Vulkan will never push DirectX to the side. OpenGL is open source and should of put DirectX to the side back in the 1990's.

We get it you hate Microsoft a lot, but without Microsoft even without Apple there would be no competition.

DirectX 12 will dominate Vulkan.

Time will tell.

The internet being what it is I need to see posts like this once in a while to remind me that I'm an adult.

Thank you.

Oh... heh. Kind of funny as I didn't see that in the thread (didn't read the entire thread), and I googled around to see if I could find some other useful things and found that and thought it post worthy. Probably should have scanned the thread more carefully. :)

I completely agree from an ideal theoretical point that a single API for anything could ultimately exist and make competing APIs irrelevant over time. However there are things that can block that from happening too, such as individual entities such as corporations or other organizations rejecting standardization to a common API outright whether it is because they dislike the implementation, dislike the pace with which something is happening (ie: design by commitee) or some other factors. Microsoft and Apple are notorious for designing their own solutions and often completely rejecting open public standards or implementing them in a minimal way for compatibility as an inferior product, or even embracing and extending them incompatibly.

So while it is theoretically possible that a single API could exist for this and be evolved by all players, in order for that to actually happen, all of the players that need such an API have to all agree at some point that the pros of working together on the common standard is not just best for developers using the API and consumers etc. but that it is also the best solution for themselves in the end.

If they don't perceive that, and they think they can do better and have their own solution become popular and also provide some vendor lock-in along the way (such as DirectX does), then they're likely to continue to embrace that approach as it clearly works for them and their own business interests.

As long as Microsoft Windows dominates the desktop PC market as it does now, and Microsoft continues to design and build new versions of their DirectX APIs and possibly provide features in it that are superior to other solutions or even simply to make such functionality exist in their solution before it is available in other solutions, or provide some other value-add selling point to use their APIs, then developers out there will line up to use Microsoft's solution they end up perceiving that it will help them solve problems better than other competing solutions.

There are many many APIs, protocols, standards, data formats out there that this happens with too due to various companies out there ignoring standards (Microsoft and Apple spring highly to mind). The OPUS audio codec, FLAC audio codec, WebM video codec, OpenAL, various web standards such as WebRTC, and many many more.

Folks like you and I and many others see a strong value in open public standards and that single standards provide a great deal of value, but companies like Microsoft may see standards as impeding their progress and goals, or that they give a level playing field for all companies rather than keeping Microsoft in a position where they are dominant.

In some cases public standards have won the war so to speak, and in other cases companies like Microsoft continue to essentially crush public standards even if they happen to be superior in every way to other existing solutions.

In this case all we can do as consumers and developers is keep fighting the fight, and promoting open standards and using them in light of what Microsoft does. That formula has worked at changing things in the past, but it can be a hard ride. :)


I agree and think that the same arguments could be applied in both directions for Direct3D too in that Microsoft can see OpenGL as redundant when they have Direct3D, as well as your statements substituting Microsoft+Direct3D with Apple+Metal.

These companies can go their own way, but ultimately they only succeed in these forced-play games if developers sign up and go along with it. If developers forcibly respond and use something else eventually the proprietary solutions die off. A perfect example of technology that dominated the landscape for a particular problem-space for a long long time which is now quickly falling out of favour and will become extinct in the near future as it is replaced entirely by open public standards and/or other solutions is Adobe Flash. Flash is used for less and less web content online and less likely to be used in new projects as web designers lean towards favouring HTML5 technologies over proprietary solutions like Flash/Java/Silverlight.

It'd be nice to see OpenGL/Vulkan get to that point as well. One thing that I personally think could make that a much higher possibility would be to see Linux usage become much more mainstream than it traditionally has. Not just on all the portable devices and embedded devices, server backends and farms, etc. but right on modern desktops, gaming platforms (like SteamOS) becoming highly popular and it really picking up significantly in head count.

If (or perhaps as) that happens, I think we'll see more and more developers want cross-platform solutions backed by seeing larger percentages of their customers and thus their revenue streams using such solutions and bringing more importance to them.

Right now if a developer gets 90-100% of their sales on the Windows platform they're likely to not consider cross-platform very important for their goals and to favour the Microsoft solution's benefits as better for their purposes. But if 50% of their sales come from Linux and other platforms, they may favour writing code once to run on all platforms as higher than to have to support multiple solutions and may switch to OpenGL/OpenAL etc.

Hopefully that happens eventually, as it's been a long time coming. :)

No doubt about it, that was a major point of what I said above :) Some here tried to paint it as a normal practice, while I disagree and consider it a crooked one.

I agree completely about examples above (Flash and etc.). That stuff was replaced by open standards precisely because competition became strong. Same reason why ActiveX died out (except for South Korea). Imagine ActiveX being widespread now like DirectX is. What a nightmare.

