Vulkan (API)

Vulkan

Developer(s)	Khronos Group, developed from AMD's Mantle[1][2][3][4][5]
Initial release	16 February 2016[6]
Stable release	1.0.36 / 2 December 2016[7]
Development status	Active
Operating system	Android, Linux, Tizen, Microsoft Windows[8][9]
Platform	Compatible hardware
Type	3D graphics and compute API[10]
Website	Khronos.org/Vulkan
As of	7 June 2016

Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API first announced at GDC 2015 by the Khronos Group.^[10][11][12] The Vulkan API was initially referred to as the "next generation OpenGL initiative," or "OpenGL next^[13]" by Khronos, but use of those names were discontinued once the Vulkan name was announced.^[14] Vulkan is derived from and built upon components of AMD's Mantle API, which was donated by AMD to Khronos with the intent of giving Khronos a foundation on which to begin developing a low-level API that they could standardize across the industry, much like OpenGL.^{[3][10][15][16][17][18][19]}

Like OpenGL, Vulkan targets high-performance realtime 3D graphics applications such as videogames and interactive media across all platforms, and offers higher performance and lower CPU usage, much like Direct3D 12 and Mantle. Vulkan also has the ability to render 2D graphics applications,^[20] however it is generally suited for 3D. In addition to its lower CPU usage, Vulkan is also able to better distribute work amongst multiple CPU cores.^[21]

Features

OpenGL and Vulkan are both rendering APIs, in both cases the GPU executes shaders while the CPU executes everything else. Vulkan has a simpler API which reduces the amount of computation the CPU has to do and it replaces the monolithic global state machine with a much more programmable approach. This enables a fine-grained programming of tasks on the GPU.

Vulkan is intended to provide a variety of advantages over other APIs as well as its spiritual predecessor, OpenGL. Vulkan offers lower overhead, more direct control over the GPU, and lower CPU usage.^[12] Intended advantages include:

• Vulkan API is well suited for high-end graphics cards as well as for graphics solution present on mobile devices (OpenGL had a specific sub-set for mobile devices called OpenGL ES).
• In contrast to DirectX 12, Vulkan is available on multiple modern operating systems; like OpenGL, the Vulkan API is not locked to a single OS or device form factor. As of release, Vulkan runs on Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, Tizen, Linux, and Android.
• Reduced driver overhead, reducing CPU workloads.^[22]
• Reduced load on CPUs through the use of batching, leaving the CPU free to do additional computation or rendering than otherwise.^[23]
• Better scaling on multi-core CPUs. Direct3D 11 and OpenGL 4 were initially designed for use with single-core CPUs and only received augmentation to be executed on multi-cores. Even when application developers use the augmentations, the API regularly do not scale well on multi-cores.^[24]
• OpenGL uses the high-level language GLSL for writing shaders which forces each OpenGL driver to implement its own compiler for GLSL that executes at application runtime to translate the program's shaders into the GPU's machine code. Vulkan drivers are supposed to ingest instead shaders already translated into an intermediate binary format called SPIR-V (Standard Portable Intermediate Representation), analogous to the binary format that HLSL shaders are compiled into in Direct3D. By allowing shader pre-compilation, application initialization speed is improved and a larger variety of shaders can be used per scene. A Vulkan driver only needs to do GPU specific optimization and code generation, resulting in easier driver maintenance, and smaller driver packages in theory (as GPU vendors still have to include OpenGL/CL).^[25]
• Unified management of compute kernels and graphical shaders, eliminating the need to use a separate compute API in conjunction with a graphics API.

OpenGL	Vulkan[26]
one single global state machine	object-based with no global state
state is tied to a single context	all state concepts are localized to a command buffer
GPU memory and synchronization are usually hidden	explicit control over memory management and synchronization
extensive error checking	Vulkan drivers do no error checking at runtime, there is validation layer for developers

Planned features

At SIGGRAPH 2016, Khronos announced that Vulkan would be getting support for automatic multi-GPU features, similar to what is offered by DirectX 12.^[27] Multi-GPU support included in-API removes the need for SLi or Crossfire which requires graphics cards to be of the same model. API multi-GPU instead allows the API to intelligently split the workload among two or more completely different GPUs.^[28] For example, integrated GPUs included on the CPU can be used in conjunction with a high-end dedicated GPU for a slight performance boost.

