EA joins The Khronos Group, will collaborate on Vulkan

Armenius

Armenius

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In what the article calls a surprise move, EA has joined The Khronos Group as a contributing member for Vulkan, NNEF, and gITF. After being one of the first to support the move to low-level graphic APIs with Mantle and later DirectX 12, EA is a latecomer among the bigger publishing houses to join the cross-platform developer. Phoronix speculates that the decision was influenced by Google's recently revealed Stadia game streaming service. With falling take-up of EA's larger franchises on the PC platform, this may very well be the case.

It will be interesting to see if EA ends up shipping Vulkan-powered games moving forward for Windows and potentially Linux and even macOS via MoltenVK. We do know EA SEED's has experimented with Vulkan for their "Halcyon" R&D engine, among expressing other interest around Vulkan in the past, but now EA has actually joined Khronos.

Even if future EA games end up being Vulkan-powered but Windows-only, it should at least help the experience in running the games under Wine / Steam Play (Proton) rather than having to wait for the D3D12-over-Vulkan support to mature, etc. EA only now joining Khronos may very well be fueled on by Google's Vulkan-powered Stadia gaming service, but we'll see.
 
more support for vulkan can almost only be good... almost... its EA after all
 
It's moderately terrifying coming from EA- they haven't managed to unfuck their DX12 implementation, after all- but Vulkan support means more / easier cross-platform development, to include Linux support.
 
MMitch said:
Already drunk :eek: ? Leave some for us.

And yeah, go Vulkan ... even if it's with EA.
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Actually coming off of a Versed and Fentanyl trip :p

(I had a medical procedure today)


Though I blame the phone touch screen keyboard more than I do the drugs.

I hate mobile devices.
 
going to vulkan sounds like they'll be dumping their frostbite engine and/or dice along with it. as long as EA has no say in the engine development then i don't have a problem with them supporting the engine.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
going to vulkan sounds like they'll be dumping their frostbite engine and/or dice along with it. as long as EA has no say in the engine development then i don't have a problem with them supporting the engine.
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Hopefully, it means a positive iteration of the engine. Hasn't improved much since BF4; DX12 has been a bit of a shitshow, and their DXR implementation could be best described as 'lacking'.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
going to vulkan sounds like they'll be dumping their frostbite engine and/or dice along with it. as long as EA has no say in the engine development then i don't have a problem with them supporting the engine.
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The opposite. It is actually EA/DICE that has the longest history here with Vulkan's lineage (Mantle), since Frostbite's former main 3D engine lead - Johan Andersson - was a huge contributor to Mantle and helped push it over the finish line into a showcase title (Battlefield 4, initially). FWIW, Johan left DICE late last year and joined an upstart game studio (Embark) with an emphasis on Rust + Vulkan. Years ago I was disappointed that Johan talked up having both the DX12 and Vulkan renderpaths in Frostbite games, but ended up only doing DX12 in the end (corporate and financial decision no doubt).
 
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sirmonkey1985 said:
going to vulkan sounds like they'll be dumping their frostbite engine and/or dice along with it. as long as EA has no say in the engine development then i don't have a problem with them supporting the engine.
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Vulkan isn’t an engine it’s a rendering API. It has its roots in AMDs mantle pre-DX12 in which EA/Dice were the first to support it...with Frostbite. Notable EA titles I can recall with Mantle being Battlefield 3 and Dragon Age Inquisition.

So unlikely they’ll be dropping their engine.
 
DejaWiz said:
They gonna charge for each feature to be unlocked in their games?

AA? $10
AF? $7
RT? $30


RIP, Vulkan…
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No one company steers the ship. This won't really effect Vulkan at all... accept perhaps helping EA get a bit more help on their end, in the form of perhaps the odd custom extension or something.

If one company could kill an open source effort Linux would have died long ago... I mean MS has people on the Linux foundation board and all, as do IBM and Oracle. I mean if your direct competition can join and the ship keeps chugging I guess things work as intended.

EA joining Khronos is a great thing... Epic Valve and Sony are all promoter members. EA joins Blizzard, Nintendo, Unity and a ton of others. I would expect most of the other large studios will follow suit this year... with Googles Linux/Vulkan powered streaming servers coming online they are all going to have to play ball. Its always better to have a voice in the process.
 
Vulkan is the Best and smoothest gaming experience I've had. Glad to see more support.
Nvidia will be displeased by this news.
 
Brian_B said:
Makes me think they are considering licensing Frostbite
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Doubt it. Has more to due with it not being Windows exclusive and the aforementioned streaming I suppose. Respawn is using UE4 for their new Star Wars game. My understanding is the game, along with Apex Legends (Source engine), were in development before they were bought out by EA though. Frostbite certainly is great though UE4 is clearly more versatile. Doesn't mean Frostbite can't be developed outwards but it would take a lot of effort to reach UE4 level.

Many game engines work great for a certain type of game but are utterly terrible when doing something else.
 
ChadD said:
No one company steers the ship. This won't really effect Vulkan at all... accept perhaps helping EA get a bit more help on their end, in the form of perhaps the odd custom extension or something.

