Khronos Group is responsible for the OpenGL and OpenCL standards.
They've had a lot of internal fighting over the future of OpenGL for many years. Real-time 3d engine developers (ie games) wanted to remove a lot of cruft and expose the hardware more, while CAD and other groups were happy with how things were. For years nothing much happened. This is the same fight which made OpenGL 2 so delayed.
Then AMD released their proprietary Mantle API a few years ago, which amongst other things was much lower level than OpenGL or DirectX at the time, allowing 3d engine developers to extract much more from the hardware.
AMD offered Mantle to Khronos which picked it up, polished it and named it Vulkan.
Now CAD folks can keep their OpenGL, while real-time 3d folks can enjoy extracting the maximum from the hardware with Vulkan.
AMD developed Mantle. Saw it was good. The Khronos Group though it could be better. They start working on Vulkan and looking hard at how it can satisfy and unify all the major platforms. A couple years later Microsoft catches wind that Vulkan is capable of huge performance improvements. The DX12 initiative is launched. Since Microsoft wants to be first to market and need only support a single platform, they are able to beat Vulkan to market. Now DX12 has received some notoriety and even helping to needlessl
When Khronos was asked why they didn't make a new API until Mantle came along, they replied saying they don't make new APIs, they only standardize existing ones. Never look to Khronos to innovate, they only follow what others have already done.
The point of summaries is to summarise. If you have to read the article in order to understand the summary, then why not eliminate the summary entirely?
PHAH.
Like I'm going to blindly click some bogus link from some place calling themselves "phoronix".
Give us a link to the story from some source of reputable technical reporting, like Forbes [forbes.com].
More or less, the group responsible for OpenGL (Khronos) has announced the release of their graphics API (Vulkan) that competes more directly with modern graphics APIs such as Microsoft's DirectX 12 and Apple's Metal.
Previously, OpenGL and DirectX (11 and earlier) provided very high-level APIs with decades of legacy cruft attached that bogged things down. Developers of graphics-intensive applications (e.g. games, VR, etc.) have been clamoring for lower-level APIs that allow them to circumvent the cruft by giving them more direct access to the hardware, since the hardware is capable of much more than what those high-level APIs were allowing. AMD's Mantle, Apple's Metal, and Microsoft's DirectX 12 were APIs in that vein, all of which were released last year. For various reasons, AMD donated Mantle to Khronos last year. After a bit of refinement and retuning so that it could operate in a cross-platform capacity (rather than being restricted to AMD hardware) Khronos has released Mantle today under its new name of Vulkan.
The reason this is big news is because it's the last of the major graphics APIs we're expecting to see released this generation. Vulkan is effectively serving as the successor to OpenGL, and it'll likely soon become the go-to graphics API for Linux app development, displacing OpenGL. The release of Vulkan allows Linux graphics to stay competitive in terms of performance with Windows and OS X. Without Vulkan, Linux apps would be stuck with OpenGL, which is quickly falling behind the modern APIs.
In retrospect it was more of a "if all your friends jump off a bridge, would you jump too" thing. AMD started it by saying low level access like on consoles would be superior, Microsoft and Apple jumped after and despite Mantle not really being much of a success they gave it to Khronos so now OpenGL has a low level API too. So now they all have one but if the market was really crying out for it, well not really. It did make AMD look somewhat better on anemic CPUs which helped their APU offerings but on a ga
Who? What? Huh? (Score:0, Offtopic)
Salamander Group announces release of Superfish 1.0
Superfish 1.0 was released this morning as a surprise for those looking towards a high-level, cross-species (everyone but Apple) RGB.
That makes about as much sense, I guess.
Re: (Score:1)
That's how I felt, too. I guess it has something to do with graphics.
Re:Who? What? Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Khronos Group is responsible for the OpenGL and OpenCL standards.
They've had a lot of internal fighting over the future of OpenGL for many years. Real-time 3d engine developers (ie games) wanted to remove a lot of cruft and expose the hardware more, while CAD and other groups were happy with how things were. For years nothing much happened. This is the same fight which made OpenGL 2 so delayed.
Then AMD released their proprietary Mantle API a few years ago, which amongst other things was much lower level than OpenGL or DirectX at the time, allowing 3d engine developers to extract much more from the hardware.
AMD offered Mantle to Khronos which picked it up, polished it and named it Vulkan.
Now CAD folks can keep their OpenGL, while real-time 3d folks can enjoy extracting the maximum from the hardware with Vulkan.
At least that's how I remember it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
AMD developed Mantle. Saw it was good. The Khronos Group though it could be better. They start working on Vulkan and looking hard at how it can satisfy and unify all the major platforms. A couple years later Microsoft catches wind that Vulkan is capable of huge performance improvements. The DX12 initiative is launched. Since Microsoft wants to be first to market and need only support a single platform, they are able to beat Vulkan to market. Now DX12 has received some notoriety and even helping to needlessl
Re: (Score:2)
The Khronos Group though it could be better.
When Khronos was asked why they didn't make a new API until Mantle came along, they replied saying they don't make new APIs, they only standardize existing ones. Never look to Khronos to innovate, they only follow what others have already done.
Re:Who? What? Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
The point of summaries is to summarise. If you have to read the article in order to understand the summary, then why not eliminate the summary entirely?
vet your sources /. (Score:3)
Like I'm going to blindly click some bogus link from some place calling themselves "phoronix".
Give us a link to the story from some source of reputable technical reporting, like Forbes [forbes.com].
Re: (Score:2)
If you had clicked the link, the very first major heading is, "What Is Vulkan 1.0".
Lol, where's the sport in that??
Re:Who? What? Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
More or less, the group responsible for OpenGL (Khronos) has announced the release of their graphics API (Vulkan) that competes more directly with modern graphics APIs such as Microsoft's DirectX 12 and Apple's Metal.
Previously, OpenGL and DirectX (11 and earlier) provided very high-level APIs with decades of legacy cruft attached that bogged things down. Developers of graphics-intensive applications (e.g. games, VR, etc.) have been clamoring for lower-level APIs that allow them to circumvent the cruft by giving them more direct access to the hardware, since the hardware is capable of much more than what those high-level APIs were allowing. AMD's Mantle, Apple's Metal, and Microsoft's DirectX 12 were APIs in that vein, all of which were released last year. For various reasons, AMD donated Mantle to Khronos last year. After a bit of refinement and retuning so that it could operate in a cross-platform capacity (rather than being restricted to AMD hardware) Khronos has released Mantle today under its new name of Vulkan.
The reason this is big news is because it's the last of the major graphics APIs we're expecting to see released this generation. Vulkan is effectively serving as the successor to OpenGL, and it'll likely soon become the go-to graphics API for Linux app development, displacing OpenGL. The release of Vulkan allows Linux graphics to stay competitive in terms of performance with Windows and OS X. Without Vulkan, Linux apps would be stuck with OpenGL, which is quickly falling behind the modern APIs.
Re: (Score:2)
In retrospect it was more of a "if all your friends jump off a bridge, would you jump too" thing. AMD started it by saying low level access like on consoles would be superior, Microsoft and Apple jumped after and despite Mantle not really being much of a success they gave it to Khronos so now OpenGL has a low level API too. So now they all have one but if the market was really crying out for it, well not really. It did make AMD look somewhat better on anemic CPUs which helped their APU offerings but on a ga