The Khronos Group has added a couple of new partners from China: The China Academy of Information and Communication Technology (CAICT) and Tencent. The former is a research institute for China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which should significantly help adoption of open standards across several Chinese companies. The latter is a huge Chinese telecom with huge investments in software and hardware; for instance, they own about 40% of Epic Games, makers of Unreal Engine.
The goal of this is to gain a huge amount of conformant software using these APIs. China is a huge market in several ways; not only would this push the technology into several products and middleware, but it should also help contribute back from China to the international standards from The Khronos Group. If there’s something that could be done to help an implementation become conformant, then that line of communication should be open rather than just encouraging them to fork-away a semi-but-not-quite-compliant standard, which apparently was an issue with OpenCL.
You can read the official press release at their website.
The Chinese will get Vulkan
The Chinese will get Vulkan working under windows 7/8.1 and Linux and it’s Windows 10 that is hurting adoption of DX12 more than it is the games makers.
When so many users are remaining on windows 7 and even 8.1(with some classic windows 7 start menu software) because of all that Windows 10 forcing of updates, adware, and other such intrusive software from Microsoft/Partners. So it’s more Microsoft’s fault than the games developers.
Games developers what to target the OSs/OS versions that have the largest market share so they have to still target DX11 also in addition to developing for DX12, and many games makers are starting to target Vulkan because it runs cross OS platform and cross OS version.
Vulkan Runs on PCs/Laptops/Tablets/Phones and that’s more billions of devices than will never see DX12 and its lock-in under Only Windows 10.
Samsumg’s is currently developing a Smartphone dock with the user option of running a Full Linux OS Distro via the phone docked in that docking device and that will be running the Vulkan graphics API also.
It’s too late to stop The Khronos Group and its members from making Vulkan the Graphics standard that the world looks to for an open standards to the metal graphics option and it will not be until 2023(Win 8.1) before the last of the NON Windows 10 OS versions is completely lagacy with no standard non-paid support of any kind remaining.
Windows 7 looks to be the new XP as there will still be government agencies and enterprises/others that will be using windows 7 past 2020, just like Windows XP, and windows 7/8.1 users can also use Vulkan.