(Cross-posted from last-night's News)

VO 1.8.543 includes (tonight):
- Performance and stability improvements to the Vulkan GKGL driver for Windows.
- Added V-Sync, Antialiasing, and Anisotropic settings to the Vulkan driver.

VO 1.8.542.1 included (last week):
- Fixed issue with "Keystroke Receiving" request on the Mac version.

VO 1.8.542
- The "/report" command now visually responds with an error message, instead of nothing, if the character name was wrong or the reported player hasn't said anything since the reporter logged in.
- Reduced network traffic when rapidly scanning through objects in the sector.
- Minor technical tweaks and updates for improved compliance with the Mac Store

VO 1.8.541.2
- Fixed issues with glow and ice effects on Mac OpenGL 4 and Reference drivers.

Last week we completed a number of final bugfixes on the Mac version, and finished with updating the install in the actual Apple Store. Please let us know (via the Bugs forum) if you find any new problems on the Mac. As far as we know, it should be pretty solid at this point.

This latest update is to the Windows Vulkan driver, which is definitively the highest performing way of running Vendetta Online on a PC. We've kept the DirectX 11 driver as the "install default" for some time, but now we're looking at migrating that to a "fallback" status for older hardware, and making Vulkan the default API for new installs (assuming Vulkan support is detected on startup).

Stabilizing the Vulkan renderer opens the door to a lot of potential graphical improvements, such as those supported by recent, higher-end GPUs. This is not to say that a high-end GPU is going to become a requirement, simply that we have the ability to add support for next-generation features which would be otherwise impossible.

If you have a somewhat-recent graphics processor (GPU) that supports Vulkan on Windows, we encourage you to switch over and try running on that, instead of the DX11 default, and let us know if you run into any problems (also via the Bugs forum). As of this most-recent version, it should be quite stable, and as I mentioned before, is considerably faster than the DX11 renderer.

Aside from NVIDIA and AMD, even Intel Iris integrated GPUs do support Vulkan, although you will want to make sure you download the latest drivers for your particular hardware.

If you have a higher-refresh gaming monitor that supports Freesync or G-sync, we recommend enabling vsync, to give you a smooth experience without frame-tearing artifacts.

That's all for now, everyone, have a great weekend!

Noice updates. On a side note as it mentions performance and the though of vulkan being the main driver. Would vulkan be used on mobile as well? I have noticed that a lot of benchmarks i found have vulkan at a lower score on mobile performance wise tho might be interesting.

Eventually it'll be used on mobile as well. No, I don't think Vulkan is any slower than ES on mobile. Whether you see lower scores there, on some random benchmark test, is not a meaningful measure of the performance of the API. The companies who make the mobile chips, like Qualcomm and such, generally believe Vulkan to be their highest-performance API.

But, Vulkan is more complicated to use than ES, and easier to screw up from a performance standpoint. It's a very low-level API (meaning more like "hardware access" and the developer has to manage things themselves, instead of it being managed "for them" by a GPU-driver). This is one common reason why one might see an undesired tradeoff on a given Vulkan implementation, the complexity can make it more difficult to use properly.

Our game tends to be heavily GPU-limited on mobile, and that will probably continue to be the case with Vulkan. So, I don't really expect it to be any faster, either, but it'll likely be easier for us to manage. Eventually it'll be faster on mobile as well, and it does give more flexibility for the future.

Having just done 3dmark tests i noticed ES scores much higher on graphics tests then what vulkan gives looking around ~26% better performance this being done on a tab s5e.
Also having run the same test "slingshot extreme" running ES 3.1 and vulkan on my samsung tab s7 with ES getting a score of a average of 7,818 and vulkan getting a average of 5618 having ES being a 32.7% better performance. Just to add it was testing ES 3.1 v2.4 and vulkan v3.1

Can vulkan with optimisation really deliver same or better performance? And having most newer devices supporting it is it worth the development time considering most buget and older devices dont support it?

Now im aware on laptop and desktop performance can be obtained from vulkan but having multiple drivers needing support and considering gpu performance being a bottleneck is it worth it?
Im not saying im against it, i would like to see vulkan support, tho from a developer point of view id like to see how it could benefit if performance scores are way lower then ES.

Can vulkan with optimisation really deliver same or better performance?

Yes. See what I wrote above. Don't read too much into 3dmark. That's a test of 3dmark, not a test of Vulkan.

Thanks for the Vulkan driver Incarnate!

Hey, glad it's working well for you :).