Khronos Group launches Vulcan 1.0

Vulkan is the name of the specification for the next generation OpenGL interface for the development of, among other things, 3D graphics. It was originally thought that Vulkan would be completed towards the end of 2015, but the specification had to be postponed to the future, but now version 1.0 is completed. Vulkan is an open specification offered as an alternative to Microsoft’s DirectX platform.

The Vulcan is based on AMD’s now defunct low-level framework Mantle, which like DirectX 12 focused on reducing the number of steps the code must go through from the operating system to the hardware and back, the so-called overheadthe loss that graphics applications on DirectX and OpenGL frameworks traditionally suffer from.

The principle is similar to the freedom and hardware-related development that allows developers to make the most of the capacity of the game consoles. Among other things, Vulkan will enable better use of multi-core processors and paired graphics cards, but also be more flexible and work across more platforms than DirectX.

AMD has released a beta version of Radeon drivers for Vulcan, and Intel has released an open source version. Qualcomm has published a blog post urging developers to begin the transition from OpenGL to Vulcan on the company’s Snapdragon and Adreno circles.

Nvidia also has a Vulcan driver available for download on its website. For those who want to test on the interface, the graphics giant recommends testers to download The Talos Principle, which is the first to support Vulkan.