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Can you give us a general status update on Vulkan: where we're at, where we're going, how it's going?

TL;DRVulkan, the back end of the new Gen12 renderer, lags slightly behind Gen12 and is roughly 60–75% complete; once Gen12 is done they expect Vulkan to follow soon after.

Ali BrownDirector of Graphics Engineering

Vulkan is obviously going to be the back end of our new renderer, which we've called Gen12. And the Vulkan side of it is going pretty well. But ultimately, it's limited by our progress on the Gen12 renderer. Until that's complete, Vulkan can't be complete. So at the moment, as we've been developing the Gen12 renderer, Vulkan's always been playing catch-up, basically. As soon as something works in the new renderer, we look at Vulkan, make sure it works, and then bring it back up to speed. So it just lags ever so slightly behind. So in terms of features for the Vulkan renderer, we're probably about 75%, something like that, of that being completed. But probably slightly less when you start factoring in performance, because Vulkan will perform slightly differently to DirectX, which we were using in the past. Probably a naive first version we run internally might not be quite as fast, but obviously we don't want to ship that to you. We want to ship the faster version. So probably somewhere between 60% and 75%, depending on how much performance work there is. A lot of that has been done. Like I said, it's playing catch-up to Gen12, and Gen12 is progressing very well now. It's not far off, and once we finish the Gen12 aspect, we'll throw a bunch of bodies on the Vulkan side, and that will, I think, very quickly [catch up]. So we're not expecting a big difference between the Gen12 release and then the Vulkan release very soon after.

Star Citizen Live›Graphics Engineering Q&A·
Published on this date.4 Feb 2022