Khronos Group: “Volcano 1.0 is complete”

To give game developers closer access to the hardware, close to metal, and minimize it overhead drivers was the big news when AMD introduced the Mantle application interface in the autumn of 2013. The purpose was to provide the opportunity for better performance, than for example DirectX 11 and OpenGL.

The following spring, Microsoft countered with DirectX 12, which in the summer of 2015 was released in sharp edition together with Windows 10. Meanwhile, Mantle has in a way gone to the grave, and instead lives on in what is called Vulkan – the successor to the open interface OpenGL.

We have some good news and some bad news. The year-end target release date for Vulkan will not be met. However, we are in the home stretch and the release of Vulkan 1.0 is imminent!

Now Khronos Group announces that work on Vulkan is progressing, but in a compote of good and bad news. The bad thing is that the consortium will not release Vulkan before the turn of the year, as first promised. The bright spot is that the specification has now been completed and is undergoing both refinement and legal review, and that partners are preparing their drivers for the launch, which is said to be “imminent”.

Furthermore, it appears that the work is progressing with developer tools (SDK) for Windows, Linux and Android. Related to the latter is also that Google is now one Promoter by Khronos Group, which means that they are part of the decision-making board together with AMD, Apple, ARM, Epic Games, Huawei, Imagination, Intel, Nokia, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony and Vivante.

Among the players who have high hopes for Vulkan is Valve, which among other things highlights that the interface, unlike Windows-exclusive DirectX 12, will also work across a number of other platforms, all the way from personal computers to game consoles, mobile phones and built-in systems.