Vulkan®

Vulkan is an open standard and cross-platform Application Programming Interface (API) developed by the Khronos® Group.

Derived from AMD’s revolutionary Mantle API, Vulkan® is a powerful low-overhead graphics API designed for developers who want or need deeper hardware control over GPU acceleration for maximized performance and predictability.

Vulkan® gives software developers control over the performance, efficiency, and capabilities of AMD Radeon™ GPUs and multi-core CPUs.

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®.

Some of our tools to support you with Vulkan® development

Discover the Vulkan® Memory Allocator (VMA) library

Our battle-tested, open source memory allocation library for Vulkan® makes allocating memory a doddle.

Read some of our Vulkan® blog posts

Not enough? Go visit our dedicated page for Vulkan application development:

Need to know driver version information? Try here!

AMD open source driver for Vulkan®

The AMD open source driver for Vulkan is an open-source Vulkan driver for AMD Radeon™ graphics adapters on Linux®.

The driver is built on top of AMD’s Platform Abstraction Library (PAL), a shared component that is designed to encapsulate certain hardware and OS-specific programming details for many of AMD’s 3D and compute drivers. Leveraging PAL can help provide a consistent experience across platforms, including support for recently released GPUs and compatibility with AMD developer tools.

Our latest Vulkan® news