Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform graphics API from the Khronos Group.
Vulkan, once known as Next Generation OpenGL or just GLnext, is designed to be a low-overhead API that facilitates multithreaded 3D development, enabling different CPU threads to simultaneously prepare batches of commands to send to the GPU. It gives developers greater control of generating commands, putting tasks such as memory and thread management in their hands rather than relying on video drivers to handle these responsibilities. In so doing, it greatly reduces the amount of work and validation that the driver must perform, thus drastically reducing driver complexity. Conversely it increases the responsibilities of the application / developer to ensure that operations are valid and properly synchronized with each other.
Vulkan uses SPIR-V bytecode as its standard representation for graphics and compute shaders. The Khronos reference GLSL compiler compiles a form of GLSL (which implements a special extension to support Vulkan features) into SPIR-V, but users can use whatever compilers they wish which have a SPIR-V backend. The SPIR-V ecosystem also includes support for compiling from other languages such as HLSL, and for cross compiling SPIR-V bytecode back into various languages, including GLSL, HLSL and C++.
Vulkan enjoys wide native platform support on Windows, Linux, & Android. Additionally, a large subset of Vulkan is supported on the iOS and MacOS platforms through MoltenVk, part of the Vulkan Portability Initiative. Additional work is being done to develop a similar implementation of Vulkan over D3D12 to allow it to be used on UWP platforms that might not have native Vulkan drivers.
- Vulkan Homepage
- Vulkan registry
- Vulkan 1.2 & 1.1 & 1.0 core specifications
- Vulkan SDK
