Vulkan APIs are positioned to become one of the next dominant graphics rendering platforms.
In a recent blog post in its Game Dev zone, Intel promoted the use of Vulkan API to game developers citing multiple benefits such as multithreaded programming, simple cross-platform development and support from major chip makers, GPUs and devices. Intel has been openly supportive of the Khronos Group and Vulkan since its inception alongside Google.
We’ve covered Vulkan many times in multiple benchmarks to showcase its capabilities in modern games and it has improved over time most especially recently with both game devs and GPU makers helping to develop support for it further.
Intel is purposely hailing Vulkan API as the future in a bid to grow its support base. Intel holds a significant share of the graphics market stemming from their large share of the laptop, office PC and tablet market. This also moves in favor of Intel’s supposed stab in the GPU market headed by former AMD Radeon head Raja Koduri. If Intel chooses to champion Vulkan further and exert significant effort in promoting it, Microsoft’s DirectX API could be in trouble as its lack of cross-platform support as well as notable lack of progress in development makes it an easy target should developers find it lacking in the future.
Vulkan carries a low overhead while also providing greater control over threading and memory management as well as improving direct access to the GPU over OpenGL* and other predecessor APIs. These features combine to give the developer versatility for targeting an array of platforms with essentially the same code base. With early backing from major industry players, the Vulkan platform has tremendous potential, and developers should be advised to get on board soon. Vulkan is built for now.