The specification for the long awaited Vulkan graphics API has now been released by Khronos. An SDK by LunarG has also been released which contains validation and debugging tools for Vulkan applications.
Quite a lot of people have been waiting excitedly for the Vulkan spec to come out and there has been a lot of hype surrounding the new API. Vulkan has been designed to be a high-performance low-level API which can take advantage of modern multicore processors far better than OpenGL. We will have to see how much this new approach affects real life performance once we have drivers with Vulkan support and games that utilize this new API, hopefully we'll get that soon.
AMD have also released a video explaining how Vulkan works in a nutshell.
Direct Link
You can read the full Vulkan specification announcement from Khronos here and find some docs and samples of Vulkan in the Khronos GitHub. Correction: The Vulkan samples page is currently empty. The LunarG Vulkan SDK will be available on their Vulkan page but currently the download page might show you a 404 error.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: rustybroomhandleHah, the "Multiple operating systems" slide in the video shows several specific Linux distros, plus a generic tux icon. :)
hmmm, android, linux and windows7-10 already cover big fucking majority
"The conformant drivers as of writing this article are: Imagination Technologies on Linux, Intel on Linux, NVIDIA on Android / Linux / Windows, and Qualcomm for Android 6.0. Yep, no mention at all of AMD, which was quite the jaw-dropper when I was sent over this material last week..."
So maybe AMD is justified for not having Linux driver if they have delays even on Windows
Finally NVidia providing signed firmware blobs for GM200 and GM204 (GM206 to
follow soon), and providing patches to Nouveau to load the signed firmware too...
Mesa needs to be patched as well though.
Quoting: Avehicle7887Vulkan powered Witcher 3 for Linux in 3...2..1.....
Maybe one day.
Yep. I'm waiting for the same :)
Quoting: rkfgI've become curious about one thing: if Vulkan provides such a low level access to hardware, what will happen if an app (a game usually) starts to misbehave? I read Vulkan has very little validation in favor of speed. Does that mean that a buggy game could crash the entire Xorg or freeze the driver? A user-space segfault usually leads to crashing the program but not the entire system (and Xorg/desktop for many people is the system), but if invalid data goes into the kernel space or the Xorg driver and crashes there because of that... I suppose it would be bad. Kernel panic for the module and Xorg crash in case of the Xorg driver.
Is it any better with OpenGL? It's direct access too. A misbehaving game/driver can easily freeze a system. You can sometimes switch to a console to kill the game, but often it is not possible. You could still ssh into the box if you have another system available, but how many users can do it?
[s]A buggy OpenGL game can freeze your system...
Added this comment way too late in the thread. Doesn't seem like I can delete a comment I made, or am I wrong?
Last edited by rune on 16 February 2016 at 4:02 pm UTC
linux_gamer Feb 16, 2016
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