Valve’s Dan Ginsburg Claims Vulkan is Better than DirectX 12

Valve developer Dan Ginsburg spoke at length regarding the two upcoming APIs, DirectX 12 and Vulkan, during this year’s SIGGRAPH event. While both are much anticipated, offering low-level access to a PC’s GPU and CPU, Ginsburg claims that there is no reason to create a DX12 back-end for games, and that Vulkan is the superior API.

Ginsburg said:

“Unless you are aggressive enough to be shipping a DX12 game this year, I would argue that there is really not much reason to ever create a DX12 back end for your game. And the reason for that is that Vulkan will cover you on Windows 10 on the same class of hardware and so much more from all these other platforms and IHVs that we’ve heard from. Metal is single platform, single vendor, and Vulkan… we are gonna have support for not only Windows 10 but Windows 7, Windows 8 and Linux.”

It must be noted that Ginsburg is working on the Khonos Group’s Vulkan API, and so may have a vested interest in its success. Conversely, he is also in a fine position to extol the virtues of Vulkan, having worked so closely on it.

Thank you Dark Side of Gaming for providing us with this information.