The Khronos Group has finalized the OpenGL Vulkan 1.0 specification and approved it as an industry standard.
Originally codenamed OpenGL Next or glNext, Vulkan can be described as the open source OpenGL equivalent of Microsoft's DirectX 12. It provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs used in a wide variety of devices from PCs and consoles to mobile phones and embedded platforms.
Vulkan is derived from and built upon components of AMD's Mantle API, which was donated by AMD to Khronos with the intent of giving Khronos a foundation on which to begin developing a low-level API that they could standardize across the industry, much like OpenGL.
Vulkan is design to provide applications direct control over GPU acceleration for maximized performance and predictability with minimized CPU overhead and efficient multi-threaded performance. Multiple Vulkan 1.0 hardware drivers and SDKs are available immediately for developers to begin creating Vulkan applications and engines.
Vulkan is compatible with all hardware that currently supports OpenGL ES 3.1 or OpenGL 4.X and up but new graphics drivers are needed to enable it.
