HiGame

It’s been some 18 months since Khronos announced the next-generation of OpenGL, and the final version of the spec, Vulkan, is finally ready for deployment. As of today, everything related to Vulkan — drivers, SDKs, and early software support is ready for launch. This is a change from Khronos’ usual practice, which is to announce a new version of the OpenGL API with vendor support following at a later time.



Vulkan is a direct descendent of AMD’s Mantle and it shares the same underlying philosophy as both its predecessor and DirectX 12. What sets Vulkan apart from DirectX 12 is that it supports a much wider range of operating systems, from Windows 7 and 8.1 up through Windows 10, Linux, SteamOS, Android, and Tizen. That’s a significant theoretical advantage for the new API, though Microsoft is doing everything it can to push Windows 7 or 8.1 gamers to adopt Windows 10.
Like DX12, Vulkan is designed to minimize driver overhead, scale across multiple CPUs, and offer developers greater control over how workloads are executed across the GPU. Mobile GPU companies like Qualcomm and Imagination Technologies have both pledged support for the API and intend to support it in their own development tools. In theory, this broad industry base could make it more likely that PC games will cross over to Android devices, Steam Machines, and Linux as a whole. Even Vivante has pledged to support the API, though its products are typically used in lower-end mobile hardware.

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