Vulkan

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Vulkan was first announced by the non-profit Khronos Group at GDC 2015. The Vulkan API was initially referred to as the 'next generation OpenGL initiative', or 'OpenGL next' by Khronos, but use of those names was discontinued when 'Vulkan' was announced. Vulkan is derived from and built upon components of AMD's Mantle API, which was donated by AMD to Khronos with the intent of giving Khronos a foundation on which to begin developing a low-level API that they could standardize across the industry. The full Vulkan specification and the open-source Vulkan SDK were released on February 16, 2016. Vulkan 1.0 was released in February 2016. Vulkan 1.1 was released on March 7, 2018. Vulkan 1.2 was released on January 15, 2020. Vulkan 1.3 was released on January 25, 2022. Vulkan 1.4 was released on December 3, 2024.

In Their Own Story

The Khronos Group began a project to create a next generation graphics API in July 2014 with a kickoff meeting at Valve. At SIGGRAPH 2014, the project was publicly announced with a call for participants. According to the US Patent and Trademark Office, the trademark for Vulkan was filed on February 19, 2015. Vulkan was formally named and announced at Game Developers Conference 2015. On August 10, 2015, Google announced that future versions of Android would support Vulkan. Android 7.x 'Nougat' launched support for Vulkan on August 22, 2016. Android 8.0 'Oreo' has full support. On December 18, 2015, the Khronos Group announced that the 1.0 version of the Vulkan specification was nearly complete and would be released when conforming drivers were available. On February 26, 2018, Khronos Group announced that the Vulkan API became available to all on macOS and iOS through the MoltenVK library, which enables Vulkan to run on top of Metal. Valve also announced that Dota 2 can as of February 26, 2018 run on macOS using the Vulkan API.

Reader's Guide

Vulkan reduces load on CPUs through the use of batching and other low-level optimizations, thereby reducing CPU workloads and leaving the CPU free to do more computation or rendering than would otherwise be possible. Vulkan offers improved scalability on multi-core CPUs due to the modernized threading architecture. Vulkan drivers are supposed to ingest shaders already translated into an intermediate binary format called SPIR-V (Standard Portable Intermediate Representation), analogous to the binary format that HLSL shaders are compiled into in Direct3D. By allowing shader pre-compilation, application initialization speed is improved and a larger variety of shaders can be used per scene. Vulkan provides unified management of compute kernels and graphical shaders, eliminating the need to use a separate compute API in conjunction with a graphics API. Ray tracing is provided in a set of cross-vendor extensions, which together are analogous to the OptiX and DirectX Raytracing APIs. Video acceleration is provided for decoding and encoding, such as H.264 and H.265.

Did You Know?

• Vulkan was initially referred to as the 'next generation OpenGL initiative' or 'OpenGL next' before being named Vulkan.
• Vulkan is derived from and built upon components of AMD's Mantle API, which was donated by AMD to Khronos.
• The trademark for Vulkan was filed on February 19, 2015, according to the US Patent and Trademark Office.
• Vulkan 1.4 was released on December 3, 2024.
• MoltenVK, which enables Vulkan to run on macOS and iOS, was open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license after an arrangement between Valve and developer Brenwill Workshop Ltd.