Vulkan mGPU support not just for W10 - Khronos clarifies

[zMeul]

source: https://www.khronos.org/blog/vulkan-multi-gpu-support-not-just-for-windows-10

 

 

after GDC, Khronos clarifies the stance on Vulkan multi-GPU support:

Quote

The good news is that the Vulkan multi-GPU specification is very definitely NOT tied to Windows 10. It is possible to implement the Vulkan multi-GPU extension on any desktop OS including Windows 7, 8.X and 10 and Linux.

 

Some of the Khronos GDC presentations mentioned that for Vulkan multi-GPU functionality, Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) must be in Linked Display Adapter (LDA) mode. That was not a very clear statement that has caused some confusion. And so it is worth clarifying that:

• The use of WDDM is referring to the use of Vulkan multi-GPU functionality on Windows. On other OS, WDDM is not necessary to implement the Vulkan multi-GPU extension
• On Windows, the use of LDA mode can make implementing Vulkan multi-GPU functionality easier, and will probably be used by most implementations, but it is not strictly necessary
• If an implementation on Windows does decide to use LDA mode, it is NOT tied to Windows 10. LDA mode has been available on many versions of Windows, including Windows 7 and 8.x

 

it still remains at the game developer's whim if they and how will they implement multi-GPU support on their games

 

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edit https://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/OS-Limitations-Vulkan-Multi-GPU-Support

more info from PCPer, it was initially thought that LDA mode was introduced with WDDM2 and W10 and this created another confusion on W10 dependance

as it stands out, LDA mode was introduced in WDDM ever since Windows Vista !!!!

Quote

 

Khronos Group has just responded to my follow-up questions. LDA has existed since Windows Vista, at the time for assisting with SLI and Crossfire support. Its implementation has changed in Windows 10, but that's not really relevant for Vulkan's multi-GPU support. To prove this, they showed LDA referenced in a Windows 8.1 MSDN post.

In short:

Vulkan's multi-GPU extensions can be used on Windows 7 and Windows 8.x. The exact process will vary from OS to OS, but the GPU vendor can implement these extensions if they choose, and LDA mode isn't exclusive to Windows 10.

 

 

Edited March 22, 2017 by zMeul

[samcool55]

Good to see they want to make it as OS independent as possible

It will be interesting to see the battle between DX12 and vulkan in the next few years.

[cj09beira]

Good news 

[ApolloFury]

19 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Good to see they want to make it as OS independent as possible

It will be interesting to see the battle between DX12 and vulkan in the next few years.

I also want to see the battle between Vulcan on Windows vs Linux. I really want to abandon Windows entirely but DX is still king at the moment.

Edited March 22, 2017 by ApolloFury
Fixed gramm

[samcool55]

Just now, ApolloFury said:

I also want to see the battle of Vulcan on Windows vs Linux. I really want to abandon Windows entirely but DX is still king at the moment.

Honestly i think that will mostly be decided by the driver support of the gpu's on linux.

Maybe DX12 and vulkan are a low-level api makes driver less relevant might help, but honestly i don't know enough about it to know how much it will matter.

 

[tlink]

11 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Honestly i think that will mostly be decided by the driver support of the gpu's on linux.

Maybe DX12 and vulkan are a low-level api makes driver less relevant might help, but honestly i don't know enough about it to know how much it will matter.

 

yea drivers matter too, but it would help if the games even ran on linux in the first place

[Prysin]

2 hours ago, samcool55 said:

Good to see they want to make it as OS independent as possible

It will be interesting to see the battle between DX12 and vulkan in the next few years.

the more shocking thing here is that @zMeuls post werent full of salt, spite and lies. Given his passionate hatred for Microsoft.

[Prysin]

2 hours ago, samcool55 said:

Honestly i think that will mostly be decided by the driver support of the gpu's on linux.

Maybe DX12 and vulkan are a low-level api makes driver less relevant might help, but honestly i don't know enough about it to know how much it will matter.

 

you do need a driver for Vulcan and DX12, just much less of it. But all vendor specific optimizations in terms of swapping data-sets, pipeline resource allocations, instruction sets, memory comression etc. do require a vendor and product specific driver.

 

I've been reading up on coding for vulcan, although im far from able to write any functional code for it just yet.

[thexzenon]

3 hours ago, ApolloFury said:

I really want to abandon Windows entirely

What about older DX9/DX11 games?

[tlink]

24 minutes ago, crisro996 said:

What about older DX9/DX11 games?

wine or vm, performance hit from virtualization is not that big anymore since hardware developed further thus we have more resources at our disposal.

[raphidy]

Still waiting for more vulkan games. I thought it was derived from mantle? BF1 should have vulkan and other EA games, no?

[ApolloFury]

2 hours ago, crisro996 said:

What about older DX9/DX11 games?

I develop my own games with Unity and Blender.

But Unity still uses OpenGL on Linux, people have been waiting for them to fully implement Vulkan.

2 hours ago, tlink said:

wine or vm, performance hit from virtualization is not that big anymore since hardware developed further thus we have more resources at our disposal.

Yes true, not only that but future games developed with Vulkan on Windows should have very little performance impact on Wine (in theory). Doom 2016 is the only game we can test right now, almost identical.

