From the consortium that brought you OpenGL®, Vulkan® is a new graphics API for developers who want or need deeper hardware control. Designed with “low-overhead” capabilities, Vulkan® gives devs total control over the performance, efficiency, and capabilities of Radeon™ GPUs and multi-core CPUs.

Compared to OpenGL®, Vulkan® substantially reduces “API overhead,” which is background work a CPU must do to interpret what a game is asking of the hardware. Reducing this overhead gives hardware much more time to spend on delivering meaningful features, performance and image quality. Vulkan® also exposes GPU hardware features not ordinarily accessible through OpenGL®.

Vulkan® inherits these capabilities from AMD’s Mantle graphics API. Mantle was the first of its kind: the first low-overhead PC graphics API, the first to grant unprecedented access to PC GPU resources, and the first to offer absolute control of those resources. Most importantly for gamers, Mantle got the industry thinking about how much additional GPU performance could be unlocked with a low-overhead graphics API.

Though the Mantle API was tailored for AMD hardware, Mantle was also designed with just enough hardware abstraction to accommodate almost any modern graphics architecture.  That architecture proved useful when we contributed the source code and API specification of Mantle to serve as the foundation of Vulkan® in May of 2015.

Since that time, Vulkan® has been forged under the stewardship of a comprehensive industry alliance that spans the hardware development, game development and content creation industries. Many new and significant capabilities have been added, such as support and performance optimizations for Android® smartphones and tablets, or cross-OS support for Windows® and Linux®.