#Why Vulcan?

16 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

lapis peak
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Hi all. First of all thank you for making this awesome engine. The only thing I'm very confused is why Vulcan is used here?

I am creating a game for more than 5 years now. It's probably the project of my life so it's highly important for me. I was working on Unity but after their licenses tricks I decided to move to Godot 4.

I have moved almost 80% of my almost finished game already. Right now I'm outside of my home and I wanted to work on a laptop on my project. But I can't, it doesn't work because of Vulcan. Workaroud with OpenGl doesn't work too.
I have tried to use Angle with Godot but without a success. My game is 2D only.

I don't want to be rude but well... just take a look at below comparison.

Games that works on my laptop:

  • Age of Empires 1,2,3 DE
  • Disciples 2,3
  • Heroes of the Storm
  • Starcraft 2
  • Broforce, Battle for Wesnoth, Blazing Beaks, Alien Swarm and many other small games
  • Deep Rock Galactic
  • Northgard
  • Helldivers
  • Armikrog
  • Old Unity version of my game

Games that don't work on my laptop:

  • Godot 4 engine and my game on it

Does 2D Godot 4 really need to use Vulcan?

chilly canopy
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Hey, you should be able to still use the Compatibility renderer in Godot 4.

If this isn't viable for you, the Godot 3 version still exists and receives LTS updates.

Here's a blog post about "Status of the OpenGL 3 renderer" which might be interesting - https://godotengine.org/article/status-of-opengl-renderer/

And here is the blog post with some of the reasoning around using Vulkan in Godot 4: https://godotengine.org/article/about-godot4-vulkan-gles3-and-gles2/

Hope this helps!

Godot Engine
Status of the OpenGL 3 renderer

Godot 4.0 will ship with an OpenGL-based renderer designed for older and low-end devices, but it won't be totally feature-complete at the time 4.0 is released.

Godot Engine
About Godot 4, Vulkan, GLES3 and GLES2

As the alpha of Godot 4.0 comes closer and closer, we wanted to spend some words to clarify the direction that Godot 4 has taken in regard of rendering back-ends.

lapis peak
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Finally it works but I'm not sure how or why 😄
I used OpenGl just like it was suggested on the Internet:

".\Godot_v4.1.1-stable_mono_win64_console.exe" --rendering-driver opengl3

and used Compatibility renderer.... I'm almost sure it didn't work first time I tried it :/ It was failing with saving my Scenes (it crashed with scene .tmp file with some part of it with incomplete <node ). It just worked now 🙂

I'm confused but happy.

Thank you @chilly canopy for a quick answer, help and links with instructions. I will read that and I hope I will learn something how it actually works and how I will be able to help my future players if they will have similar problem 🙂 Cheers!

cloud gulch
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vulkan is future proof, it's much closer to the metal of what GPUs actually do internally than openGL, if godot wasn't using it then everyone would complain "why not vulkan"

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(that was basically the case for godot 3)

lapis peak
cloud gulch
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yeah 😄

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every second person wants to make a game with the graphics and performance of the newest AAA game, if that's not your goal it's a perfectly valid choice to just use an older engine or such
but yeah happy that compatibility mode does work

lapis peak
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at this point I have a little knowlegde about it, I have 2 PCs and 1 laptop and only 1 my PC is a modern one 😄 On this one Godot 4 works perfectly, but older machines fail because of Vulcan and for some reason I couldn't run it with OpenGl... but suddenly it works now. Maybe I fixed something in my project with a "dumb luck" or maybe my first try with compatability and OpenGl was wrong 😄

lapis peak
cloud gulch
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and tilemap

lapis peak
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so far I'm very happy with Godot engine 🙂 Particle effects and lighting looks very cool. I'm a little worried that players will complain the game doesn't work on their machines (because of Vulcan) so I have to learn about it more and have some tips for them

cloud gulch
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so i'm happy they didn't drop opengl support completely, though i absolutely understand the need for a certain minimum API versions and hardware, it's untenable to support the whole range of computers forever, at some point it becomes a spagehetti of workarounds, there's always someone with an even older PC 😄

lapis peak
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I hope the game will be great, people will like it and it will earn some money that I can share a profit with Godot creators 🙂 Because the work done for this engine is just awesome