Submission + - Khronos Unveils Vulkan Graphics API (arstechnica.com)
jones_supa writes: The Khronos Group has announced "Vulkan", its next generation API for high performance 3D graphics and GPU-based computation. Vulkan, previously known as Next Generation OpenGL or just GLnext, is designed to be a low-overhead API that facilitates multithreaded 3D development, enabling different threads to simultaneously prepare batches of commands to send to the GPU. It gives developers greater control of generating commands, putting tasks such as memory and thread management in their hands rather than relying on video drivers to handle these responsibilities. In so doing, it greatly reduces the amount of work that the driver must perform. The new API was created to make it a better fit for modern hardware: GPUs are complex, highly programmable devices, and CPUs have abundant cores and multithreading support. Shader compilation will adopt the Direct3D approach: instead of compiling from source on every run, programs will be stored as precompiled bytecode in a form called "SPIR-V". At least for now, OpenGL won't go away either, and Khronos will continue its development on the side.
