When will there be a Vulkan renderer?

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+5 votes

Vulkan. You know you want to. Everybody is doing it.

in Engine by (27 points)
I don't really see the need.  I expect the majority of people actually producing games in Godot don't need the features of Vulkan.  It'd be such a massive undertaking to integrate into the engine and OpenGL ES 3+ gives us most of the benefits of Vulkan for a lot less work.
by (68 points)

3 Answers

+5 votes
by (229 points)
+5 votes

The renderer rewrite is on the 3.0 roadmap. Vulkan is still not widely supported, so the focus will be on OpenGL ES 3.0 and 3.1.

Quoting reduz on this decision:

The problem is not PC support, this will be eventually resolved within a year or so. The main limitation is adoption on Mobile and HTML5.
As a lot of Godot users make games for Mobile, we must give priority to APIs that work on such platforms. OpenGL ES 3.0 and 3.1 are on the way to being widely standardized so they get priority.
Also, GLES3 is already very powerful and we will be able to enormously improve the rendering quality thanks to it

Source

by (488 points)
edited by
I'm a bit disappointed by this decision.

Mobile devices who support GL ES 3.1 are recent too. They will probably support Vulkan. I can't imagine Vulkan to be so restrictive.

Why not keep GL ES 2.0 for " old " devices and add a Vulkan choice  for PC and recent devices ?
   
GL ES 2.0 seems pretty decent for all 2D games and devices who can't support Vulkan probably haven't a sufficient hardware for beautiful 3D games .
by (548 points)
+3 votes

2019 update as of October 1st

We now know Vulkan is going to be supported after 3.2:
https://github.com/godotengine/godot-roadmap/blob/0f1e19265740a9e31e7dbe04a4173b93c00fc2b3/ROADMAP.md

This article explains the reasons why godot is going to drop GLES3 in favor of Vulkan:
https://godotengine.org/article/abandoning-gles3-vulkan-and-gles2

The main dev announced that he was going to work on that after 3.1:
https://twitter.com/reduzio/status/954051358914744320

It came out he started working first on 3.2, on certain key features he wanted to implement.
Now it's already a few months he's working on Vulkan, 2D seems to be ready, 3D is starting to come together, some user already compiled and played around with it, and it looks quite good!

I'm just a regular Godot user, so my estimate is just an educated guess, it could be we'll have an alpha by the end of the year or beginning of the next.

by (110 points)
edited by

That sounds great! How would you estimate readiness of Vulkan support in vulkan branch (it seems that the engine works) and when the full support is ready? I am wondering about the mentioned branch just in testing purposes.

Thanks for the answer! I built the project too and it really looks good.
Just to be aligned with the progress, I am attaching links to the official reports
https://godotengine.org/article/vulkan-progress-report-1
https://godotengine.org/article/vulkan-progress-report-2
https://godotengine.org/article/vulkan-progress-report-3

by (10 points)
edited by
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