Vulkan

Vulkan is a modern graphics API released in 2016 that allows developers to take greater control over what the player sees, and greatly affects performance.^[1] It is an alternative to DirectX.

It sits between the render engine and the graphics card driver, allowing the developer a fine grained control over what they develop. It also gives flexibility for cross-platform, including Linux as it is an open standard API, contrary to Microsoft proprietary.

The design of Vulkan allows to alleviate some CPU bottlenecks by submitting work in parallel to the GPU.^[2]^[1]

A graphic API is a tool that interfaces between the players graphics card and the developers.

Vulkan has many features that Cloud Imperium Games will be exploring in the future, such as variable rate shading, boundless resources and GPU accelerated ray tracing. Vulkan can also help collect live hardware data on a large scale that can be used to target specific features and extensions.

Vulkan was a requirement in order to use DLSS.^[3] Its implementation has been worked on in parallel with the development of Gen12.^[4]

External Links

Vulkan

References

↑ ^1.0 ^1.1 CitizenCon 2951: Gen 12 & The Multicore of Vulkan, Star Citizen, Youtube, 9 october 2021
↑ If the conversion works, there'll be no visual difference at all and the performance will be better (in cases where the CPU graphics workload was the limiting factor). Spectrum. Retrieved August 11th 2020
↑ We are very interested in DLSS, but as already said many times we need Vulkan first.. Spectrum. Retrieved September 20th 2022
↑ [https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/50259/thread/dlss3/5378547 It's been in development in parallel along Gen12. It is to be expected that it won't take long to have a first Vulkan version running once Gen12 is complete.]. Spectrum. Retrieved September 20th 2022

[:0-1] 1.0 ^1.1 CitizenCon 2951: Gen 12 & The Multicore of Vulkan, Star Citizen, Youtube, 9 october 2021

[2] If the conversion works, there'll be no visual difference at all and the performance will be better (in cases where the CPU graphics workload was the limiting factor). Spectrum. Retrieved August 11th 2020

[3] We are very interested in DLSS, but as already said many times we need Vulkan first.. Spectrum. Retrieved September 20th 2022

[4] [https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/50259/thread/dlss3/5378547 It's been in development in parallel along Gen12. It is to be expected that it won't take long to have a first Vulkan version running once Gen12 is complete.]. Spectrum. Retrieved September 20th 2022

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