Confirmed: Vulkan Is The Next-Gen Graphics API

As a follow-up to last week's "Vulkan" trademark by the Khronos Group and mulling it over this weekend, I've now been able to confirm with two independent entities that Vulkan is indeed the next-gen graphics API designed as the successor to OpenGL for high performance 2D/3D graphics.

The Vulkan details will go public on 3 March tomorrow for GDC2015. For whatever silly reason I wasn't pre-briefed on the matter even though Phoronix is the leading source for Linux OpenGL/graphics information, etc, there were two sources that came through and delivered official documents on Vulkan and the forthcoming OpenCL 2.1. While I'm not under NDA with Khronos, I respect the work done by them and their stakeholders, so as such I won't spill all the beans ahead of time. Just to say today that Vulkan is indeed the name for their new open API for high-efficiency access to modern GPUs across all platforms from desktops to mobiles to embedded/consoles. While Vulkan delivers highly-efficient graphics/compute, OpenGL and OpenGL ES will continue to evolve.

The key Vulkan details are pretty much what one could have assumed now for months given all the talk generated by Direct3D 12, Mantle, Metal, etc. There's also one other exciting nugget: SPIR-V. There will also be open-source Vulkan tools coming.

More details tomorrow.