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: wolfyrionI wonder how long it will take for some distros to implement Vulkan API... :|They don't need to. They just have to ship drivers with Vulkan support built into them.
Quoting: wolfyrionI wonder how long it will take for some distros to implement Vulkan API... :|
Expect all major distros to support all kinds for Vulkan API in autumn releases. I would even expect some Vulkan support to land in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, if all goes well.
* AMD - no supported drivers, Windows beta, Linux driver later due of AMDGPU restruct...as far as we know it will be blob at the beginning, and open sourced later. No info will it ship separately from Catalyst/fglrx;
* Nvidia - official blob supporting lot of cards released, can be used as we speak. Nouveau - considering amount of work required for OpenGL, don't expect any time soon. However it will be easier to implement for sure;
* Intel - open source driver, based on Mesa, released as we speak;
* Lots of mobile chips support Vulkan API trough Android (how about other Linux based distros? Are those drivers platform neutral)?
So not bad start imho. I hope AMD gets their Windows driver finished and certified soon, and AMDGPU case is cleared up till autumn. Other than that, looks really promising start. Wayland supported, Blender supported, Gstreamer supported...and that's just a start.
Quoting: GuestI just hope Blizzard implement this in WoW because it really is the one and only game/application that annoyingly keeps me dual booting.
One can dream.
How would that magically make it a Linux port?
Quoting: GuestI just hope Blizzard implement this in WoW because it really is the one and only game/application that annoyingly keeps me dual booting.
One can dream.
Don't dream about it.
They already have OpenGL renderer in this game, and they had Linux internal port. They decide not to release it. So no, don't hope.
Quoting: Pecisk* Lots of mobile chips support Vulkan API trough Android (how about other Linux based distros? Are those drivers platform neutral)?
well.. the kernel couldn't care less, though, the compositor above will ;-). So in a driver-sense, android drivers stay android drivers, support for other display servers would require the driver to support them (e.g. X11, Wayland, Mir).
please please i don't wait for long time!
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