AMD has written to HEXUS to celebrate the release of the ratified Vulkan 1.0 specification by the Khronos Group. Just before Xmas we heard that Vulkan 1.0 was going to miss its end of year target but remained 'imminent', now in mid-February the specification has been published.
To recap, Vulkan is a new generation, open standard API for high-efficiency access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs. It was built from the ground-up to provide direct control over GPU acceleration for maximized performance and predictability on a wide variety of systems including Windows 7 or newer, Android and Linux. Thus it aims to deliver the "latest and greatest game rendering technologies to millions of users and many operating systems simultaneously".
AMD had a big part to play in the development of Vulkan, as it is based upon the red team's work on the Mantle API. As such AMD is happily boasting of this powerful low-overhead graphics API that gives software developers deep control over the performance, efficiency, and capabilities of modern GPUs and multi-core CPUs. Compared to OpenGL, Vulkan is said to substantially reduce API overhead, furthermore it exposes GPU features not ordinarily available via OpenGL. AMD will be releasing a beta version of its Vulkan API-enabled Radeon Software driver soon, delivering on the promise of removing historical software bottlenecks to unleash new, rich visual gaming experiences.
Raja Koduri, SVP and Chief Architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD, claims that the release of Vulkan will provide a huge step forward for developers and a significant boost for cross-platform and cross-vendor applications. "The promotion of open and scalable technologies continues to be the focus at AMD, as a pioneer in the low-overhead API space," said the RTG boss. "As a member of the Khronos Group, AMD is proud to collaborate with hardware and software industry leaders to develop the Vulkan API to ignite the next evolution in PC game development," Koduri summed up.
