Discover Vulkan, the successor to OpenGL

If you’re an OpenGL developer, take a look at this briefing on Vulkan.

It’s the preface to a three-part tutorial that shows you how to use the Vulkan API. As it explains, Vulkan is seen as the successor to OpenGL and it represents a complete redesign of the API to take advantage of the changes in graphics cards over the last 20 years.

Vulkan is a low-level API, which means there’s less error checking and feedback than you’re used to with OpenGL. The upside is that this new "thin API" offers a much higher performance, being only a thin abstraction layer of the hardware itself.

The tutorial includes source code and takes you from loading the Vulkan runtime library, through using swap chains to display rendered images, up to creating a graphics pipeline and preparing drawing commands. A fourth part of the tutorial is also in development.

For more resources to help you develop your games, visit the Intel Developer Zone.

This blog post is sponsored by the Intel Developer Zone, which helps you to develop, market and sell software and apps for prominent platforms and emerging technologies powered by Intel Architecture.