The Khronos Group, an open industry consortium behind numerous technology standards in the computer graphics industry, has this week announced the release of a new website entirely dedicated to Vulkan, the technology designed to create a multi-device, multi-operating system, cross-platform graphics API (application programming interface).
Architosh has written extensively about Vulkan in the past with the aim of making it clear that future professional and consumer-oriented 3D application (eg: games) users understand the implications of this technology.
Vulkan Website
The new Vulkan website puts all the key resources about the graphics programming standard in one place, separate from the larger Khronos website, where developers can quickly get up-to-speed on the standard and access the information they need.
A screenshot of the home page for the new Vulkan website.
There are complete sections for developers and end-users to understand Vulkan projects and software tools in support of the Vulkan ecosystem.
Made with Vulkan
Khronos says Vulkan is experiencing a boom in adoption by world-class developers. A new “Made with Vulkan” section showcases the latest apps made to run on the Vulkan API.
Readers can explore the Made with Vulkan apps and select by platform or operating system. For instance, one will find that the new game Rise of the Tomb Raider, which works via Steam, is available for Linux computer systems.
Vulkan projects include Vulkan® Portability™ which aims to counter platform fragmentation by encouraging layered implementations of Vulkan functionality over proprietary platform graphics APIs like Apple’s Metal, Microsoft’s DX12, and other APIs.
To learn more visit the website.
Architosh Analysis and Commentary
Reader’s familiar with our coverage of Vulkan’s rise may be curious about Vulkan’s impact in the professional 3D software market of which this website is mostly devoted. From our limited inquiries into software discussions around Vulkan, it seems that cross-platform CAD and 3D software developers may try to leverage native graphics APIs on both Windows and Mac ideally rather than go the Vulkan route. This may particularly be the case with large software developers with legacy CAD or 3D platforms who need to maintain the highest performance possible on each respective platform. From our M1 Mac mini testing around its GPU performance, we witnessed the GFXBench published benchmarks across a range of graphics performance tests that typically showed the highest scores coming off of Metal and Microsoft’s DirectX12 (DX12). But we were not scientifically observing this. And there were some instances where we did see Vulkan test scores leading the pack. One thing that was obvious, however, is that in many cases OpenGL lagged.
What this last note is hinting at is that Vulkan’s performance may not match either Metal to DX12. That hint should come with a caveat. Again, we did not do a systematic comparison of GFXBench scores across graphics APIs. I am merely sharing an observation noticed during the GFXBench phase of our review.