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As someone from game development, not supporting Vulkan on Android and sticking with OpenGL ES instead is a safer bet. There is always some device(s) that bug out on Vulkan badly. Nobody wants to sit and find workarounds for that obscure vendor.

by tadfisher7 hours ago|

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Bizarre take. Notice how that WebGPU is an AndroidX library? That means WebGPU API support is built into apps via that library and runs on top of the system's Vulkan or OpenGL ES API.

Do you work for Google or an Android OEM? If not, you have no basis to make the claim that Android will cease updating Vulkan API support.

by pjmlp6 hours ago|

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I did not do such claim.

WebGPU on Android runs on top of Vulkan.

If you knew about 3D programming on Android, you would know that there are ongoing efforts to have only Vulkan, with OpenGL ES on top.

However Java and Kotlin devs refuse to bother with the NDK for Vulkan, and keep reaching for OpenGL ES instead.

Please refer to Google talks on Vulkanised conferences.

by mirsadm2 hours ago|

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Vulkan is awful to work with and the drivers are buggy. Google's own phones are the worst for it. I have an app with a compute only vulkan pipeline and on the Google Pixel 10 the whole screen becomes corrupted with some fairly basic shaders.

by torginus4 hours ago|

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Is it possible to support OpenGL on top of Vulkan well? It has been pointed out that Vulkan requires you to completely freeze and compile a graphics pipeline before using it, while OpenGL's state machine is more flexible, and the underlying hardware is somewhat more amenable to these state transitions at runtime, than the Vulkan API would suggest.

Don't these compatibility layers run into issues with constant pipeline recompilation related performance issues, when emulating OpenGL?

by pjmlp2 hours ago|

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It is no different from running DirectX on Vulkan, DirectX or Vulkan on Metal.

It works, kind of.

by flohofwoe6 hours ago|

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> ...efforts to have only Vulkan, with OpenGL ES on top...

Ok this made me laugh given that Vulkan support on Android is so bad that WebGPU needs a fallback mode to GLES ;)

https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/4266

by pjmlp6 hours ago|

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Agreed, which is Google's motivation for doing that.

The argument being that if Android only does Vulkan, that OEMs will be forced to care about their drivers.

There are talks done by Google on this, either Vulkanised, Google IO, or GDC, can't remember now the exact one.

by kllrnohj7 hours ago|

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> Addiitionally most of these fixes aren't coming into Android

The fuck are you talking about? Of course they'll come to Android

by pjmlp6 hours ago|

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Thanks for showing the audience the lack of experience with Vulkan drivers on Android.