The Most Popular Vulkan News From 2016

Written by Michael Larabel in Vulkan on 26 December 2016 at 10:09 AM EST. Add A Comment
VULKAN
While Vulkan 1.0 only made its public debut in February, on Phoronix in 2016 were 231 news items so far about this new graphics API from The Khronos Group, not counting the dozens of benchmarking articles looking at length about GPU/driver Linux performance.

The release of Vulkan 1.0 is one of my favorite highlights of 2016. Given all of our Vulkan news on Phoronix from bechmarks to driver news to specification updates to interesting Vulkan projects, here is a look at the most popular Vulkan news on Phoronix from this calendar year. Following that are our most viewed featured-length articles / reviews featuring Vulkan.

The top 12 most viewed Vulkan news items from 2016:

Some Early Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Vulkan Tests With NVIDIA Graphics
While waiting to test Ubuntu Bash on Windows, I decided to run some (manual) tests of Vulkan on Windows compared to some recent Ubuntu Linux figures with different NVIDIA graphics cards.

Intel Vulkan Linux Driver Lands Color Compression Support For Skylake
It's been another busy day in Mesa Git for Intel's "ANV" Vulkan open-source Linux driver.

CryENGINE Is Planning To Deliver Its Vulkan Support In About Two Months
The middle of October is when Crytek should be publicly rolling out their Vulkan API support in the CryENGINE.

Early Radeon Vulkan Windows vs. AMDGPU PRO Linux Benchmarks
On Friday I posted Some Early Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Vulkan Tests With NVIDIA Graphics while today the tables have turned to show The Talos Principle on Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04 Linux under AMD Radeon graphics.

AMD's Vulkan Driver Will Only Work With The AMDGPU Kernel Driver
I've just received confirmation from AMD that their forthcoming Vulkan driver will only work with the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver. This means that unless this AMDGPU kernel driver is extended to support pre-VI hardware, only the very latest AMD GPUs on Linux will work with Khronos' next-generation API.

Direct3D 11 vs. OpenGL vs. Vulkan Radeon Benchmarks On Windows & Linux
After making the Direct3D 11 vs. Vulkan vs. OpenGL benchmarks available to Phoronix Premium subscribers this weekend, these results are now available to everyone. Enjoy.

Running The Latest Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux OpenGL/Vulkan Benchmarks
Now that my Linux reviews of the GeForce GTX 1070 and GeForce GTX 1080 have been published, next on my agenda this week are running some fresh Windows vs. Linux graphics benchmarks with these Pascal graphics cards.

You Can Help Bring Vulkan Support To Older AMD GCN GPUs
Earlier today I wrote about how AMD will only be supporting Vulkan with the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver and not the more common Radeon DRM kernel driver. Here's a few more points to clarify the situation.

Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver Gets ~30% Performance Boost, Now Faster Than OpenGL
With our past Intel Vulkan benchmarks the Vulkan driver was slower than the mature OpenGL driver but this is about to change with an important patch-set published today: a big performance boost is in store.

Valve Is Finally Releasing Dota 2 With Vulkan Support Very Soon
It has taken longer than anticipated, but it looks like Valve will be releasing Dota 2 with Vulkan API renderer support within the next week.

AMD Posts Initial AMDGPU Hybrid Driver With Vulkan Support
Well, AMD has just sent out a pleasant surprise before the weekend: an initial AMD Hybrid Linux driver build! It's AMDGPU-based providing OpenGL and Vulkan support on the new stack!

What A Developer Thinks About Vulkan After Using It In A Game Engine
One of the developers behind a new open-source 3D game engine written in C++ and using Vulkan and DirectX 12 as rendering back-ends has shared his thoughts on this new Khronos graphics API after diving into it for this project.

And then the featured articles with Vulkan:

