkan support doesn't make or break it, it's just something I really hope to see some day.
