Vulcan Graphics API Released

Vulcan

The Khronos Group on Tuesday announced the initial release of Vulcan, a cross-platform graphics API designed to replace the older OpenGL specification. Vulcan is based on AMD’s Mantle API, which provides it improved access to video card features beyond OpenGL, including multi-core graphics processors and additional hardware features.

From the announcement:

Vulkan is designed for portability across multiple platforms with desktop and mobile GPU architectures. Vulkan is available on multiple versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 7 to Windows 10, and has been adopted as a native rendering and compute API by platforms including Linux, SteamOS, Tizen and Android.

By placing an unprecedented collection of Vulkan-related materials into open source, including the full Vulkan conformance tests, the specification source, and a rich set of software tools, Khronos is enabling strong community participation to drive API consistency and ecosystem evolution. All Khronos open source projects are available here: https://github.com/KhronosGroup.

Drivers that support Vulkan are available for most recent graphics cards on most operating systems. Support for Vulcan in development tools, such as Unity, Unreal Engine, and CryEngine, are coming soon but are not yet available.

Announcement Roundup

• OpenGL’s successor is ready to improve gaming graphics via Engadget
• OpenGL successor Vulkan 1.0 is now live and ready for use in games via Gamasutra
• The Vulkan Graphics API Is Here—and Your NVIDIA GPU Is Ready via nVidia
• Radeon GPUs are ready for the Vulkan graphics API via AMD

Get It!

The API, specification information, and reference documentation can be found at the Khronos Vulkan Registry.