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Khronos Group Announces Release of Vulkan 1.0 (phoronix.com)
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.
Khronos Group is responsible for the OpenGL and OpenCL standards.
They've had a lot of internal fighting over the future of OpenGL for many years. Real-time 3d engine developers (ie games) wanted to remove a lot of cruft and expose the hardware more, while CAD and other groups were happy with how things were. For years nothing much happened. This is the same fight which made OpenGL 2 so delayed.
Then AMD released their proprietary Mantle API a few years ago, which amongst other things was much lower level than OpenGL or DirectX at the time, allowing 3d engine developers to extract much more from the hardware.
AMD offered Mantle to Khronos which picked it up, polished it and named it Vulkan.
Now CAD folks can keep their OpenGL, while real-time 3d folks can enjoy extracting the maximum from the hardware with Vulkan.
At least that's how I remember it.