Vulkan is a low level API that gives direct access of the GPU to developers who want the ultimate in control. With a simpler, thinner driver, Vulkan has less latency and overhead than traditional OpenGL or Direct3D. Vulkan has efficient multi-threading capabilities with multi-core CPUs that keep the graphics pipeline loaded, enabling a new level of performance on existing hardware.
Vulkan is the first new generation, low-level API that is cross platform. This allows developers to create applications for a variety of PC and mobile devices and operating systems. Like OpenGL, Vulkan is an open, royalty-free standard for any platform to adopt. For developers who prefer to remain on OpenGL, NVIDIA will continue to lead OpenGL innovations.
Learn more about Vulkan here.
Product is based on a published Khronos Specification and has been submitted to, and expected to pass, the Khronos Conformance Process. Current conformance status can be found at khronos.org/conformance.
The LunarG Vulkan SDK provides development and runtime components required to build, run, and debug Vulkan applications. Refer to the LunarG Vulkan SDK, Documentation and Known Issues at vulkan.lunarg.com for the most up to date SDK information.
A prebuilt SDK can be downloaded from vulkan.lunarg.com
Currently there is no prebuilt SDK provided for Linux-ARM, but source code can be downloaded from the above location and built for ARM architecture with the instructions mentioned inside the package.
gitlab.khronos.org/vulkan/vulkan - This needs khronos account to access and download the code.
For developer convenience, NVIDIA has prebuilt a few parts of the SDK, downloaded from above location, which will be required for vulkan applications.
This Vulkan SDK file is based on Khronos Vulkan API header version 1.0.1.
Details of what the prebuilt SDK contains:
- loader
-- libvulkan-1.so.0 : Vulkan loader library
- nvidia_icd.json : Configuration file for Vulkan ICD
- LICENSE.txt : License under which this package is being distributed
- demos :
-- cube : demo app showing rotating cube
-- tri : demo app showing triangle animation
-- vulkaninfo : app to findout vulkan implementation details on platform
- glslang
-- bin
--- glslangValidator : shader validation tool
--- spirv-remap : a utility to improve compression of SPIR-V binary files via entropy reduction, plus optional stripping of debug information and load/store optimization.
-- lib : required libs