 

Wine vs actual Windows:

 

[zMeul]

58 minutes ago, ApolloFury said:

Doom 2016 is the only game we can test right now, almost identical.

almost is not quite right, there are frametime differences that are very notable

 

Talos can be tested in Vulkan / OpenGL Linux vs Windows:

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I would write a benchmark for both Win and nix but ...

1. have no experience with actual 3D workloads
2. have no experience with nix programming

[samcool55]

7 hours ago, tlink said:

yea drivers matter too, but it would help if the games even ran on linux in the first place

 can't argue with that!

Just being able to run more games at all on linux would indeed be an improvement in itself regardless of performance.

Also, don't know about nvidia but iirc AMD has open-source drivers for linux. So i think it's safe to assume if devs use vulkan they will also improve the open-source driver to work better with their game which would be better for everyone. Game devs can get their game running better, users of the open-source driver might get general improvements and the driver matures. 

 

Imo i really want to see Vulkan winning.

[zMeul]

Just now, samcool55 said:

Also, don't know about nvidia but iirc AMD has open-source drivers for linux. So i think it's safe to assume if devs use vulkan they will also improve the open-source driver to work better with their game which would be better for everyone

you are making quite a lot of assumptions

indeed, nVidia does not have a open source driver

but !!!! the Vukan AMD driver is not open source, I repeat .. it's not open source - linux people are quite upset at AMD for this

[samcool55]

1 minute ago, zMeul said:

you are making quite a lot of assumptions

indeed, nVidia does not have a open source driver

but !!!! the Vukan AMD driver is not open source, I repeat .. it's not open source - linux people are quite upset at AMD for this

Yea tbh i'm not familiar with gpu drivers on linux so i have no idea O_o

Anyway, let's hope both companies will go open-source driver wise, properly. I believe this would help everybody in the long term.

[zMeul]

Just now, samcool55 said:

Yea tbh i'm not familiar with gpu drivers on linux so i have no idea O_o

Anyway, let's hope both companies will go open-source driver wise, properly. I believe this would help everybody in the long term.

open source doesn't mean it helps

nVidia has closed nix source drivers since forever and that didn't impede them to have better perf than AMD

[samcool55]

1 minute ago, zMeul said:

open source doesn't mean it helps

nVidia has closed nix source drivers since forever and that didn't impede them to have better perf than AMD

All true, but giving the community at least the option doesn't hurt or anything.

I mean, if people want to help developing the drivers for their gpu then at least they can.

Maybe it ends up going nowhere but then so be it i guess... If enough people care and it's properly open-source, stuff will happen.

[zMeul]

3 minutes ago, Tedny said:

So, How many game and application support more than 1 GPU? 

mGPU support was just added to Vukan, not even a month ago https://vulkan.lunarg.com/doc/view/1.0.26.0/linux/vkspec.html

[zMeul]

Just now, Tedny said:

How many dev can do mGPU ? 

if they actually cared!? all of them

[zMeul]

24 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

All true, but giving the community at least the option doesn't hurt or anything.

I mean, if people want to help developing the drivers for their gpu then at least they can.

Maybe it ends up going nowhere but then so be it i guess... If enough people care and it's properly open-source, stuff will happen.

just an example: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mesa-22mar-2017&num=1

[BuckGup]

5 hours ago, tlink said:

wine or vm, performance hit from virtualization is not that big anymore since hardware developed further thus we have more resources at our disposal.

Perf hits from virtualization is still very apparent. Bad example but Minecraft runs off Java. When someone made it run off DX12 or Vulkan, can't remember, on the same hardware they saw an increase of almost 200FPS. That's not something to overlook. VMs have gotten better though.

[zMeul]

1 minute ago, SamStrecker said:

Perf hits from virtualization is still very apparent. Bad example but Minecraft runs off Java. When someone made it run off DX12 or Vulkan, can't remember, on the same hardware they saw an increase of almost 200FPS. That's not something to overlook. VMs have gotten better though.

didn't Minecraft got ported to Visual after MS bought it?!?!

[Sniperfox47]

31 minutes ago, zMeul said:

didn't Minecraft got ported to Visual after MS bought it?!?!

Nope. The Minecraft portable version/Windows 10 version uses Visual, but the Java version is still Java. It just uses its own packaged in JVM now.

[tlink]

48 minutes ago, SamStrecker said:

Perf hits from virtualization is still very apparent. Bad example but Minecraft runs off Java. When someone made it run off DX12 or Vulkan, can't remember, on the same hardware they saw an increase of almost 200FPS. That's not something to overlook. VMs have gotten better though.

Yes but that's java. People can run windows in a VM on linux with 99.9% performance passtrough by using pcie passtrough and VT-X(I think its called that? Its a hardware virtual machine manager, dunno how to translate it). This isn't mainstream because its quite hard to set up from what I understand. and it can greatly differ per game depending on how they function. I'm not saying that the performance hit isn't there with easy solutions, but my point is that older games require less performance and if we move over completely to vulcan with the odd dx12 game then in 2 years it might.be completely doable to VM current gen dx11 games.