12 Facts About Vulkan API

Vulkan API was first announced by the non-profit Khronos Group at GDC 2015.

The Vulkan API was initially referred to as the "next generation OpenGL initiative", or "OpenGL next" by Khronos, but use of those names was discontinued when Vulkan was announced.

Vulkan API is not backwards compatible with OpenGL, although there are certain projects that implement OpenGL as a layer on top of Vulkan API, such as Google's ANGLE and Mesa's Zink.

Vulkan API offers lower overhead, more direct control over the GPU, and lower CPU usage.

The overall concept and feature set of Vulkan API is similar to concepts seen in Mantle and later adopted by Microsoft with Direct3D 12 and Apple with Metal.

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Vulkan API reduces load on CPUs through the use of batching and other low-level optimizations, therefore reducing CPU workloads and leaving the CPU free to do more computation or rendering than would otherwise be possible.

Vulkan API offers improved scalability on multi-core CPUs due to the modernized threading architecture.

In contrast, Vulkan API drivers are supposed to ingest shaders already translated into an intermediate binary format called SPIR-V, analogous to the binary format that HLSL shaders are compiled into in Direct3D.

At SIGGRAPH 2016, Khronos announced that Vulkan API would be getting support for automatic multi-GPU features, similar to what is offered by Direct3D 12.

Multi-GPU support included in-Vulkan API removes the need for SLI or Crossfire which requires graphics cards to be of the same model.

On February 26,2018, Khronos Group announced that the Vulkan API became available to all on macOS and iOS through the MoltenVK library, which enables Vulkan to run on top of Metal.

On Windows, Vulkan API is supported by the newer lines of hardware like Intel Skylake and higher, AMD GCN 2.