The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies, has announced availability of the Vulkan 1.0 royalty-free, open standard API specification.
It’s designed to provide high-efficiency, cross-platform access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs [graphical user interfaces] used in a variety of devices from PCs and consoles to mobile phones and embedded platforms. This ground-up design, complementing the OpenGL and OpenGL ES 3D APIs [application programming interfaces], provides applications direct control over GPU acceleration for maximized performance and predictability with minimized CPU overhead and efficient multi-threaded performance.
Multiple Vulkan 1.0 hardware drivers and SDKs are available immediately for developers to begin creating Vulkan applications and engines. More information on Vulkan is available at https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/.