For Vulkan, Khronos opted to give platform holders the right of first refusal on defining feature sets; Khronos would only define feature sets if the platform holder passed on it. Now that Vulkan is launching, we have updated information on which platforms will be defining their own feature sets, and what Khronos will be doing for the rest.
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Update: Windows drivers for both
AMD and
NVIDIA GPUs have been posted today. Both drivers are developer betas and either lack features or are based on older branches than current consumer drivers, however the NVIDIA driver has passed Vulkan conformance testing.
On the hardware side of matters, there’s still some ambiguity in the mobile space about what specific GPUs will support Vulkan, in part due to the fact that it’s Google defining the feature sets. Imagination, Qualcomm, ARM, and NVIDIA have all publicly committed to supporting Vulkan, so the question is how they will handle older architectures. Qualcomm is just launching their new Adreno 5xx series, whereas ARM Mali “Midgard” and Imagination PowerVR “Rogue” continue to be each respective firm’s leading GPU architecture. Finally NVIDIA for their part has already confirmed that Kepler and newer will get Vulkan support.
