@glyph @puppygirlhornypost2 SDL3 GPU, Vulkan, and WebGPU would be attractive prospects if my hardware cutoff were much closer to the present day, but I want to make stuff that works on my 2012 desktop and other random low spec hardware. I think a very smart strategy for game studios that have the ability to adapt is to assume the majority of potential players are not going to have a convenient upgrade path to new hardware for a while and this problem is going to get worse.

@aeva Vulkan works on a lot of older hardware though? As long as you steer clear of RT and stuff.

At Velan we treated 600-series NV cards as minspec and we shipped an engine with Vulkan as the primary backend.

It's an API with lots of problems and I personally won't work with it unless I'm getting paid, but "Vulkan doesn't work yet" does not agree with my experience.

@ataylor I checked and in a sense we are both right. the computer *does* support vulkan, however only via llvmpipe. the GPU appears to be unsupported

here's the vulkan-info output if you are curious: https://gist.github.com/Aeva/974bff1d5de1747756c2cade71a09ed5