HARD TECHNOLOGY GROUP HTG NEWS TIPS

At GDC 2017, in San Francisco during February, Khronos™ released several new Vulkan® extensions for cross-platform Virtual Reality rendering and multiple GPU access. This functionality has been initially released as KHX extensions to enable feedback from the developer community before being incorporated into final specifications. One key question that we have been asked since GDC is whether the Vulkan multi-GPU functionality is specifically tied to ship only on Windows 10. The good news is that the Vulkan multi-GPU specification is very definitely NOT tied to Windows 10. It is possible to implement the Vulkan multi-GPU extension on any desktop OS including Windows 7, 8.X and 10 and Linux. Some of the Khronos GDC presentations mentioned that for Vulkan multi-GPU functionality, Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) must be in Linked Display Adapter (LDA) mode. That was not a very clear statement that has caused some confusion. And so it is worth clarifying that: The use ...

Developer ‘xerpi’ who is probably most well-known for libVita2D has started dabbling around with libgxm! Libgxm is the Vita’s 3D graphics API. What does this mean? In layman’s terms, it means that now, homebrew will be able to access the GPU thus we can expect to see ports of beefier software someday. This means that the days of having everything rendered by software may finally come to an end. Hardware acceleration could bring the Vita various emulators (such as the N64 and maybe Dreamcast) and more demanding homebrew ports/titles. libGXM is quite a complex API according to ‘Xerpi’ so it’s important that everyone does their best at being patient. Xerpi has said, on Reddit, that he plans to help libretro which means that we could eventually see an N64 emulator up and running. Awesome! Can I see what libGXM can do? Actually, you can! Xerpi has kindly provided a demo VPK to show what libGXM can actually do! This makes it the 2nd Vita 3D homebrew after Yifan’s cube de...