Vulkan Looks All But Confirmed For 2016 Launch

It looks all but confirmed that Vulkan will launch in early 2016 rather than making it out this calendar year as originally planned.

Last week I wrote about how it was looking like Vulkan would not be released this year. Since then, no stakeholders have been willing to officially confirm the launch of Vulkan has slipped from 2015 or have the need to point out anything to correct to my previous article, anonymously or not.

Any day past today for a public launch of the Vulkan API this year would come down as silly from a PR perspective considering many people get the last two weeks of the year off of work and/or are otherwise distracted by Christmas and the New Year, etc -- a holiday launch just wouldn't generate much buzz given all the other distractions. More so, I haven't received any notification of forthcoming NDA briefing about the launch, which in the past generally happens around 1~2 weeks prior to big Khronos Group announcements.

So while circumstantial without any official confirmation from Khronos either way, I'd place my bets on Vulkan being unveiled in early 2016... Hopefully they'll be able to make it in the run-up to CES in January so the various vendors will be able to show their Vulkan demos in full in Las Vegas. There aren't any other events in early 2016 that come to mind where Khronos could use it as a large platform for launching the new standard, as they've traditionally done in the past at events like SIGGRAPH and GDC. The 2016 CES runs from 6 to 9 January.