Back in August of 2014, Khronos announced the Next Generation OpenGL Initiative. The industry consortium, responsible for overseeing a number of major cross-platform GPU standards such as OpenGL and OpenCL, was embarking upon a development project to create a true, next-generation successor to OpenGL and OpenGL ES. What would eventually become to be known as Vulkan, Khronos’s new graphics API would be an open, multi-platform low-level API to rival DirectX 12 and Metal.
Now 18 months after the initiative began, today Khronos is announcing that the Vulkan 1.0 specification has been released, and that the consortium and its members intend to hit the ground running. Along with the release of the specification itself, today will also mark the launch of document, drivers, SDKs, conformance tests, and even beta software support. Khronos has never had a hard API launch before – previous procedures were to release the specification and then let members trickle in with drivers and applications – so this marks a major occasion not just for graphics APIs, but for Khronos as an organization going forward.
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