ARM announced a new GPU from the same family as Mali-400 that uses only half as much power. The new GPU, the Mali-470, is targeted at next-generation wearables and IoT devices that need low-cost and low-power chips. The new Mali-470 comes with support for the ubiquitous OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics API. According to ARM, it brings a strong balance between pixel control and energy efficiency, which makes it well-suited for user interfaces. Users aren’t likely to play 3D games on their smartwatches any time soon, so OpenGL ES 3.0 and beyond shouldn’t be necessary. (By the time it is, the more efficient Vulkan should be the de facto graphics API.)

Vulkan is able to cover a wide range of platforms and hardware with vastly different form factors and power envelopes. Vulkan can run on a smart watch or a high end workstation, or anything in between. These platforms are going to have completely different capabilities and for good reason – they have different use cases in mind. Read more to understand how Vulkan has been designed to support all platforms.

Imagination Technologies are very excited to announce an upcoming series of talks designed to discuss the Vulkan API in more detail. Imagination is a promoter member of the Khronos Group and a keen supporter of open standards for mobile graphics. Imagination is currently collaborating with the Vulkan working group to ensure the final version of the API is optimally designed for today’s mobile and desktop GPU architectures.

Neil Trevett gave an interview and talked Vulkan after the 2015 Linaro Connect conference. ARM Devices has the video coverage of the interview.

Introduction to Vulkan and how the NVIDIA driver will implement Vulkan:

This Vulkan demo from Intel shows the power and performance improvements resulting from a thinner, better optimized 3D API. Vulkan API is on track for release before the end of this year.

Toptal Technical editor Nermin Hajdarbegovic has written great overview on Vulkan. If you’re curious how this new API slated compares to OpenGL, or how it relates to SPIR-V, this would be a good starting point.

As there has been lots of new information on Vulkan, Khronos‘ new graphics and compute API Sascha Willems decided to do a write up of the new API from a hobby 3D developer’s point of view.

The Khronos Group announced significantly expanded scope and momentum for its family of open standard 3D graphics APIs. Vulkan™, the new generation API for high-efficiency access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs, is on track for implementation and specifications later this year. It has received support from Android, SteamOS, Tizen, and multiple Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Red Hat.  The new OpenGL® ES 3.2 specification absorbs AEP (Android Extension Pack) functionality to enhance pervasive graphics capabilities across mobile, consumer, and automotive devices.  A set of OpenGL extensions will also expose the very latest capabilities of desktop hardware.


Press Release (Khronos Press Briefing slidedeck)

Feedback forum

Registry

Valve and LunarG are working closely with Khronos to provide Vulkan developers with open source tools. These tools and first drivers are expected to be available for Vulkan developers during 2015. Valve is sponsoring LunarG to provide Open Source Tools, a prepackaged SDK, and technical support for Game Developers bringing their 3D engines to the new Vulkan API.

In order to address some of the sources of CPU overhead and provide developers with more explicit control over rendering, we’ve been working to bring a new 3D rendering API, Vulkan™, to Android. Like OpenGL™ ES, Vulkan is an open standard for 3D graphics and rendering maintained by Khronos. We’ll be working hard to help create, test, and ship Vulkan, but at the same time, we’re also going to contribute to and support OpenGL ES. As a developer, you’ll be able to choose which API is right for you: the simplicity of OpenGL ES, or the explicit control of Vulkan. We’re committed to providing an excellent developer experience, no matter which API you choose. Vulkan is still under development, but you’ll be able to find specifications, tests, and tools once they are released online.

Imagination is partnering with Google to demonstrate an advanced prototype of the new Vulkan graphics API on Android. The Gnome Horde demo will be unveiled during a presentation at SIGGRAPH 2015 and runs on the PowerVR GPU inside the Nexus Player device from Google. Gnome Horde is designed to showcase the capability of Vulkan to meet the needs of the Android graphics developer community. The article below offers a complete technical description of the demo, including a video and multiple screenshots illustrating how Vulkan on PowerVR leads to improvements in performance and energy consumption.

If you can’t make it to SIGGRAPH, you can still get your Vulkan t-shirt. Order today from TeeSpring. We are not making a profit on these shirts. Our goal is to simply get as many shirts out there that we can. All shirts printed on high quality American Apparel Triblend from Small to 2XL for men and S to XL for women.

The Khronos Group SIGGRAPH schedule has been posted online. This year Khronos brings four BOFs to the BOF Blitz, a Chapter meetup and a course a party! Khronos is celebrating it’s 15th Anniversary this year, and what a year it’s turning out to be. BOFs include OpenVX & OpenCL, OpenCL, SYCL & SPIR-V, WebGL and glTF and Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenGL ES.

Developers at Canonical working on the Mir Display Server for Ubuntu Linux have publicly confirmed for the first time they’re starting to look at the Vulkan graphics API.