Khronos Delays Vulkan Graphics API To 2016 Release (phoronix.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The Khronos Group has announced that the Vulkan specification is complete and undergoing legal review and final polishing, but it means that Vulkan will not be published this year. Khronos reports that the Vulkan 1.0 specification will be published when the first conformant implementations are confirmed. Phoronix received some more details about the state of Vulkan in that there were a lot of changes since GDC and " the gating factor for release will be availability of product-quality implementations."

Comments

Re:What the fuck is "Vulkan"?

[beelsebob]

It's a graphics API that gives you lower level access to the GPU.

There two big improvements from OpenGL that all of these APIs (D3D 12, Metal, Mantle, Vulkan, ...) are trying to achieve (plus a bunch of smaller ones)
1) Give complete control over thread safety in accessing memory on the GPU, rather than having the API be thread safe. This lets game developers make informed decisions like "I know that frame n-2, and n-1 use part of this texture, but not all of it, during work for frame n, I can update the part they're not accessing with no thread safety primitives". That can shave a whole millisecond off a frame layout time per contended lock on some platforms. When you're trying to lay out in 8 or 16 milliseconds, that's really important.
2) Specify more information up front, allowing earlier verification, and baking of states. OpenGL drivers do not know in what states (what vertex formats, what blend modes, what shaders etc) are going to be used when draw calls come in. That means that they need to verify the state, and recompile shaders at the last second (on many architectures, changing blend mode requires at least a re-run of the back end of the shader compiler for example). This can be mitigated by caching, but ultimately it doesn't work as well as it could. The new APIs let developers specify which of the states they're going to use up front, and therefore the system to optimise for them very early on.

Re:What the fuck is "Vulkan"?

[Kjella]

GPU drivers. Like OpenGL, but.....modern. An open-source alternative to AMD/NVIDIA/Intel's closed-source proprietary drivers, but should work better than existing open-source solutions. At least, that's my basic understanding of it. I could be wrong.

Vulkan is not a driver, it's the next generation OpenGL API for writing accelerated 3D graphics and compute code. AMD, nVidia, Intel etc. will have drivers implementing this interface. Like DirectX 12 and the defunct AMD Mantle, it provides a much more low level interface than traditional DirectX/OpenGL which means drivers should be simpler. Intel has an open source driver, AMD starts closed source but has promised to open it up while nVidia will probably remain closed source. The offset is of course that when the driver does less, your code must do more. Typically that would be the job of a game engine or something similar.

This is the culmination of a process that has been going on for a very long time from fixed function hardware to programmable shaders to generic computing capability and what we call "drivers" today really being giant libraries running on top. The Vulkan API exposes that generic low-level capability directly. I don't think the high-level interface is going away though, but it's been unclear to me if that's going to stay in the 4.x series or not. At least Microsoft called it all DirectX 12, but then they control the whole platform. On open source it's likely you'll have full Vulkan support, but still OpenGL 4.x functions missing.