How to enable Vulkan?

[Dinosaur Fire Chief]

Is this something that can be enabled in p18 and how do I do that? Or do I need to use one of the beta branches?

[DjArcas]

you can use a pair of command lines to force Vulkan or DX12.

-force-d3d12
-force-vulkan

Quite frankly, I'm not impressed, and both of them crash on exit. GG Unity!

[Dinosaur Fire Chief]

Ha. I'll give it try. It sounds like it might not be fully supported, so I'll keep the bugs to myself. But if you decide you're interested I can report anything odd that I find. Thanks.

[DirtyCamper]

Oh... nice... I will definitely try vulkan.

[Dinosaur Fire Chief]

Originally posted by DirtyCamper:

Oh... nice... I will definitely try vulkan.

I haven't tried the DX12. Forcing Vulkan caused the game to crash when Alt-Tabbing (I'm on Win10) and it crashed during gameplay. I may try the DX12 just out of curiosity. Good luck to you!

[Grumpy Old Gamer]

Vulkan sucks. It;s primary purpose is to make development easier, and it fails miserably. Compared to Direct3D or OpenGL It is currently only supported by high end GPU's like Tesla, as 64 bit floating point support is a requirement.

Section 2.1 - The host must have runtime support for 32- and 64-bit floating-point types satisfying the range and precision constraints in the Floating Point Computation section.

The API seems designed more for high throughput (video post processing and GP/GPU) not high availability (games).

Maybe I am wrong, this is just my initial impression of it from glancing over the API specification.

[Dinosaur Fire Chief]

Originally posted by Dorf In Space:

Vulkan sucks. It;s primary purpose is to make development easier, and it fails miserably.

I understood as not making development easier but to allow lower level access to the hardware and to reduce the overhead of the OGL state machine. I mean, it's a lower level API. That usually makes it harder to use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan_(API)

Originally posted by Dorf In Space:

The API seems designed more for high throughput (video post processing and GP/GPU) not high availability (games).

I think I got this: https://gaming.radeon.com/en/product/vega/radeon-rx-vega-64/
It would've been fun to test regardless.

[DjArcas]

Originally posted by Dorf In Space:

Vulkan sucks. It;s primary purpose is to make development easier, and it fails miserably. Compared to Direct3D or OpenGL It is currently only supported by high end GPU's like Tesla, as 64 bit floating point support is a requirement.

Not sure where you got that from, it runs just fine on my old GTX 960. It's just not much of a performance boost.