Intel IGP Vulkan support?

[nathanddrews]

I was searching for some information on this because I recently saw some benchmarks of Godavari APUs playing Doom with OpenGL vs Vulkan and there's a 20-50% boost (but still not very smooth).

I stumbled upon this very recent thread where users and Intel summed up the whole thing as Intel released a driver update for Vulkan... but it doesn't actually play Vulkan games...? I'm a bit confused by it. Then someone claims that it plays Dota 2 Vulkan just fine. I'm skeptical. I could try it myself, but... laziness.

 

[ThatBuzzkiller]

https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-products#vulkan

According to Khronos Group, Intel has conformant Vulkan drivers for Linux (Broadwell and up) and for Windows (Skylake and up) but it seems rather disappointing that it won't work for end users ...

 

[nathanddrews]

Yeah, that rather defeats the purpose of having drivers if the API doesn't work for your customers. With all the gong-banging from Intel about Iris Pro graphics, I would expect graphics drivers to be more important to Intel than they are.

 

[ThatBuzzkiller]

If your customers are developers then it's not so bad but yes, Vulkan's end goal is intended for the benefit of applications and if Intel has ABSOLUTELY no intention of getting games to run on it then it's a pointless endeavor for them however let's hope that they'll get games running on their Vulkan drivers soon ...

 

[NTMBK]

EDIT: NM

 

[ShintaiDK]

Vulkan like DX12 requires a path for it by the developers for each IHV and even more segmented. 3Dmark for example runs on DX12 on Skylake IGP, the most advanced GPU there is of the 3 IHVs. Yet what games run?

Vulkan/DX12 is a micromanagement API in terms of hardware options.

DOOM with Vulkan on AMD for example is using GCN Shader Extentions. Not the SPIR-V standard shaders.

That's the problem when its the developer that has to pay for the bill.

 

[Bacon1]

Vulkan like DX12 requires a path for it by the developers for each IHV and even more segmented. 3Dmark for example runs on DX12 on Skylake IGP, the most advanced GPU there is of the 3 IHVs. Yet what games run?

This is completely false. The developers for 3dMark Timespy flat out said they aren't doing separate paths at all.

 

[ShintaiDK]

This is completely false. The developers for 3dMark Timespy flat out said they aren't doing separate paths at all.

So what you say is any DX12 game in this case should run the IGP. Then why doesn't it

 

[Bacon1]

So what you say is any DX12 game in this case should run the IGP. Then why doesn't it

Ask Intel? Probably because their GPUs are really weak and they haven't provided complete DX12 drivers yet.

 

[NTMBK]

So what you say is any DX12 game in this case should run the IGP. Then why doesn't it

Because Intel's graphics driver team is woefully underfunded?

 

[ShintaiDK]

Ask Intel? Probably because their GPUs are really weak and they haven't provided complete DX12 drivers yet.

But you just said DX12 was fine and no special path was used.

 

[ThatBuzzkiller]

Vulkan like DX12 requires a path for it by the developers for each IHV and even more segmented. 3Dmark for example runs on DX12 on Skylake IGP, the most advanced GPU there is of the 3 IHVs. Yet what games run?

Vulkan/DX12 is a micromanagement API in terms of hardware options.

DOOM with Vulkan on AMD for example is using GCN Shader Extentions. Not the SPIR-V standard shaders.

That's the problem when its the developer that has to pay for the bill.

Their called "GCN shader extensions" for a reason. AMD is not providing you an entirely separate shader language, their providing you EXTENSIONS to a shader language much like how every IHV is providing their own D3D driver extensions ...

Every developer is forced to either write their shaders in GLSL or SPIR-V for Vulkan, the extensions are OPTIONAL ...

So what you say is any DX12 game in this case should run the IGP. Then why doesn't it

It should if Intel has conformant DX12 drivers, there shouldn't even be an excuse when their IGPs have the most advanced DX12 feature set support since they support obscure hardware features like standard swizzle and cross adapter row-major textures along with feature level 12.1. It's fully bindless too like GCN is so what exactly is Intel's excuse ?

 

[nathanddrews]

Of course I find this all hilarious since Intel was the one that pushed all this DX12 draw call measuring into the spotlight in the first place...

 

[Bacon1]

But you just said DX12 was fine and no special path was used.

I said no special paths are required. It is still recommended to use them as each IHV will have better performance. But there is absolutely no requirement to do so.

Neither would prevent Intel from running at all as there would be a "generic" path.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Neither would prevent Intel from running at all as there would be a "generic" path.

Prove it.

 

[NTMBK]

You know that NVidia is the king of OpenGL shader extensions, right? http://developer.download.nvidia.com/opengl/specs/nvOpenGLspecs.pdf It's not like this is some big new thing with Vulkan. You get paid a fistful of money by the GPU vendor, and you put an #ifdef in your shader to use a vendor's extension to speed up a hot loop.

 

[Bacon1]

Prove it.

Prove what? Where is any of your proof of anything in this thread?