Valve Developed an Open-Source Intel Vulkan GPU Driver For Linux

Posted by timothy on Thursday March 5, 2015 @06:40AM from the good-news-for-a-change dept.

An anonymous reader writes For those wondering when the first graphics driver for the new Khronos Vulkan API will materialize and for what hardware, it looks like the first driver could very well be for Intel graphics and it might not be too far away. It turns out Valve developed an Intel Linux Vulkan driver to help ISVs bootstrap their new Vulkan code, with Valve planning to open-source this driver code. This is yet another reason to love Valve, especially as Intel graphics on Linux don't even support OpenGL 4 yet.

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Easier to support than OpenGL 4.x by Blaskowicz · 2015-03-05 07:16 · Score: 5, Interesting

This comes out as a very good point for using Vulkan (which I thought would be called something like OpenGL 5.0, but well)
It's a nice suprise, though the downside may be the need for recent hardware. Article leaves out the minimum hardware feature level : is it restricted to Haswell and up? (that's the plan for DirectX 12). What is the status for Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and even Bay Trail Atom graphics : that is pretty important given the installed base.