A reader asked me to reach out to Stardock about their Linux plans, specifically for Galactic Civilizations III as they said they would port it with Vulkan. I didn't get an answer on that specifically, but Vulkan has put them in a better position to port.
The latest and greatest Mesa release 17.1 is due for release on May 5th, so not long for everything to get polished up.
Croteam have put out yet another stable build of The Talos Principle, which brings improvements for the Vulkan version. I did some fresh benchmarks and the difference is quite amazing.
The Khronos Group have announced a '3D Portability Initiative' to enable 3D applications that are portable across Vulkan, DX12 and Metal.
More news from GDC, Unity have announced that on March 31st, Unity 5.6 will release and it will have 'out of the box support for Vulkan'.
Vulkan 1.0.42 seems like a much bigger release than usual, NVIDIA have also release their 375.27.12 beta Vulkan driver to fit in the new extensions from this Vulkan release.
Croteam has stated on their forum that Serious Sam 3: BFE running on their new Fusion engine which uses Vulkan could arrive in public Beta as early as next month.
Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter now supports VR on Linux using Vulkan, but Croteam is now waiting on Valve updating SteamVR to work on Linux.
The recent Mesa release of Mesa 17.0.0 included a patch from a Feral Interactive developer, but Feral aren't stopping there. Another developer from Feral has had two patches accepted into Mesa-git today.
Croteam are continuing to improve The Talos Principle with a brand new stable build that has Vulkan optimizations.
The Mesa developers have announced the release of Mesa 17.0.0 and it's a truly incredible release. You should probably update as soon as possible.
There’s been a fair bit of talk recently about attempting to multi-thread using OpenGL so I thought I’d write a bit more about what “multi-threading” an OpenGL game is, what’s normally done, and how it compares to multi-threading in Vulkan. Here's an attempt to explain it a little.
Continuing my love for Croteam, today it was pointed out on reddit that the Croteam developers have been talking quite a bit more about Vulkan on one of their Steam forums. They also stated that Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter should have the Fusion update with Linux & Vulkan in 'weeks'.
This year's GDC sounds like it might be quite interesting! AMD, NVIDIA, Khronos, Unity, Croteam and more have announced they will be doing a bunch of talks and some of them will be about Vulkan.
Something that sadly got buried in my inbox is this video of David Airlie (Red Hat) talking about the Vulkan Graphics API.
For those of you interested in seeing The Witness on Linux, it seems Jonathan Blow mentioned it again recently in a livestream in response to a viewer question. It's hard to argue with what he's saying.
In addition to Mesa 17 getting a new release candidate, we also today have a Mesa 13.0.4 release candidate which should be released on Friday.
Dave Airlie sent in a massive patch-set of 31 patches for 'radv', the open source AMD Vulkan driver, to support geometry shaders.
Mesa 17, the next stable release of the open source graphics drivers on Linux has been a bit delayed, due to so much last minute work going on. Looks like Intel Ivy Bridge will get OpenGL 4.0.
A commit that just landed in Mesa-git allows for 'radv', the open source Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs to use multiple devices.
