iD Software explains why they chose OpenGL/Vulkan over DirectX11/12

iD Software explains why they chose OpenGL/Vulkan over DirectX11/12

| Source: DSO Gaming Author: Mark Campbell

iD Software explains why they chose OpenGL/Vulkan over DirectX11/12

iD Software has explained why they chose to support OpenGL and Vulkan rather than DirectX11 and DirectX 12 with DOOM, explaining that while DirectX 11 has a lot more driver optimisation from both AMD and Nvidia over OpenGL, that OpenGL offers a broader range of tools and extensions that make it a lot less restrictive on developers.

One of the other key aspects of OpenGL is that it is an API that is not controlled by Microsoft, allowing Linux and MacOS versions of the game to be possible. Below is a quote from iD software's Axel Gneiting.

Overall we had very little issues developing DOOM with OpenGL. DirectX 11 might have an advantage when it comes to optimizations on driver side, as more effort was put into that over the years by the IVHs compared to OpenGL. Also admittedly, there is a broader range of tools that work with DirectX than OpenGL at this point in time. On the other hand, OpenGL has a bigger feature set through extensions and it is less restrictive in terms of certain GPU operations.

Moving forward to the modern graphical APIs, Vulkan and DirectX 12, Bethesda does state that both APIs operate in a very similar way and "inherited a lot from AMD's Mantle API efforts" making both APIs fairly similar to work with.

Unlike DirectX 12 Vulkan is not locked to Windows 10, allowing Vulkan supported games to run on older/popular operating systems like Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 as well as on Linux and MacOS. Again like OpenGL Vulkan supports an extension mechanism which allows Bethesda to work closely with AMD, Nvidia and Intel in order to offer specific hardware optimisations for their games, allowing them to gain a lot of performance by communicating and working with hardware vendors.

DirectX 12 and Vulkan are conceptually very similar and both clearly inherited a lot from AMD’s Mantle API efforts. The low-level nature of those APIs moves a lot of the optimization responsibility from the driver to the application developer, so we don’t expect big differences in speed between the two APIs in the future. On the tools side there is very good Vulkan support in RenderDoc now, which covers most of our debugging needs. We choose Vulkan, because it allows us to support Windows 7 and 8, which still have significant market share and would be excluded with DirectX 12. On top of that Vulkan has an extension mechanism that allows us to work very closely with AMD, NVIDIA and Intel to do very specific optimisations for each hardware.

While right now more games support DirectX 12 it is clear that the Vulkan API offers some unique benefits, especially for those who game on Linux or have avoided the upgrade to Windows 10.

You can join the discussion on iD Software choosing Vulkan over DirectX 12 on the OC3D Forums.

iD Software has explained why they chose to support OpenGL and Vulkan over DX11/DX12.https://t.co/JYh4SizE7Z pic.twitter.com/qdtoTJjeGD — OC3D (@OC3D) July 20, 2016

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