The new Vulkan will complement the existing OpenGL

Feb 16, 2016 14:41 GMT  ·  By

The Khronos Group just announced that the Vulkan 1.0 open standard API specifications have been made available, along with the Vulkan SDK for Windows and Linux from LunarG.

The new Vulkan is not the successor of OpenGL but complements the already-existing OpenGL and OpenGL ES 3D APIs and provides developers with direct control over GPU acceleration for maximized performance and predictability with minimized CPU overhead.

This new technology has been 18 months in the making and brought together many of the hardware and software companies, including Valve, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and many others. In fact, from the looks of it, Valve is one of the biggest players in this venture, and it's not a coincidence that it's the first one to have something to say about Vulkan 1.0.

Vulkan 1.0 and Vulkan SDK have arrived

The Khronos Group has also set up a GitHub repository with all the Khronos open source projects, and that includes all kinds of tools that are Vulkan-specific.

Also, as you can imagine, the hardware makers are now trying to provide specific supported drivers, but for now, only AMD and Nvidia have made any moves in this directions, and just for the Windows platform. The good news is that support for other platforms is being planned, especially since we now also have the Vulkan SDK.

"LunarG has released the first Vulkan SDK for Windows and Linux concurrently with the Vulkan 1.0 specification. The SDK includes validation layers to ensure proper Vulkan API usage and improve portability across platforms and graphics hardware. Additional layers are available for taking screenshots, tracing API activity, and running other debugging tasks," the official announcement reads.

The Talos Principle to support Vulkan

Information about Vulkan support in The Talos Principle was shared by Croteam a couple of weeks ago, but now it has been confirmed in the press release as well. This means that The Talos Principle will probably be the first one with Vulkan support out there.

More details about Vulkan and its impact on the industry will be available soon.