crowbyte.orgYesterday the Khronos Group with participants from all segments of the graphics industry - including big players like AMD, nVidia, Samsung, Sony, Valve, Intel and many others - has anounced the availability of the first final and open specification of the Vulkan-API. It is comparable with Microsoft's Direct3D and Apple's Metal and planned as the successor to OpenGL.
The Vulkan-API is based on large parts of the AMD exclusive and closed source Mantle-API. Therefore it's no big surprise that AMD already has Vulkan-ready drivers made available. nVidia has drivers ready as well as Intel has at least published the source code of the Linux drivers. Vulkan's biggest advantage is that it is not only available for Linux but for Android (from Version 6.0 and later), Tizen and Windows (Version 7 and later), too, and will be open source.
If you are interested in learning more about the upcoming graphics API you can find a few nice articles linked below.
Further reading
- Spezifikationen des Low-Level-API Vulkan veröffentlicht / golem.de (DE)
- Vulkan bringt sehr viel (für) Open Source / golem.de (DE)
- 3D-Schnittstelle: Vulkan-API und -Treiber von AMD und Nvidia erschienen / heise.de (DE)
- 3D-API Vulkan von Khronos: Eierlegende Wollmilchschnittstelle für alle Systeme / heise.de (DE)
- Khronos Vulkan Registry / khronos.org (EN)
- Vulkan (API) / wikipedia.org (DE)
- A Brief Overview Of Vulkan API / toptal.com (EN)