Vulkan puede suponer la hegemonía de los drivers libres frente a los privativos.

The Source 2 Vulkan back-end would be enhanced to utilize these features with integration and debugging being done by driver and engine developers working closely together. This team had minimal GPU debugging tools, nominal validation layers and a Vulkan API that was being defined and refined simultaneously with development. Their success hinged on two key elements: their experience with the 3D graphics pipeline and full access to the Vulkan driver source code.

Enabling Valve’s team of Source 2 developers full access to the source code in the Vulkan sample driver made this development possible. Simply giving them a black box to figure out how to use the evolving Vulkan API would not have yielded the resulting GDC demo in such a short period of time. It was encouraging to see the benefits of providing driver source code to engine developers. The engine developers do not know the driver and hardware architecture like the driver team does but being able to step across the Vulkan interface in the debugger enabled the team to see what the driver was doing with the workload and more often than not isolate an issue in either their back-end, or the driver, or both. The driver and game engine teams worked to interpret challenges in their respective areas of expertise and communicate clearly to the other side what was needed. We attribute the productivity realized while tracking down the most difficult issues to having a strong team of 3D graphics experts with full visibility of the source code on either side of the Vulkan interface