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One improvement in Vulkan vs. OpenGL is that it effectively decouples software updates from hw generations.

As of today, you can write Vulkan 1.3 code (which is significantly better and less verbose than 1.0) and run it on 10+ year old hardware on all desktop platforms with GPUs from all vendors as long as you've got up to date drivers.

Such a thing was never possible in the OpenGL days when the API version was tied to certain hardware features (which you probably didn't use), and you were stuck with 10+ year old API version if you wanted to run on 10+ year old HW.

It ain't perfect but it's much better than back then.




That's still very much a thing, except that the new HW features are not as fundamental as before. For example, if you want to use ray-tracing, you're on the same boat as before: it won't work on 10-year-old HW. Same for using certain non-32bit variable sizes in shaders. Or the newer shader features that help AI.


But you still get the latest API version and you can use all the features available on your hardware (at runtime). You don't need to stick with Vulkan 1.1.

Ray tracing, mesh shaders, etc need hw support. But my potato Intel laptop from 2013 has Vulkan 1.3.


Semantics.

What's the point of "using 1.3" if you can't use the coolest new extensions because they're optional? Yeah you get dynamic rendering and, uh, nothing else new? Saying "it has Vulkan 1.3" is not really saying a lot, since way too much stuff is optional.


Off the top of my head: Dynamic rendering, timeline semaphores, buffer device address, shader subgroups, push descriptors, descriptor indexing.

These are mostly "software" features and they are all required in Vk1.3, and a huge improvement over what there was before it.

Mesh shaders and ray tracing need hw support, but there's a lot of improvement in the API you get without latest hw.


2013 Intel iGPUs pretending to have Vulkan support are actually one of the worst targets (on par with bad mobile phone drivers), because the hardware doesn't fully support vulkan, the implementation is buggy and incomplete (and Linux only, though to be fair buggy and incomplete applies to all intel gpu drivers, at least for dx12+vulkan), and it doesn't pass CTS (any sane vulkan app will block running on non-conformant drivers because they're a nightmare).


Fake news: Intel Graphics on Linux submits its drivers for Conformance Testing and gets the official stamp by Khronos for its products: https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-prod... . The drivers are good and often conformant on launch. I'd argue that Linux is better than the Other OSes if you want Intel Graphics.


...did you even bother to search through that? There aren't any Haswell iGPUs in there, because they're non conformant.

I'd agree that overall Intel's Linux drivers work better (though afaik they've had a lot of problems with Alchemist, and seem to have prioritized Windows performance over Linux for them).




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