Happy First Birthday Vulkan!
Today marks one year since The Khronos Group unveiled the Vulkan 1.0 specification! If you want to re-live the Vulkan 1.0 release from one year ago, check out our extensive Vulkan 1.0 Released: What You Need To Know About This Cross-Platform, High-Performance Graphics API article. Vulkan sure is popular and at last check that article had over a half-million views.
It's been a hell of a year for Vulkan! Vulkan 1.0 debuted on 16 February 2016 with The Talos Principle as the launch title. The three big hardware vendors were quick to ship their first Vulkan beta drivers. NVIDIA's Vulkan driver remains in great shape, AMD shipped their closed-source Vulkan driver that unfortunately still hasn't been open-sourced, Intel's Windows Vulkan driver was recently promoted from beta to stable, Intel's open-source Linux driver continues maturing, and the RADV driver has come about as a viable open-source Radeon Vulkan driver developed by the community. Vulkan drivers across mobile continue to advance as well.
It's been a fun year with Vulkan around. We know Khronos is still working on Vulkan-Next but in the interim last month was the sizable Vulkan 1.0.39 update.
Open-source projects around Vulkan continue to flourish, as we've noted in so many articles over the past year. From a look this morning on GitHub, there are over 850 projects mentioning Vulkan. When it comes to commercial games/software with Vulkan, Linux users have currently The Talos Principle and Dota 2 while there is also the ability to play DOOM via Wine. From open-source, vkQuake currently remains the main open-source Vulkan game. But Vulkan in its second year should see more Vulkan game releases now that game studios have had more time to adapt their engines to lower-level graphics APIs like Vulkan, D3D12, and Metal.
Overall it's been a remarkable first year for Vulkan, at least I'd say so with looking at it on a daily basis. Feel free to share your thoughts about Vulkan in its first year with us via our forums.
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