Vulkan Graphics API

Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API maintained by the Khronos Group. Announced at GDC 2015 and released in 2016, Vulkan is the successor to OpenGL, designed to better utilize modern multi-core CPUs and GPUs by reducing driver overhead and giving developers direct control over GPU operations. Vulkan is used by Unreal Engine, Unity, Source 2, DXVK (for DirectX games on Linux via Proton and Steam Deck). Key features include: explicit API design (direct control over GPU memory allocation, synchronization, and command execution, eliminating hidden driver overhead), multi-threaded command generation (command buffers generated in parallel across CPU threads, scaling with core count), low CPU overhead (up to 10x less driver overhead than OpenGL, enabling more draw calls and richer scenes), cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Android, and macOS/iOS via MoltenVK), validation layers (runtime API usage checking, debugging, and profiling), SPIR-V (binary intermediate language for pre-compiled portable shaders, supporting GLSL and HLSL), extensions mechanism (vendors exposing hardware features before core promotion), ray tracing (hardware-accelerated ray tracing on NVIDIA RTX, AMD RDNA 2+, Intel Arc), compute shaders (general-purpose GPU computing), and Vulkan SC (Safety Critical variant for automotive and aerospace).