Software that supports Vulkan

Games

• The Talos Principle – The first game with Vulkan rendering support.^[29]
• Dota 2 – Vulkan support released in May 2016.^[30]
• Doom – Vulkan support released in July 2016.^[31]
• vkQuake – A Vulkan Quake port was released in July 2016.^[32][33]

Game engines

• Source 2 – In March 2015, Valve Corporation announced the Source 2 engine, the successor engine to the original Source engine, would support Vulkan.^[34][35]
• Serious Engine 4 – In February 2016, Croteam announced that they were supporting Vulkan in their Serious Engine.^[36]
• Unreal Engine 4 – In February 2016, Epic Games announced Unreal Engine 4 support for Vulkan at Samsung's Galaxy S7 Unpacked event.^[37][38]
• id Tech 6 – In May 2016, id Software announced Doom, running the id Tech 6 engine, would support Vulkan.^[39]
• CryEngine – Crytek has plans to include Vulkan support in CryEngine.^[40]
• Unity – The engine will support Vulkan in an early state in 2016.^[41]
• Xenko – Vulkan support was added in July 2016.^[42]
• Intrinsic – A free Vulkan based cross-platform game engine published on GitHub.^[43]
• Torque 3D MIT - In Apr 2016, the developers community announces they looking towards to include Vulkan support.^[44]

Development tools

GPU PerfStudio 3.6 supports Vulkan on Windows and Linux.^[45]

OS components

The Vulkan Window System Interface (WSI) does for Vulkan what EGL does for OpenGL ES.^[46] EGL is used by OpenGL ES programs to interface with the native platform windowing system. EGL handles context management, surface binding and rendering synchronization.

Compatibility

Initial specifications stated that Vulkan will work on hardware that currently supports OpenGL ES 3.1 or OpenGL 4.X and up.^[47] As Vulkan support requires new graphics drivers, this does not necessarily imply that every existing device that supports OpenGL ES 3.1 or OpenGL 4.x will have Vulkan drivers available.

Android 7.0 Nougat supports Vulkan.^[48] The software was released in August 2016.^[49]

Vulkan support for iOS and macOS has not been announced by Apple, but at least one company provides a Vulkan implementation that runs on top of Metal on iOS and macOS devices.^[50]

Company	Hardware				Software support: Vulkan 1.0
	Microarchitecture	Available since	GPUs (chips)	Graphic cards / SoCs	Linux	Microsoft Windows[lower-alpha 1]	Android Nougat and later[51]
AMD
	GCN 4th	June 2016	Polaris 10, Polaris 11, Vega 10	Radeon Rx 400 Series	AMDGPU PRO (Ubuntu & RHEL)[52][53] Mesa/RADV[54]	Radeon Software[55]	N/A
	GCN 3rd	August 2014	Tonga, Fiji, Carrizo	Radeon R9 Series
	GCN 2nd	March 2013	Bonaire, Hawaii, Kaveri, Kabini, Temash, Mullins, Beema, Carrizo-L	Radeon HD 7790, PlayStation 4, Xbox One	Work in Progress
	GCN 1st	February 2012	Oland, Cape Verde, Pitcairn, Tahiti	Radeon HD 77xx–7900 Series
	TeraScale 3 "Northern Islands"	December 2010	Aruba (Trinity/Richland), Barts, Turks, Caicos, Cayman	Radeon HD 7xxx–76xx Series, Radeon HD 6000 Series	not supported
	TeraScale 2 "Evergreens"	September 2009	Cedar, Cypress, Juniper, Redwood, Palm, Sumo	Radeon HD 5000 Series
	TeraScale 1	May 2007	R600, RV630, RV610, RV790, RV770, …	Radeon HD 2000 Series, HD 3000, HD 4000
Nvidia
	Pascal	May 2016	GP100, GP104, GP106, GP107	GeForce 10 series, Tegra X2	Nvidia GeForce driver[56][57]	Nvidia GeForce driver[57]	Yes
	Maxwell 2.0	September 2014	GM200, GM204, GM206, GM20B	GeForce 900 series, Tegra X1
	Maxwell 1.0	February 2014	GM107, GM108	GeForce GTX 750 Ti, GTX 750, GTX 860M
	Kepler	March 2012	GK110, GK104, GK106, GK107, GK208	GeForce 600 series, GeForce 700 series, Tegra K1
	Fermi	March 2010	GF100, GF104, GF106, GF108, GF110, GF114, GF116, GF119	GeForce 400 series, GeForce 500 series	not supported
	Tesla 2.0	June 2008	GT200, GT215, GT216, GT218,	GeForce 200 series, GeForce 300 series
	Tesla 1.0	November 2006	G80, G84, G86, G92, G94, G96, G98	GeForce 8 series, GeForce 9 series, GeForce 100 series
Intel
	Kaby Lake	2016			Mesa/ANV[58][59]	Intel Graphics driver 15.40.20 beta	N/A
	Skylake	August 2015		Core i3-/i5-/i7-6000, Core m3-/m5-/m7-6Yxx, Pentium G4xxx, Celeron G39xx
	Broadwell	September 2014		Core i3-/i5-/i7-5000, Core M-5Yxx		not supported
	Haswell	September 2012		Core i3-/i5-/i7-4000, Pentium G3xxx, Celeron G18xx
	Ivy Bridge	April 2012		Core i3-/i5-/i7-3000, Pentium G2xxx, Celeron G16xx
	Sandy Bridge	January 2011		Core i3-/i5-/i7-2000, Pentium Gxxx, Celeron Gxxx	not supported
	Westmere	January 2010		Core i3-/i5-/i7-xxx, Pentium G69xx, Celeron G1101
Imagination Technologies
	PowerVR Series 8XE	February 2016	GE8200, GE8300		PowerVR Graphics SDK v4.1[60]
	PowerVR Series 7XT	November 2014	GT7200, GT7400, GT7600, GT7800, GT7900	Apple A9, Helio X30 (MT679?)
	PowerVR Series 7XE	November 2014	GE7400, GE7800
	PowerVR Series 6XT	January 2014	GX6240, GX6250, GX6450, GX6650	Apple A8, A8X, MediaTek MT8173, MT8176,
	PowerVR Series 6XE	January 2014	G6050, G6060, G6100 (XE), G6110	RK3368
	PowerVR Series 6 (Rogue)	January 2012	G6100, G6200, G6230, G6400, G6430, G6630	MediaTek MT6595M, MT6595T, MT6595M, MT6795, MT8135, Helio X10 (MT6795), LG H13, Apple A7, Atom Z3460, Z3480, Z3530, Z3560, Z3570, Z3580
	PowerVR Series 5XT	January 2009	SGX543, SGX544, SGX554	Apple S1, A5, A5X, A6, A6X, NovaThor L8540, L8580, L9540, TI OMAP 4470, 5430, 5432, MediaTek MT5327, MT6589M, MT6589T, MT6589, MT8117, MT8121, MT8125, MT8389, Atom Z2460, Z2520, Z2560, Z2580, Z2760, Exynos 5410	not supported
Qualcomm
	Adreno 500 series		Adreno 510, Adreno 530	Snapdragon 430, 625, 650, 652, 820, 821	1.0[61]
	Adreno 400 series			Snapdragon 415, 615, 616, 617, 805, 808, 810
	Adreno 300 series			Snapdragon 200, 208, 210, 212, 400, 410, 412, 600, 800, 801	not supported
ARM
	Bifrost[62]	June 2016	Mali-G71, …	TBA	1.0[63]
	Midgard 4th	Q4 2015	Mali-T860, Mali-T830, Mali-T880	Exynos 8890, Exynos 7870, Kirin 950, 955, MediaTek MT6738, MT6750, Helio X20 (MT6797), X25 (MT6797T), P10 (MT6755), P20 (MT6757)
	Midgard 3rd	October 2013	Mali-T760, …	Exynos 7420, Exynos 5433, MT6752, MT6732, RK3288
	Midgard 2nd	August 2012	Mali-T600 series, T720	Exynos 5250, 5260, 5410, 5420, 5422, 5430, 5800, 7580, Mediatek MT6735, MT6753, Kirin 920, 925, 930, 935	not supported

