Posted by Martin on Apr 01, 2023; 10:29am
URL: https://forum.jogamp.org/Brainstorming-Vulkan-Integration-tp4042335p4042369.html

Hi Sven,

I am not sure Vulkan support is worth the effort. It is probably a tedious task and you can't do other JOGL improvements while doing this.

Vulkan has mainly been pulled by the gaming industry which performance requirements led toward more specialized and fine grained interface to the rendering hardware. The result is that Vulkan API is very complex and verbose.

I do not know video games written in Java. I think the Java ecosystem relating to 3D rendering is mainly in the field of scientific visualization. This area does not require high performance. Software vendor using Java and JOGL mainly want to have descent performance and ability to build 3D visualization software with little effort (java to write once/run everywhere, JOGL to avoid diving in CGL/WGL/GLX). I fear that the current users of JOGL would not want to learn and use Vulkan, unless OpenGL disappear from earth - but I think this won't happen.  

If enabling Vulkan is consider valuable, it would probably not be enough per se. My understanding is that Vulkan and Metal are very similar but that Vulkan does not exists on macOS. So if JOGL supports Vulkan, it should support Metal at the same time.

What do you think?