NVIDIA Appears To Be Readying Their Vulkan Drivers

Written by Michael Larabel in NVIDIA on 4 November 2015 at 11:00 AM EST. 20 Comments
NVIDIA
NVIDIA is readying their Vulkan drivers for a same-day release and on the Windows side they've already begun exposing some of the Vulkan interface.

NVIDIA's 358.66 driver for Windows adds a few OpenGL runtime changes referencing VK (Vulkan) and there's a new nv-vk32 library that exposes a number of Vulkan functions. Beyond that, this driver sets new runtime capabilities in OpenCL for the forthcoming Pascal and Volta GPUs.

Details on the Vulkan functions showing up in the new NVIDIA Windows driver can be found from this forum thread.

The Khronos Group's public release of Vulkan isn't too far away now and the NVIDIA Linux driver shouldn't be too far behind. With the next release stream we should see Vulkan showing up and possibly even the Mir/Wayland exposure, following their year-plus of work for OpenGL EGL support and working towards complying with the Linux kernel's DRM mode-setting interfaces. Interesting times are ahead!

Complementing the same-day NVIDIA Vulkan driver support will be the open-sourcing of the Intel Vulkan driver and hopefully AMD's closed-source Vulkan driver.
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