So you are right, in order for Vulkan to advance, Linux usage should grow. But also don't forget that Vulkan will have a very major push on mobile, where DX is simply non existent. The only thorny issue will be Apple's position, which is still not clear. If they'll push Metal, iOS will be locked out. But they might consider that upsetting developers like that doesn't pay them off, and add Vulkan to iOS too eventually.

About FLAC and other open codecs - that's a very sore point. Apple is especially nasty in sabotaging interoperability on the Web, but MS isn't much better in this regard. At least Opus became part of WebRTC and MS formally plans to support it. But they still didn't add Opus to the audio tag. Video is worse, but there is Daala effort on the way, and IETF plans to adopt it. Apple however ignored WebRTC just to annoy everyone, because they can. That's Apple for you.

Competition doesn't have to be on all platforms to be healthy. Windows has a very large part of the gaming market and is open. Consoles and mobile devices are closed for good reason (stability and user experience), and typically use custom API's anyway. (This applies to consoles more than to mobile devices, but the reasoning does hold for mobile.)

As do I. Even if it were common practice it is not best practice IMHO. I've seen the good that can happen both for consumers and companies when they work together on common standards and the greater good rather than try to monopolize and control, so I'll always favour the co-operative approach personally.

You make a very strong point with Vulkan on mobile that I hadn't even thought of yet but which is very highly likely indeed. Mobile is very big and only likely to become bigger over time so it does stand to reason that OpenGL and/or Vulkan are likely to become the defacto standard on such devices at least on those which are powered by non-Microsoft non-Apple OSs.

While Apple is still a big player in mobile, I think they're making a number of decisions that risk isolating themselves and ending up like the Blackberry.


Yep, both companies have bad track records in that regard over time. I was under the impression that Microsoft abandoned any idea of supporting OPUS which really irritated me because Microsoft themselves contributed one of the two sub-codecs contained within OPUS (well, technically Skype developed it, but they're part of M$ now). Have you seen any official discourse on Microsoft's plans with OPUS? I searched a bit and didn't find anything but didn't spend much time at it either. Would be very positive news to even get a hint of OPUS support coming from M$ officially.

Yeah, Apple really doesn't seem to care about WebRTC or OPUS or a dozen or two other technologies and even when they do decide to care they're likely to go write their own incomplete and incompatible mess solution than to reuse existing code. They've done that with Webkit many times. The thing I find particularly strange about their behaviour though is that they act like Microsoft as if they are in a dominant or controlling position in the market when in reality they're not. They're big on mobile but certainly not on the desktop in comparison to Microsoft. They do have some clout but it's the type of clout that can vanish in an instant with one big enough mistake. IMHO, the iPhone/iPad is their only clout in webspace currently.

So they can afford to play that game for a while, but it isn't likely to last too long IMHO, especially if Microsoft weighs in. If both Microsoft and Apple simultaneously avoid some standard either to do their own thing or even something collaborative between each other - they can both pull that off for a time usually. But if Microsoft goes along with an open standard eventually or throws their weight into one from the start - Apple has not got the standalone clout to fight a battle on its own IMHO, not a general one anyway.

There's a catch-22 going on though too with a lot of this tech, and that is that if it isn't being used widely out there then these companies have less reason to concern themselves with it. But if Apple and Microsoft don't add support for something then developers are less inclined to use it because it isn't supported by 1 or both of these companies. At a certain point something has to break the loop either suddenly or more likely gradually. So it's either a slow plodding process over time by all the small players/developers/sites out there, or needs other big players that have a stake and a large say to take a hardline stance and push their own weight around a bit. Companies like Google or Mozilla for example have been effective at pushing some standards out there despite what Microsoft or Apple or Adobe or Sun etc. were doing, and some of that is commonplace now too.

I only hope that Google and Mozilla can put more influence on this stuff going forward.

You could just say "on Android". It's shorter and clearer. :)

And yes, I think Vulkan is likely to make Android consoles more appealing to developers. OpenGL ES is somewhat of a limitation, and having a single standard for desktop and Android that also has low CPU overhead would be good for Android.

Android is certainly dominant on certain mobile devices of course. Android is just a collection of frameworks and technologies sitting on top of Linux though with OpenGL family of APIs and other common APIs used along with it. There are a lot of devices out there with a variety of operating systems that all use the OpenGL family, some of which are Linux based, others BSD based or other UNIX derivatives (such as QNX). Android is the most well known but I don't restrict my thoughts to Android or even Linux, especially when discussing and considering the benefits of using cross-platform APIs.

I agree with what you're saying of course, but I extend the idea far beyond Android to include Mac, iOS, FirefoxOS, WebGL, BSD and derivatives, and any other Linux distributions/derivatives, but any other platforms as well.

Write once, run everywhere is a nice concept to get behind. :)

Here are some sources:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/10/27/bringing-interoperable-real-time-communications-to-the-web.aspx
https://status.modern.ie/webrtcobjectrtcapi

Nothing happened so far however. May be their new post-IE browser will support it. But it still leaves the question of the audio tag unanswered.

