Sandbox Logo
02 February 2024

Vulkan

We've finally switched to Vulkan - and everything's the same
matt
Programmer
UK
chattwitter
Why Vulkan?
We plan to support s&box over multiple decades, so we want to launch on a modern graphics API and have no baggage when it comes to supporting new GPU features.

We don't want to end up in a position where we have 4 different render pipelines.

Source 2 already has Vulkan support. Valve sponsor and contribute to Vulkan.
And they've been willing and kind enough to keep sharing improvements to their Vulkan render system with us.
Performance
This isn't going to magically make the game look or perform better by itself.

But we gain access to a new set of APIs to help us further push for more performance with GPU driven rendering.
Supported Hardware
Supported hardware remains the same, our minimum target is really anything from the last decade, rather than something that struggles to run HL2:
  • Nvidia Geforce GTX 900 Series (2014)
  • AMD Radeon 300 Series (2015)
Issues
We know it's not going to be perfect right away, there's such a huge variety of hardware we simply can't test for it all.

As always if you have any issues, let us know, your feedback is invaluable.
Shader Compilation
For DX11 we were using Microsoft's "FXC" compiler - every engine hates it; it's extremely slow, has many weird quirks & doesn't support modern GPU features.

To compile Vulkan shaders we're using Microsoft's "DXC" compiler, which can compile HLSL for both DX12 and Vulkan.

It's about 10x faster (which is great for our Shader Graph) and supports HLSL 2021.
Come Help Us
We're a relatively small team at the moment, and could do with some more graphics programmers.

Our goal isn't to push something as pretty as Unreal, or as complicated as Unity.
We want to deliver a simple and performant renderer, making use of modern Forward+ and GPU driven rendering techniques.

If those words mean anything to you, please post your application here.