I've received an e-mail stating that the new Core 2.0, etc. rollout will require having a graphics card that supports Vulkan, and the Rift (my DK2, technically) will no longer function with my severely underspec'd card (which does not support Vulkan). This is not an unexpected turn of events, but it does lead to a few questions:
1) What is the timeline for the 2.0 rollout? Obviously, this impacts how I will move forward on my project, and more specifically, card prices being what they are (and cards about to be announced/released), how I time my upgrade to be the least disruptive.
2) What, specifically, will require Vulkan support? I understand that Desktop/Home may be upgrading to Vulkan as their underlying graphics API, but is there anything in the actual development runtime/SDK that will require that level of support? I know it's been asked before, but being able to run in a headless "development mode" would at least enable folks (me) to sidestep Desktop/Home and launch our projects without running into the new higher requirements barrier. I realize the chances of adding such a thing for this underspec'd scenario are zero, but just maybe one of the dev team says "oh, that's easy!". A guy can dream!
With regards to the rollout timeline, I understand that things might be a bit fluid and not wanting to put an "official" stake in the ground. That said, it would be highly disruptive (for me) for it to suddenly appear and for my development to come screeching to a halt. In lieu of an official date, something along the lines of "no sooner than" would be very helpful (as well as some sort of notification ahead of time when 2.0 is soon to roll out). Further, if the old (current) experience was still available as a fallback for some limited amount of time after the 2.0 rollout that would help mitigate disruption.
Regarding Dash and Vulkan, I presume that Dash requires a Vulkan-capable card to function, period (i.e.; it's built on top of Vulkan). More specifically, it's not a matter of needing Vulkan only to do in-app dash composition (which wouldn't work for me anyway, as I'm on Windows 7)? Obviously, any existing VR app would not support in-app dash and would default to the "empty room" dash experience, but presumably that still requires Vulkan support as that is still the new 2.0 Dash (meaning existing apps will cease to function on non-Vulkan supported cards).