You can also vote and express your frustration here: https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/257854-microsoft-edge-developer/suggestions/6513488-ogg-vorbis-and-opus-audio-formats-support-firefox

Oh, thanks for the links! That's great news, I see they directly mentioned OPUS codec support there! This is the first acknowledgement I've seen of Microsoft to consider including support for OPUS for anything at all and I felt for sure they abandoned it before it even became standardized and called OPUS and was baffled all along as to why they would donate what is ultimately an amazing codec to an open standard and then not ever use it. It just seems so unlike Microsoft to contribute to the common good, but baffles the mind for them to not use it after. :)

Perhaps it just turns out that they suck with communication (word play not intended). :)

Yes, while good news to see this, it is a long way from claims and news to being integrated into a shipping product, and Microsoft has a long history of not backporting IE or other products to previous still supported operating systems. So the disappointing news is that even if it shipped in their new browser in Windows 10, it'll be probably 2 to 5 years before Windows 10 and the new browser reach wide enough distribution for web developers to be able to safely use the feature without having to also have fallbacks to give compatibility to Windows XP/7/8.x with older versions of IE.

Kind of like half of the other features built into HTML5 technologies. :) Still, good news to see though. :)

Your weren't wrong in being baffled :) Skype opened up SILK and submitted it to IETF in 2009 - 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SILK#History

And MS bought Skype in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype#Microsoft_acquisition

So it wasn't MS who made the decision to donate the codec for the common good. It was Skype. I guess MS already couldn't back from those obligations, otherwise it wouldn't have been likely to happen altogether.

Right, I knew Skype developed it but thought M$ owned it and contributed it as most things document it that way online. In that case it makes more sense. The version currently in OPUS is a variant of SILK but largely the same, along with the other codec which IIRC is CELT although I'd have to google that up. Together the two sub-codecs are pretty amazing across the board essentially improving on every mainstream codec and some obscure ones in just about every category without pro/con tradeoffs. Almost unheard of in engineering like this. :)

I've tested OPUS locally with music and voice audio and was blown away by how heavily you can compress it until it really starts to break down compared to MP3 and to a lesser extent OGG Vorbis. Never compared it to other codecs though. When it comes to voice communication online though, OPUS is the best codec ever hands down from my personal experience. I use it with Mumble, and Icecast. I believe Teamspeak also uses it although sadly Ventrilo doesn't. The audio quality sounds like the person is sitting beside you in the room, no gobbledy gook.

Yeah, CELT was developed by Xiph and merged with SILK to produce Opus. I encode all my music in Opus, that's why I always try to get FLAC first, to be able to encode it :) Transparency level for Opus is somewhere between 96 and 140 Kbps as far as I know. 160 is for sure an overkill above transparency. So I usually encode it at 140 just to be safe.

See http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm
http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Opus

opusenc --bitrate 140 some.flac some.opus

Finding portable players for Opus is a bit harder, but luckily Rockbox supports it, so I use it with Sansa Fuze Plus. The music industry as usual is crawling at the snail pace (and Apple doesn't help here either). So it might take years before we'll see music sold in Opus. Heck, even in FLAC it's often hard to find :)

Thanks for the kind words. :)
Yep, I used OGG Vorbis almost exclusively for many years as it produces higher quality audio with a smaller file size and saving disk space was a priority for me. I used that on my PC and my portable media player until it broke one day and I never replaced it. When I got my new PC however, I put 6TB or hard disk storage into it and when migrating my music to the machine I pondered how much space it would consume if I re-ripped all of my CDs to FLAC instead. I did the math and it only worked out to about 300GB which was a drop in the ocean so I re-ripped all my music to FLAC and deleted all of the old OGG Vorbis files as I preferred the higher quality audio and conserving disk space was no longer an issue, not to mention that I no longer use portable devices so large file sizes just didn't matter. I'm a musician and frequently transcribe music by ear to sheet music, and doing that with MP3 or OGG or any other lossy format gives terrible results as all of the distortion, noise, and lost data is greatly magnified when slowing down music and/or changing the pitch or tempo algorithmically and applying filters. Sometimes you just cant clearly make out individual notes in a solo or the exact makeup of a chord, but when you use the original audio either right off CD, or WAV or FLAC - it clears up significantly. So that was a major win for me.

Later on OPUS was standardized by the IETF and I experimented with it. The increase in quality was highly noticeable compared to MP3 and OGG Vorbis, but of course nothing can compare quality-wise to original uncompressed audio formats or lossless-compression such as FLAC, so since the disk space usage wasn't a big concern I decided to not bother transcoding my FLAC files to OPUS, however if I ever buy a portable player again I'd likely try to get one that supports OPUS and transcode to that then as it'd give the best quality with the smallest storage footprint.