A new age starts for OpenGL and Vulkan 1.0

Feb 16, 2016 14:01 GMT  ·  By

AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group has just revealed that a new Vulkan API-enabled Radeon Software Beta driver is now available, following the release of the Vulkan 1.0 API specifications.

With the Vulkan 1.0 specifications made public by the Khronos Group, the companies are starting to integrate the new technology in their drivers. AMD has been quick to announce the launch of a new Vulkan API-enabled Radeon Software driver, which for now is in the Beta stages.

The promise of Vulkan could be setting the expectations of the community a little bit too high, but the Khronos Group did this by themselves. This is a concern of companies from the hardware and software industry, including Valve, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and many others. It's the same group that has been working on OpenGL since forever.

Unlike the development cycle of OpenGL, which has been slow, the companies seem much more eager to adopt the new specifications for Vulkan. From the looks of it, more has been done for Vulkan in the last two years than we had for OpenGL in the past ten, and that is a direct result of the funds that have been pumped into the project.

Vulkan 1.0 is here

The release of Vulkan 1.0 should have been made a few months ago, but it was postponed for 2016. AMD didn't forget to remind us that Vulkan is a descendant of Mantle and that, compared to OpenGL, Vulkan substantially reduces API overhead (background work a GPU or CPU must do to interpret what a game is asking of the hardware).

“The release of the Vulkan 1.0 specification is a huge step forward for developers. The Vulkan API, which was derived from Mantle, will bring the benefits of low-overhead high-performance Graphics API to the benefit of cross-platform and cross-vendor targeted applications,“ said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and Chief Architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD.

For now, the new AMD drivers are still in Beta and Vulkan is just at version 1.0, and that means that there is a lot of work left to be done. Hopefully, we'll be able to see some Vulcan-powered games in 2016.