AMD Vulkan 1.0 Spec Announcement

With this transition to public availability of the Vulkan 1.0 API specifications, AMD will be releasing a beta version of our Vulkan™ API-enabled Radeon™ Software driver. This new driver, in-concert with Radeon™ graphics hardware, enables PC game developers to remove historical software bottlenecks which will unleash new, rich visual gaming experiences.

As a complement to OpenGL™, descended from AMD’s Mantle, and forged by the industry, Vulkan™ is a powerful low-overhead graphics API that gives software developers deep control over the performance, efficiency, and capabilities of Radeon™ GPUs and multi-core CPUs. Compared to OpenGL, Vulkan™ substantially reduces API overhead, which is background work a GPU or CPU must do to interpret what a game is asking of the hardware. Reducing this overhead gives hardware much more time to spend on delivering meaningful features, performance, and image quality. Vulkan™ also exposes GPU hardware features not ordinarily accessible through OpenGL, and uniquely supports Windows® 7, Windows® 8.1, Windows® 10, Android, and Linux.

 

With the consortium of hardware and software companies that make up the Khronos™ Group, AMD is looking forward to the delivering the latest and greatest game rendering technologies to millions of users and many operating systems simultaneously:

 

“The release of the Vulkan™ 1.0 specification is a huge step forward for developers. The Vulkan™ API, which was derived from Mantle, will bring the benefits of low-overhead high-performance Graphics API to the benefit of cross-platform and cross-vendor targeted applications,“ said Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. “The promotion of open and scalable technologies continues to be the focus at AMD, as a pioneer in the low-overhead API space. 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.”