At this year’s SIGGRAPH event, Valve’s Dan Ginsburg talked a bit about the new upcoming APIs that will offer low-level access to the GPU and CPU, thus improving performance in games, DirectX 12 and Vulkan.

Dan has been working for Valve on Vulkan since its inception and claimed (1:40:01 in the video at the end of the article) that there is really not much reason for developers to ever create a DX12 back end for their games, and stated that Vulkan is far superior than in DX12 in various areas.

“Unless you are aggressive enough to be shipping a DX12 game this year, I would argue that there is really not much reason to ever create a DX12 back end for your game. And the reason for that is that Vulkan will cover you on Windows 10 on the same class of hardware and so much more from all these other platforms and IHVs that we’ve heard from. Metal is single platform, single vendor, and Vulkan… we are gonna have support for not only Windows 10 but Windows 7, Windows 8 and Linux.”

Dan concluded that all IHVs are making great progress on drivers, believes that we’ll super rapid adaption, that Vulkan is the best choice for next-generation titles, and that he’s really proud of the current state of the API.

Do note that Dan is working on Vulkan and has every right to promote this particular API. And while we do have to agree that Vulkan seems a better choice for developers since it’s not restricted to one specific OS, it’s still behind as more and more developers announce support for DX12.

In the following video, you can also take a glimpse at the first Vulkan benchmark called Alien Beam (1:45:47).

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/valves-dan-ginsburg-not-much-reason-to-ever-create-a-dx12-back-end-for-your-game-praises-vulkan/

Isn't the PS4 rumoured to be getting Vulkan?

Yeah,  the PS4 should support Vulkan. Or at least it could fairly easily it seems.

http://gamingbolt.com/ps4-should-support-vulkan-ps4s-api-not-completely-native-for-current-gen-yet-brad-wardell

Yeah, I just came back to post that very link.

Of course Valve prefers to support Vulkan to DX12, as SteamOS cannot use DirectX. It needs a game which can do both API for a direct comparision to see how much of this actually holds true, though.

I find the image funny as this is true for 2 decades already (exept for Metal, which is a newcomer) but OpenGL never could really get off the ground for gaming. One reason being much slower feature updates than with DirectX, which left the API in the dust when it caming to gaming purposes.

hmmm trusting the opinion of Valve on which is the better API would be like asking Nvidia for an objective opinion about which is the better Graphics Card maker. We saw a lot of the exact same claims over the years for OpenGL, the reality was MS was better at providing consistent performance with ongoing upgrades, I imagine part of the reason for that is they don't have to write DirectX to support a variety of incompatible OS's. In the end gamers and developers want consistency, performance and some assurance that they aren't going to have the rug pulled out from under them in 6 months time (AKA the steambox delays)

Still waiting on STEAM Machine to take over the living room.

This is a stretch but Valve talks about Vulcan, previous articles suggest the PS4 should get Vulcan and Naughty Dog Tweet to Valve asking if they can develop Half Life 3.

No way in hell I'm getting Windows 10, so that leave's me cheering for Vulkan. Making it for PS4 would mean a lot as well.

your loss, you can instead wait around for a steambox, they are set to be released in 2014 2015 2016    maybe. valve have an incredibly unreliable history when it comes to time lines, I would hate to be tied to them for anything.