17 Facts About Vulkan

Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform API, open standard for 3D graphics and computing.

Vulkan is intended to offer higher performance and more efficient CPU and GPU usage compared to older OpenGL and Direct3D 11 APIs.

Vulkan 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 is derived from and built upon components of AMD's Mantle API, which was donated by AMD to Khronos with the intent of giving Khronos a foundation on which to begin developing a low-level API that they could standardize across the industry.

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

Vulkan is intended to provide a variety of advantages over other APIs as well as its predecessor, OpenGL.

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

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

Vulkan provides a single API for both desktop and mobile graphics devices, whereas previously these were split between OpenGL and OpenGL ES respectively.

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

In contrast, Vulkan 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 would be getting support for automatic multi-GPU features, similar to what is offered by Direct3D 12.

Vulkan was formally named and announced at Game Developers Conference 2015, although speculation and rumors centered around a new API existed beforehand and referred to it as "glNext".

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