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Khronos Group Announces Release of Vulkan 1.0 (phoronix.com)

Posted by timothy on from the next-phase-begins dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Vulkan 1.0 was released this morning as a surprise for those looking towards a high-performance, cross-platform (everyone but Apple) API. In a lengthy overview of Vulkan 1.0, the stage is set for making Vulkan what it's been talked up to be, but it's not there yet for end-users to fully enjoy: NVIDIA has conformant drivers out for major platforms, AMD doesn't have any conformant driver yet, and Intel only has a conformant Linux driver. The lone launch title for Vulkan 1.0 is Talos Principle, but don't expect it to perform better than the OpenGL port at this time. While it's easy for many game developers to port to Vulkan, it will require significant investment to make the engines really much faster than their OpenGL/DirectX11-geared code-bases while new games should be much better from the start when designed around this lower-level API. The spec will be available at Khronos.org and the Vulkan SDK is available from LunarG.com.

4 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. Intel already has Open Source Support by CajunArson · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Intel has already published open source Vulkan support in a new Mesa branch: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/m...

    Nvidia also has Linux Vulkan support in its newest beta driver.

    AMD... uh... has a beta driver for Windows. Not even an announcement of Linux support. Yeah, so much for AMD having an insurmountable lead or anything.

    --
    AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
    1. Re:Intel already has Open Source Support by CajunArson · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's true that Vulkan inherits some things from Mantle (mostly using separate command buffers without global state and dropping the old-school OpenGL graphics context). However, there are also major differences from Mantle including the use of GLSL instead of HLSL (Microsoft's shader langauge) and the SPIR-V intermediate layer is a major part of Vulkan that literally has no equivalent in Mantle.

      On top of all that: Mantle only ever existed as a beta-quality driver for Windows. Despite some talk about cross-platform, it never ran under anything other than Windows, and even AMD's new graphics cards like the R9-Fury run *worse* on the old Mantle driver than they do under DX11.

      --
      AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
  2. Re:OpenGL is dead. Long live OpenGL! by sbaker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Well, kinda. For those who have to write extremely high performance graphics code and need to work close to the bare metal - Vulkan is the answer. For those who need not much more than a spinning cube - OpenGL/GLES/WebGL are still the answer. Actually, even for a lot of people who need high performance graphics code - they may well be working with middleware that uses Vulkan rather than with Vulkan itself.

    --
    www.sjbaker.org
  3. Re:API documenation by Fragnet · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And check out the Lunar-G SDK (you can sign up for it today). Got my first spinning cube up and running in about 2 minutes (OK, Lunar-G wrote it but whatever!).