If one company could kill an open source effort Linux would have died long ago... I mean MS has people on the Linux foundation board and all, as do IBM and Oracle. I mean if your direct competition can join and the ship keeps chugging I guess things work as intended.

EA joining Khronos is a great thing... Epic Valve and Sony are all promoter members. EA joins Blizzard, Nintendo, Unity and a ton of others. I would expect most of the other large studios will follow suit this year... with Googles Linux/Vulkan powered streaming servers coming online they are all going to have to play ball. Its always better to have a voice in the process.
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Does blatant sarcasm always defy you?
 
N4CR said:
Vulkan is the Best and smoothest gaming experience I've had. Glad to see more support.
Nvidia will be displeased by this news.
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nvidia's one of the biggest contributors and supporters for vulkan so i doubt they'd be displeased.. but they need to take a serious look into either their drivers or gpu architecture and figure out why they're having such massive performance issues.
 
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sirmonkey1985 said:
nvidia's one of the biggest contributors and supporters for vulkan so i doubt they'd be displeased.. but they need to take a serious look into either their drivers or gpu architecture and figure out why they're having such massive performance issues.
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Does Nvidia have a huge performance issue? Pascal sure, but I thought Volta resolve most of the performance issue?
 
Chimpee said:
Does Nvidia have a huge performance issue? Pascal sure, but I thought Volta resolve most of the performance issue?
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nvm ignore my post, there were a couple games they had issues with that i for sure thought were using vulkan but was actually UE4.
 
N4CR said:
Vulkan is the Best and smoothest gaming experience I've had. Glad to see more support.
Nvidia will be displeased by this news.
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Hmm...

upload_2019-5-1_8-12-9.png
 
Huawei.....???

I have my ideas about why they are on the board.
 
Read into this what you want but the answer is pretty simple. Vulkan is the best way forward for devs because it is cross platform. You are not tied down to DX for 2 platforms (windows and Xbox) when you are coding for a graphic API. One API for all platforms. Makes sense at every level.
I really have to wonder about the nay sayers when it comes to Vulkan. It is a win-win for consumers. It shouldn't hurt anyone's feeling that DX is slowly falling out of favor.
 
IMO, there's nothing more important to health and longevity of PC gaming than the proliferation of Vulkan. It's the only thing that can break Microsoft's DirectX stranglehold on PC gaming, not to mention the only true path to native, AAA Linux gaming.

Platform agnostic instead of artificially tied to one version of one OS (Windows 10). That's the holy grail.

DX11 and DX12 based development will still be around for a long time, but for almost two decades Microsoft has treated PC gaming like a dog kept chained in the backyard while all the energy and care was spent on Xbox. Token gestures in recent years putting a GoW or Forza title in the W10 Store doesn't change the overall.
 
Auer said:
Huawei.....???

I have my ideas about why they are on the board.
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There a major ARM player. They are making their Kirin line of APUs for their phones... and getting into ARM server chips with their Kunpeng line. They have been pretty good open source players so far with things like the open stack foundation ect.

On the other hand perhaps they are the real reason EA has decided to join to glean some new spy methods origin. ;) lol
 
DejaWiz said:
Does blatant sarcasm always defy you?
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Sorry yes I knew your comment was sarcastic didn't really intend to quote it... sorry. Was meant as more of a EAs cancer can't really spread post. :)
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
nvidia's one of the biggest contributors and supporters for vulkan so i doubt they'd be displeased.. but they need to take a serious look into either their drivers or gpu architecture and figure out why they're having such massive performance issues.
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That was what I was getting at but didn't realise they were onboard. I always wondered if it's the whole independent api that doesn't allow cheating thing going on.
 
ManofGod said:
Well then, you were one of only a handful that was not interested in Crysis then. (EA is their publisher, after all.)
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Only Crysis I ever played was the multiplayer demo for Crysis 2. I found it to be very pretty, but ultimately the robot theme bored me to death.

I probably would have been interested in Crysis at the time, but I met my first wife in 2005, and pretty much fell off the PC hardware/gaming scene for like 5 years after that, only picking it back up in 2010, a couple of years before the divorce :p Turns out our interests weren't compatible, and I really didn't notice for the first several years due to the honeymoon phase.

A word of advice to you young kids, even if you are happy and doing it on your own accord, don't get involved with someone who takes you away from the things you love in life. The honeymoon phase eventually ends in every relationship, and then you have to have something else to fall back on. Lesson learned :p

I heard a lot about Crysis when I got back, and figured I'd probably pick it up on a Steam sale at some point to try it out, but I had a backlog of other things I found more interesting at the time, and I still haven't gotten around to it close to 10 years later, so I'm guessing it probably won't happen at this point :p
 
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Brian_B said:
Makes me think they are considering licensing Frostbite
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Makes me think they want to branch to other platforms, but Vulkan currently doesn't have any readily available dev tools or environments so they want to have a say in getting those going to cut costs on any future development projects while having a means to claim their donations to the Kronos group as donations to a non profit that they can later claim back on their taxes.
 
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