Khronos Group announced that they plan on merging OpenCL and Vulkan into a single API. Sounds pretty awesome in my opinion. This should probably lead to big performance enhancements on compute tasks using OpenCL.
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Low level access computing language.
Every orifice on my body is moist.
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Same here.
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Hopefully this means more advance graphics simulations for Vulkan games. I know physics simulations like TressFX use OpenCL.
Well shit. Guess expectations better be pushed back then as to a full featured release of Vulkan across all platforms.
This right here is the problem with open source. Not even finished the original project to release state across the intended platforms with the support and implementation it was supposed to have and all ready they are adding sizeable chunks to it.
So like a lot of high profile opensouurce across platform stuff this will just get constantly "improved" with out ever making it to release and being in forever beta.
Don't get me wrong this would be really nice if they could get it out and finished but it just looks like yet another open source project with too much scope and not enough actual finishing the project in the first place.
I also know yes there is vulkan out in games on multiple platforms, just only very few. If their intention is to take on DX well this is just another roadblock to that goal in my opinion.
Scott Michaud over at PCPer did a write up about the merge of Vulkan and OpenCL. Some Q and A with Neil Trevett and Tom Olson from Khronos Group, discussing the Roadmap:
Interesting read. A couple of points:
The Vulkan API roadmap is not affected by the merge, added feature sets, not one layer over the other
Compatibility layers for existing OpenCL 1.2 and 2.x is planned
Plenty of stuff in OpenCL that Vulkan can use, but there has been no discussion about this yet
OpenCL group wants to embrace the layered ecosystem and get back to ease of use, get the middleware people involved in design
OpenCL compliance should be more modular and less monolithic, coherent framework with optional feature sets. Plenty of people who do neural net etc shouldn't be forced to support FP32 etc.
Adoption adoption adoption. Apple uses Metal, Google doesn't ship OpenCL drivers on their Nexus devices and Nvidia doesn't even support OpenCL 2.0 yet. Niel thinks OpenCL has a much clearer adoption path by slip-streaming into Vulkan. More feedback from non-members, advisory panels just like they had for Vulkan is planned for the new integrated OpenCL.
@Zibob This looks like a lot of removing of roadblocks to me. Especially if they want to really compete with DirectX. A great development IMHO that will probably be huge. Vulkan will be very much strengthened and OpenCL might actually see good adoption. There is a real possibility of SYCL through Vulkan, and there is plenty of interest for that. This is a possibility for Vulkan to walk all over DX.
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