Getting to know the Vulkan API

The Vulkan API, introduced in 2016 by the Khronos Group, is a low-overhead, cross-platform computing API that is the successor to OpenGL and its variants (WebGL and OpenGL ES). In fact, Vulkan was called Next Generation OpenGL (or glNext) before it was officially named Vulkan. OpenGL has been around since 1992 and it was the de facto introductory graphics API everyone learned (and learns still today). Allied with its simplicity, OpenGL is ubiquitous even today.

So, how is Vulkan different from OpenGL? It starts with its complexity. Vulkan is intended to provide application authors more control over the graphics hardware so that they can implement a solution that caters to their needs. Applications can implement solutions as simple as they want or as complex as they need. In practice, this means that the application is now responsible for controlling the hardware, making it more complex. The drivers, on the other hand, became simpler. For instance,...