NVIDIA Blogs About The Beauty Of Vulkan

A NVIDIA engineer has penned a post about engaging with Vulkan and how this soon-to-be-released graphics API is great going forward.

Christoph Kubisch of NVIDIA began by saying, "NVIDIA believes strongly that Vulkan supplements OpenGL, and that both APIs have their own strengths. Vulkan’s strengths lie in the explicit control and multi-threading capabilities that by design allow us to push more commands to the GPU in less CPU time and have finer-grained cost control. OpenGL, however, continues to provide easier to use access to the hardware. This is especially important for applications that are not CPU-limited. Current NVIDIA technologies such as “bindless”, NV_command_list, and the “AZDO” techniques for core OpenGL, can achieve excellent single-thread performance."

His post goes on to cover the command submission, command buffer usage, common objects for rendering, and allocation management.

He concludes Engaging the Voyage to Vulkan by saying, "Starting with a new API can involve a lot of work as common utilities may not yet be available. NVIDIA will therefore provide a few Vulkan extensions from day zero, so that you as developer can enjoy less obstacles on your path to Vulkan. We will support consuming GLSL shader strings directly and not having to use SPIR-V. Furthermore we leverage our industry leading OpenGL driver and allow you to run Vulkan inside an OpenGL context and presenting Vulkan Images within it. This allows you to use your favorite windowing and user-interface libraries and some of our samples will make use of it to compare OpenGL and Vulkan seamlessly."

Of course, this isn't anything new that NVIDIA's been readying a same-day Vulkan driver for Windows and Linux. Vulkan has been delayed well into 2016 and last I've heard makes it sound like the Khronos Group will ratify the specification at the end of Q1 or beginning of Q2.