Khronos Group has announced the availability of the Vulkan 1.0; which was created as the successor to OpenGL. Vulkan has been long awaited by many developers and gamers because the API offers an increase in performance without relying too much on the CPU for a performance boost.
Interestingly, AMD played a big part in Vulkan’s development by providing a large amount of code that was derived from its own Mantle API. Senior Vice President of Radeon Technologies Group, Raja Koduri, mentioned that the release of Vulkan will not only benefit developers, but also the entire PC gaming industry. In addition to that, AMD has also released drivers with Vulkan support.
Nvidia’s senior vice president of content and technology, Tony Tamasi, mentioned that the company is glad to play a part in Vulkan’s development and has already released drivers to support the API. Nvidia Vulkan drivers will be available for Windows, Linux, and even Android.
ComputerBase has been conducting tests by running The Talos Principle – currently the only game to support the API – on Vulkan. The results are rather surprising. It seems that, performance-wise, Vulkan is still behind DirectX 11. Then again, being a new API, one should expect an increase in performance from Vulkan in future updates.
Consumers with low to mid-range systems will definitely be benefiting from the release of the Vulkan API. It’s worth mentioning that mobile GPUs will also support the Vulkan API. Until then, it remains to be seen whether or not Vulkan proves what it claims to achieve.
(Source: Khronos via AMD, Nvidia, WCCFtech , ComputerBase)
