“We are extremely pleased at the industry’s rapid execution on the Vulkan API initiative. Due to Vulkan’s cross platform availability, high performance and healthy open source ecosystem, we expect to see rapid uptake by software developers, far exceeding the adoption of similar APIs which are limited to specific operating systems,” Gabe Newell, co-founder and managing director, Valve.
The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies, announces the immediate availability of the Vulkan 1.0 royalty-free, open standard API specification. Vulkan provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs used in a wide variety of devices from PCs and consoles to mobile phones and embedded platforms. This ground-up design, complementing the OpenGLand OpenGL ES 3D APIs, provides applications direct control over GPU acceleration for maximized performance and predictability with minimized CPU overhead and efficient multi-threaded performance. Multiple Vulkan 1.0 hardware drivers and SDKs are available immediately for developers to begin creating Vulkan applications and engines. Vulkan is the result of 18 months in an intense collaboration between leading hardware, game engine and platform vendors, built on significant contributions from multiple Khronos members. Vulkan is designed for portability across multiple platforms with desktop and mobile GPU architectures. Vulkan is available on multiple versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 7 to Windows 10, and has been adopted as a native rendering and compute API by platforms including Linux, SteamOS, Tizen and Android
Right now in more simpler terms and why does it matter and why should you care.
Vulkan is great for developers. It reduces porting costs and opens up new market opportunities for applications across multiple platforms. It is the first new generation, low-level API that is cross platform. This allows developers to create applications for a variety of PC, mobile and embedded devices using diverse operating systems. Like OpenGL, Vulkan is an open, royalty-free standard available for any platform to adopt.
“Vulkan in just one sentence? The endless war between performance and portability is finally over!” Dean Sekulic graphics engine specialist at Croteam
It minimizes driver overhead for optimal graphics and compute performance and provides the direct GPU control demanded by sophisticated game engines, middleware and applications. Simpler, more predictable drivers provide performance and functional portability across a wide range of implementations. A key advantage of Vulkan over OpenGL is the ability to generate GPU work in parallel using many CPU cores, making Vulkan particularly useful for CPU-bound developers, eliminating a bottleneck in applications from diverse domains including games and computer-aided design.
For gamers, Vulkan’s low latency and high-efficiency lets developers add more details and more special effects to their games, while still maintaining great performance. Because a Vulkan driver is thinner with less overhead, application developers will get fewer performance surprises. This translates to smoother, more fluid experiences.
Both AMD and Nvidia are shipping drivers for their GPUs
AMD will be releasing a beta version of our Vulkan API-enabled Radeon Software driver. This new driver, in-concert with Radeon graphics hardware, enables PC game developers to remove historical software bottlenecks which will unleash new, rich visual gaming experiences. As a complement to OpenGL, descended from AMD’s Mantle, Vulkan also exposes GPU hardware features not ordinarily accessible through OpenGL, and uniquely supports Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Android, and Linux. With the consortium of hardware and software companies that make up the Khronos Group, AMD is looking forward to the delivering the latest and greatest game rendering technologies to millions of users and many operating systems simultaneously:
“The release of the Vulkan 1.0 specification is a huge step forward for developers. The Vulkan API, which was derived from Mantle, will bring the benefits of low-overhead high-performance Graphics API to the benefit of cross-platform and cross-vendor targeted applications.The promotion of open and scalable technologies continues to be the focus at AMD, as a pioneer in the low-overhead API space. As a member of the Khronos™ Group, AMD is proud to collaborate with hardware and software industry leaders to develop the Vulkan API to ignite the next evolution in PC game development.” Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD.
NVIDIA is also shipping fully-conformant Vulkan drivers for all GeForce boards based on Kepler or Maxwell GPUs running Windows (Windows 7 or later) or Linux.
“Vulkan does not replace traditional APIs, but it provides another choice for developers. In the right hands, Vulkan’s multi-threading and explicit resource management can enable a new class of smooth, high-performance engines and applications.” Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president at NVIDIA
GeForce gamers will be the first to play the Vulkan version of The Talos Principle, a puzzle game from Croteam that also shipped. For professional application developers using Quadro: Nvidia’s Vulkan and OpenGL drivers use an integrated binary architecture that enables the use of GLSL shaders in Vulkan. Developers also have the flexibility to continue using OpenGL or plan a smooth transition from OpenGL to Vulkan to take advantage of Vulkan’s new capabilities. For example, Vulkan’s multi-threaded architecture can enable multiple CPU cores to prepare massive amounts of data for the GPU faster than before. For design and digital content creation applications, this means enhanced interactivity with large models.
For mobile developers using Tegra: We’re making Vulkan available to developers shortly for both Android and Linux. Vulkan will ship alongside OpenGL ES as a core API in a future version of Android. This means that standard Android will have a state-of-the-art API with integrated graphics and compute, ultimately unleashing the GPU in Tegra for cutting-edge vision and compute applications, as well as awesome gaming graphics. Developers can use Vulkan on NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV and SHIELD tablets for Android coding, and Jetson for embedded Linux development.
