Announced today (February 18) by Mojang developers, this is a big change for such a game and will take time – but it will be worth it in the end so they can take advantage of all the modern features available for both visual improvements and better performance.
They explicitly note that their aim is to “keep Minecraft: Java Edition playable for almost any PC-operating system, including macOS and Linux”. For the macOS side of things, they’ll use a translation layer since Apple doesn’t support Vulkan directly (they’ve created their own API with Metal).
For modders, he is suggesting that they start preparing to move away from OpenGL
The switch from OpenGL to Vulkan will impact mods that currently use OpenGL for rendering, and we anticipate that it will take more effort for modders to update from OpenGL to Vulkan than it does for you to update for each of our releases.
To start, we recommend our modding community to move away from the use of OpenGL. We encourage authors to try to reuse internal rendering APIs as much as possible to make this transition as smooth as possible. If that’s not enough for your needs, come and talk to us!
This means that players on really old devices that don’t support Vulkan will be left out, but Vulkan has been supported by going back to something pretty Old GPU. However, you have time, because they will be launching Vulkan with OpenGL in a snapshot (development release) “sometime in the summer”. You’ll be able to toggle between them during the trial period until Mojang believes it’s ready. OpenGL will eventually be removed completely once we are happy with performance and stability.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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