Vulkan was first announced by the non-profit Khronos Group at GDC 2015. The Vulkan API was initially referred to as the "next generation OpenGL initiative," or "OpenGL next" by Khronos. Vulkan is derived from and built upon components of AMD's Mantle API, which was donated by AMD to Khronos with the intent of giving Khronos a foundation on which to begin developing a low-level API that they could standardize across the industry. The Khronos Group began a project to create a next generation graphics API in July 2014 with a kickoff meeting at Valve. At SIGGRAPH 2014, the project was publicly announced with a call for participants. Vulkan was formally named and announced at Game Developers Conference 2015.
Vulkan is intended to provide a variety of advantages over other APIs as well as over its predecessor, OpenGL. Vulkan offers lower overhead, more direct control over the GPU, and lower CPU usage. Its overall concept and feature set are similar to those of Mantle. These were later adopted by Microsoft with Direct3D 12 and by Apple with Metal. Vulkan is available on multiple modern operating systems and architectures, and provides a single API for both desktop and mobile graphics devices. Vulkan runs natively on at least Android, Linux, BSD Unix, QNX, Haiku, Nintendo Switch, Raspberry Pi, Stadia, Fuchsia, Tizen, and Windows 7, 8, 10, and 11. MoltenVK provides freely licensed third-party support for macOS, iOS and tvOS by wrapping over Apple's Metal API.
Vulkan reduces load on CPUs through the use of batching and other low-level optimizations. Vulkan offers improved scalability on multi-core CPUs due to the modernized threading architecture. Vulkan drivers are supposed to ingest shaders already translated into an intermediate binary format called SPIR-V. Vulkan provides unified management of compute kernels and graphical shaders, eliminating the need to use a separate compute API in conjunction with a graphics API. Ray tracing is provided in a set of cross-vendor extensions, analogous to the OptiX and DirectX Raytracing APIs. Video acceleration is provided for decoding and encoding, such as H.264 and H.265.
Vulkan 1.0 was released in February 2016. Vulkan 1.1 was released by the Khronos Group on March 7, 2018. This update standardized several extensions, such as multi-view, device groups, cross-process and cross-API sharing, advanced compute functionality, HLSL support, and YCbCr support. On January 15, 2020, Vulkan 1.2 was released by the Khronos Group. This update integrates 23 additional commonly used proven Vulkan extensions into the base Vulkan standard. On January 25, 2022, Vulkan 1.3 was released by the Khronos Group. This update integrates 23 additional commonly used proven Vulkan extensions into the base Vulkan standard and focuses on reducing fragmentation. On December 3, 2024, Vulkan 1.4 was released by the Khronos Group.
As of March 2023, Intel has split Vulkan driver support on Windows and on Linux. On Windows, Skylake to Ice Lake supports up to Vulkan 1.3. On Linux, there is incomplete Vulkan support for Haswell. On Windows, AMD supports Vulkan 1.2 from GCN 1.0 to GCN 3.0, and GCN 4.0 and newer support Vulkan 1.3. On Linux, there are various Vulkan drivers, including AMDVLK developed by AMD and RADV in Mesa developed by Valve, Red Hat, Google and others. NVIDIA developed Vulkan drivers support Vulkan 1.2 on Kepler cards and Vulkan 1.4 on Maxwell and newer cards. NVK, an experimental, open source Vulkan driver for Linux, was merged into mainline Mesa in August 2023. Most modern Android devices support Vulkan. As of June 2022, Apple devices do not provide native support for the Vulkan API. Huawei provides support for native Vulkan NAPI since HarmonyOS 4.0 API 10. Microsoft supports Vulkan 1.2 (and higher) on Windows 10 and 11, with a downloadable compatibility pack.
Vulkan is not backwards compatible with OpenGL, although projects like Google's ANGLE and Mesa's Zink implement OpenGL on top of Vulkan. Vulkan is also not compatible with other graphics APIs such as Direct3D, Metal, and Mantle. However, implementations of those APIs exist atop of Vulkan, such as DXVK for Direct3D 8, 9, 10, and 11, and VKD3D-Proton for Direct3D 12 support. Indium is an in-development third-party implementation for Metal, and GRVK is an in-development third-party implementation for Mantle.
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