khronos Vulkan (GLnext) API specs released; drivers too

[zMeul]

source: https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/specs/1.0/xhtml/vkspec.html 
via: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10035/vulkan-10-released

 

 

 

 

 

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Back in August of 2014, Khronos announced the Next Generation OpenGL Initiative. The industry consortium, responsible for overseeing a number of major cross-platform GPU standards such as OpenGL and OpenCL, was embarking upon a development project to create a true, next-generation successor to OpenGL and OpenGL ES. What would eventually become to be known as Vulkan, Khronos’s new graphics API would be an open, multi-platform low-level API to rival DirectX 12 and Metal.

 

Now 18 months after the initiative began, today Khronos is announcing that the Vulkan 1.0 specification has been released, and that the consortium and its members intend to hit the ground running. Along with the release of the specification itself, today will also mark the launch of document, drivers, SDKs, conformance tests, and even beta software support. Khronos has never had a hard API launch before – previous procedures were to release the specification and then let members trickle in with drivers and applications – so this marks a major occasion not just for graphics APIs, but for Khronos as an organization going forward.

 

Spoiler

 

Khronos has designed GLNext (a.k.a Vulkan) to work on a wide array of hardware and operating systems, including Windows, Linux, SteamOS, Android
because Vulkan is not tied to WDDM like DirectX is, it will work on older versions of windows too (like W7 and W8.1 and possibly Windows XP )

 

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Keeping with their goals for a hard launch for Vulkan, Khronos’s members will be hitting the ground running on the driver front. The all-important Vulkan conformance test is already complete, and 30 drivers have passed testing. In turn, some of those drivers will be getting released today for developers and end-users to experiment with right away.

 

 

At this point Khronos has confirmed that Android drivers from NVIDIA and Qualcomm have passed conformance testing, as have Linux drivers from Imagination, Intel, and NVIDIA. Finally, on the Windows side, so far only NVIDIA has passed conformance testing. ARM for their part has a Linux driver under review, and while we asked AMD about a Windows driver for today’s launch, they weren’t able to get back to us by press time. However in a separate pre-written press release that will be going out at the same time as this article, they say that “With this transition to public availability of the Vulkan 1.0 API specifications, AMD will be releasing a beta version of our Vulkan™ API-enabled Radeon™ Software driver,” so if not today then I’d expect to see one soon.

 

Vulkan GPU support (as of now):

• AMD - GCN 1.0+
• Intel - Skylake: Yes; Haswell & Broadwell: unknown
• nVidia - starting with Kepler

 

 Croteam, developers of Talos Principle have released, yesterday, a Vulkan rendering path for their game - BETA
 
nVidia has released a Vulkan driver, available here: https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver
AMD has a BETA Vulkan driver: http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/Radeon-Vulkan-Beta.aspx?webSyncID=823623e8-339a-86be-7b39-5ded94310702&sessionGUID=01e2b0e5-b0ba-a9d2-c358-c01bbdeebb0d
Intel's open source Vulkan driver for Linux: https://01.org/linuxgraphics/blogs/jekstrand/2016/open-source-vulkan-drivers-intel-hardware

 

can't wait for some real benchmarks to surface, not like Croteam's wrapper inside Talos Principle 

 

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in case you were living under a rock and have no idea what Vulkan is

 

Vulkan, initially referred to as glNext, is a low-overhead, multithreaded, cross-platform 3D graphics API developed by the Khronos Group:

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

[ThreePinkApples]

Sorry to say it, but this was already posted yesterday.

 

Edit: And I can't find the thread. Was it somewhere else?
Oh well AMD test drivers if anyone is interested: http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/Radeon-Vulkan-Beta.aspx 
Note: They are only for Vulkan and are not to be used as normal drivers

[rattacko123]

1 hour ago, aerandir92 said:

Sorry to say it, but this was already posted yesterday.

 

Edit: And I can't find the thread. Was it somewhere else?

I think zMeul posted a thread before, but he reposted it because he couldn't edit his post or something.