We are only just beginning to see Vulkan friendly games become available. DOOM is the biggest name in the Vulkan gaming stable and it really does benefit greatly from this modern API, depending upon your PC system and GPU. Now the Khronos Group has revealed it is already beavering away on Vulkan Next.
At the recent SIGGRAPH 2016 the Khronos Group gave a presentation about OpenGL, OpenGL ES and Vulkan. Within the presentation we got a tantalising but brief glimpse of what Vulkan Next will bring. (A single slide, skip to 21mins 10s and onward in the linked video.)
As you can see above, Vulkan Next is "in active development". Key areas being worked on in this updated API are improved multiple GPU support and VR support. The scope of the improved multi-GPU support wasn't sketched out so it's probably not worth speculating about right now. In the presentation it was just said the current multi-GPU support wasn't very polished so it would be improved. The VR support will come by way of more efficient multi-view rendering, direct screen access and other tweaks. These techniques are useful in optimising content for VR headset displays like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
With SIGGRAPH presentations targeted at the graphics industry and developers, Khronos revealed some more aspects of Vulkan Next that might appeal to this community. Such features include; cross-API and cross-process sharing, subgroup instructions, generalized renderpass / subpass dependencies, and a tightening up the memory model.
Interestingly the Khronos group said that some of the new features of the API may come out as extensions. That could be good for keeping Vulkan as light as possible as it is meant to be a universal API, for a multitude of platforms. The group hasn't set out a release schedule for Vulkan Next.