History

The Khronos Group began a project to create a next generation graphics API in July 2014 with a kickoff meeting at Valve Corporation.^[64] At SIGGRAPH 2014, the project was publicly announced with a call for participants.^[10]

According to the US Patent and Trademark Office, the trademark for Vulkan was filed on February 19, 2015.^[65]

Vulkan was formally named and announced at Game Developers Conference 2015, although speculation and rumors centered around a new API existed beforehand and referred to it as "glNext".^[66]

In early 2015, LunarG (funded by Valve) developed and showcased a Linux driver for Intel which enabled Vulkan compatibility on the HD 4000 series integrated graphics, despite the open source Mesa drivers not being fully compatible with OpenGL 4.0 until later that year.^[67][68] There is still the possibility^[69] of Sandy Bridge support, since it supports compute through Direct3D11.

On August 10, 2015, Google announced that future versions of Android would support Vulkan.^[70] Android Nougat launched support for Vulkan on August 22, 2016.

On December 18, 2015, the Khronos Group announced that the 1.0 version of the Vulkan specification was nearly complete and would be released when conformant drivers were available.^[12] The specification and the open-source Vulkan SDK were released on February 16, 2016.^[6]

See also

• OpenGL – Another graphics API by the Khronos Group
• OpenCL – Another compute API by the Khronos Group
• Mantle – A low-level graphics and compute API from AMD, the foundation of Vulkan
• Direct3D – Windows and Xbox-only graphics API
• Metal – A low-level graphics and compute API for iOS and macOS
• AMDGPU – AMD's fully open-source unified graphics driver for Linux

Notes

1. Drivers so far have supported Windows 7 and later.

References

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2. Kirsch, Nathan. "Is AMD Mantle Dead As We Have Known It? Vulcan API Uses Mantle Technology for OpenGL". Legit Reviews. Retrieved 25 June 2015.
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6. https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-releases-vulkan-1-0-specification
7. https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/specs/1.0/xhtml/vkspec.html
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External links

• Vulkan 1.0 specification
• Vulkan Graphics API: in 20 Minutes (Coffee Break Series) Kenwright