

Low-overhead rendering with Vulkan on Android - sam42
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2015/08/low-overhead-rendering-with-vulkan.html

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gulpahum
It's great that Google Android will support Vulkan. Now, the support list
seems to be: Android, Windows, SteamOS, Tizen, and many Linux distributions
including Ubuntu and Red Hat. [1]

It's sad that it doesn't include Apple, most likely because they have now
their Metal API.

[1] [http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/10/khronos-wins-support-
from-...](http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/10/khronos-wins-support-from-google-
android-for-its-vulkan-graphics-api/)

EDIT: here's another list of hardware vendors: AMD, ARM, Intel, Imagination,
NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung.

[https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-expands-scope-
of-...](https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-expands-scope-of-3d-open-
standard-ecosystem)

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sgrove
I'd love to see a WebVulkan [0], as wrestling with WebGL's setup is really a
slog to get it to work predictably in the way you want.

WebGL is making progress via extensions with Uniform Buffers, instanced
geometry, etc., but as most people end up using e.g. Three.js, it seems like
exposing a sane, more fine-grained API would help everyone.

[0] Knowing full-well that WebVulkan naturally won't magically solve any
performance issues, and seems to be a very different beast
[https://twitter.com/Tojiro/status/628660898756825089](https://twitter.com/Tojiro/status/628660898756825089)

~~~
gulpahum
I think WebVulkan would be great with WebAssembly! The nice thing about those
technologies is that they are low-level APIs, which means less rooms for bugs.

WebGL, HTML, DOM, and most other web technologies suffer from not being
consistent and they are full of bugs. How many graphics cards have been
blacklisted from WebGL because the drivers don't have the required features or
have too many bugs? [1][2]

[1]
[https://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/BlacklistsAndWhitelists](https://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/BlacklistsAndWhitelists)
[2]
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drive...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drivers)

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StavrosK
Can someone knowledgeable tell me if Vulkan is a good API? I've heard that
OpenGL is a bit of a mess (maybe DirectX is too?), did they get it right this
time?

~~~
flippinburgers
Vulkan is still in development. I don't believe anything about the api is
published yet.

~~~
caligastia
But you can check out the SPIR-V IR spec which is almost finished:

[https://www.khronos.org/registry/spir-v/](https://www.khronos.org/registry/spir-v/)

Not only the Vulkan API but new programming languages will target this IR, so
far it appears to be an innovative architecture for concurrent software, that
integrates graphics and compute, not a bolt-on like OpenCL.

