14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia, Valve, and developers of Vulkan from the Khronos Group met for the first-ever Vulkan Developers Day.
It’s clear that Vulkan seems to be the future, at least for the open-standard graphics, and there is no doubt that Valve is the tip of the speak. The Khronos Group is the same one responsible for OpenGL, but it took them forever to get moving. In fact, they moved so slow that OpenGL dragged its feet for years behind Direct X, bringing us to today’s situations.
Khronos Group is an industry consortium, which means that it’s an organization supported by multiple companies, such as AMD, Intel, Apple, Qualcomm, Sony, Google, Adobe, Amazon, Pixar, Valve, and even Microsoft. The OpenGL comparison is interesting to make because the code for upcoming Vulkan is written by the same developers and they seem to be going fast.
Nvidia and Valve are making a push for Vulkan
Vulkan is officially a new cross-platform, open-standard graphics and compute application programming interface, but most of the people just see it as something that can finally replace the old OpenGL. More importantly, this is something that’s capable of uniting companies that usually work as competitors, and the final goal is to have an open-standard that can be used by anyone.
“A key advantage of Vulkan over OpenGL is the ability to generate work for the GPU across many CPU threads, making Vulkan particularly useful for developers who find themselves CPU-bound, which can occur in diverse application domains, including games, computer-aided design and mobile apps,” wrote Nvidia’s Neil Trevett, who also happens to be the president of Khronos.
The new Vulkan Developers Day took place on Nvidia’s campus and Valve’s John McDonald was there to speak about High Performance Vulkan Programming. It’s clear that something big is brewing for 2016 and that these companies seem to be helming the entire venture, with Valve doing a lot of the work.