Suggestion: Vulkan API

[DumdogsWorld]

When Vulkan is faster, it's faster for a reason. I don't like that reason.

Back in the early 90s, games for Dos didn't have apis for graphics, audio, etc. I started learning C++ many, many years after Dos was considered a thing. Naturally, I was very confused when I looked at an early port of Doom's code for Dos (the code was released for Linux only due to licensing troubles with the audio code).

To blit pixels to the screen, you copied a 320x200 buffer of 8-bit color values to memory address 0xA0000. I was truly amazed.

As for audio, later re-implementations of the audio code revealed that, to play sound, you had to pretty much directly program the Soundblaster or whatever card you were using directly. Yikes.

The result was that all the hardware you ever possibly wanted to support in the future had to have support hard-coded into the program at the time of writing it.

Then came along DirectX and OpenGL, which introduced the idea of a "middle-man".

The program tells DirectX what to do. DirectX tells the driver what to do. The Driver tells the physical hardware what to do. Problem solved.

However, such functionality takes time, like any other form of computations on the planet.

The solution to slow "middle-men"? Make the programmer do all the work. In other words, we've gone full-circle.

Just like how Windows 8 and various menus in Windows 10 resemble Windows 3.1 more than Windows XP/Vista/7. People forget about how things used to be and bring old bad ideas as "good" ideas.

The point is, it's not as simple as simply "switching apis". When switching to Vulkan or other apis that use the same idea (like DirectX 12), you need to rewrite a ton of functionality that is already provided for you in DirectX 11.