Vulkan 1.0 Released: What You Need To Know About This Cross-Platform, High-Performance Graphics API
Today's the day! It's Vulkan day! After the better part of two years of hard work, Vulkan 1.0 is ready to meet the world! Today The Khronos Group is announcing the release of Vulkan 1.0 with an embargo that just expired. This hard-launch today is met by the public release of the first conformant driver. The first Vulkan-powered game is also in public beta as of today, but the Linux situation as of today isn't entirely exciting for end-users/gamers as most vendors are still baking their Linux support with Windows generally taking priority. However, even ignoring operating system differences, you need to make sure your expectations are realistic before trying to fire up a Vulkan game while giving developers time to learn and design for this new graphics API.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 On Linux: OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan Performance
$699 USD is a lot to spend on a graphics card, but damn she is a beauty. Last month NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 1080 as the current top-end Pascal card and looked great under Windows while now finally having my hands on the card the past few days I've been putting it through its paces under Ubuntu Linux with the major open APIs of OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and VDPAU. Not only is the raw performance of the GeForce GTX 1080 on Linux fantastic, but the performance-per-Watt improvements made my jaw drop more than a few times. Here are my initial Linux results of the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 Founder's Edition.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 On Linux: Testing With OpenGL, OpenCL, CUDA & Vulkan
If you were amazed by the GeForce GTX 1080 performance under Linux but its ~$699 USD price-tag is too much to handle, the GeForce GTX 1070 is now shipping for $399~449 USD. NVIDIA sent over a GeForce GTX 1070 and I've been putting it through its paces under Linux with a variety of OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan benchmarks along with CUDA and deep learning benchmarks. Here's the first look at the GeForce GTX 1070 performance under Ubuntu Linux.

Dota 2 Vulkan vs. OpenGL Performance Redux
Earlier this week I published some Dota 2 Vulkan vs. OpenGL benchmarks with AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards under Linux. Since then I received some feedback from Valve with regards to Dota 2 on the Source 2 Engine testing along with a better demo to use for benchmarking and also using the latest Dota 2 Vulkan DLC updates. So here is a fresh look at the OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance for this popular Valve game on an assortment of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards.

AMD vs. NVIDIA Vulkan & OpenGL Linux Performance With The New Drivers
Thanks to AMD having released their new GPU-PRO "hybrid" Linux driver a few days ago, there is now Vulkan API support for Radeon GPU owners on Linux. This new AMD Linux driver holds much potential and the closed-source bits are now limited to user-space, among other benefits covered in dozens of Phoronix articles over recent months. With having this new driver in hand plus NVIDIA promoting their Vulkan support to the 364 Linux driver series, it's a great time for some benchmarking. Here are OpenGL and Vulkan atop Ubuntu 16.04 Linux for both AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

Testing The Open-Source "RADV" Radeon Vulkan Driver vs. AMDGPU-PRO
With word coming out last week that the RADV open-source Vulkan driver can now render Dota 2 correctly, I've been running some tests the past few days of this RADV Vulkan driver compared to AMD's official (but currently closed-source) Vulkan driver bundled with the AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan driver.

Mesa 12.0 Released With OpenGL 4.3 Support, Intel Vulkan & Many Other Features
While it's coming late, the huge Mesa 12.0 release is now official! Mesa 12.0 is easily one of the biggest updates to this important open-source user-space OpenGL driver stack in quite some time and will offer much better support and features especially for Intel, Radeon, and NVIDIA open-source Linux desktop users/gamers.

NVIDIA vs. AMD OpenGL & Vulkan Benchmarks With Valve's Dota 2
Yesterday marked the public availability of Dota 2 with a Vulkan renderer after Valve had been showing it off for months. This is the second commercial Linux game (after The Talos Principle) to sport a Vulkan renderer and thus we were quite excited to see how this Dota 2 Vulkan DLC is performing for both NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards. Here are our initial Dota 2 benchmarks with Vulkan as well as OpenGL for reference when using the latest Linux graphics drivers on Ubuntu.

Trying The New AMD GPU-PRO Linux Driver On Ubuntu With Vulkan, OpenCL & OpenGL
On Friday night to much surprise, AMD published the beta version of their new hybrid Linux driver stack with Vulkan support alongside OpenCL, OpenGL, and VDPAU support. Here's some more details from my initial testing of this new driver that AMD is currently calling the Radeon Software AMD GPU-PRO Beta Driver for Linux.

Radeon Vulkan Driver Added To Mesa, Fresh Radeon Vulkan vs. OpenGL Benchmarks + AMDGPU-PRO
Today the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver is landing in mainline Mesa and just hit the Git code minutes ago. Merging the RADV driver came up just over the past few weeks in time for next month's Mesa stable release while this community-based driver was developed over the summer by David Airlie and Bas Nieuwenhuizen. This "unofficial" Radeon Vulkan open-source driver is now becoming part of the Mesa code-base with it being able to support the few Vulkan Linux games but isn't yet a fully conformant driver. Here are fresh benchmarks of the RADV driver compared to the RadeonSI OpenGL driver and benchmarks compared to AMD's hybrid closed-source AMDGPU-PRO driver on several different graphics cards.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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