Semantic Coherence: Vulkan – Signal Evidence & AI Readability

Khronos welcomes community contributions
[H2] Contributing
There are many ways community members can contribute to Vulkan ranging from joining Khronos as a member, making suggestions for the Vulkan spec via Github or contributing to the many open source software and tools projects. Here are a few pointers to how to get started:
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Khronos welcomes community contributions
[H2] Contributing
There are many ways community members can contribute to Vulkan ranging from joining Khronos as a member, making suggestions for the Vulkan spec via Github or contributing to the many open source software and tools projects. Here are a few pointers to how to get started: Join Khronos as a Member Promoter/contributor levels: Directly influence the Vulkan spec (with voting rights)Associate/Academic/Not-for-Profit levels: Advise the Working Group on future evolution topics (no voting rights) Find Out More Vulkan on GitHub Khronos maintains several public GitHub repos for Vulkan - please follow the contributing and licensing guidelines listed on the repos:The Vulkan specification (Vulkan_docs)Vulkan Guide (vulkan_guide)Khronos Vulkan Tutorial (vulkan_tutorial)Vulkan samples (vulkan_samples)docs.vulkan.org website (vulkan_site)Many tools, layers, profiles, etc.The public community can contribute viaSubmitting issuesSuggesting improvements Find Out More Contribute to the many community supported open source Vulkan projects EnginesFrameworksLibrariesLanguage bindings Find Out More Roadmap Suggestions Vulkan Roadmap "proposal" (for background on Vulkan Roadmaps) The Vulkan working group welcomes input from the developer community on challenges that you would like to see targeted in future Vulkan Roadmap milestones. If you have significant problems you’d like to see solved, major pain points that need addressing, improvements to streamline development, etc., your feedback will help guide the development of new solutions. Submit a "Roadmap Feedback" issue on Vulkan-Docs Open an issue (or comment on an existing Roadmap Feedback issue) on the Vulkan-Docs Github repo using the Roadmap Feedback issue template. See issue #2220 for an example. Discord channel for roadmap ideas Go to #vulkan-roadmap-discussions on the official Vulkan Discord and post suggested roadmap improvements to seed discussions with other Vulkan developers and Work Group members
[H2] Vulkan Platform Support
Vulkan is a cross-platform industry standard enabling developers to target a wide range of devices with the same graphics API.
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Vulkan Developments
[H2] Latest Extensions
Vulkan is constantly evolving to bring new capabilities and improvements to the API. Here are some of the most recent developments
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Baldur's Gate 3 - Larian Studios Vulkan Developments
[H2] Latest Extensions
Vulkan is constantly evolving to bring new capabilities and improvements to the API. Here are some of the most recent developments Vulkan 1.4 Specification Vulkan 1.4 Specification The Vulkan 1.4 specification consolidates numerous previously optional extensions, features, and increased minimum hardware limits, many of which were defined in the Vulkan Roadmap 2022 and 2024 milestones and associated profiles Read the press release Khronos Streamlines Development and Deployment of GPU-Accelerated Applications with Vulkan 1.4 Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Released Press Release The Vulkan Working Group has released two important updates to the API and ecosystem: an entirely new Descriptor system and the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone. Roadmap 2026 Specification This milestone raises the baseline feature support of Vulkan implementations as with prior milestones. In addition, this milestone makes guarantees about swapchain and presentation support for implementations. Descriptor Heaps Read the blog The new VK_EXT_descriptor_heap extension represents a complete overhaul of the current Vulkan descriptor system, providing direct access to descriptor memory while preserving compatibility with legacy descriptor sets and other APIs. Spec Proposal Document This document outlines a proposal to make the management of descriptor memory more explicit, allowing descriptors to be present in buffer memory, allowing the data and memory to be managed alongside other buffer objects. Video - Finalized Extensions Released! Press Release Khronos has released finalized extensions, collectively called ‘Vulkan Video’, for seamlessly integrating hardware-accelerated video compression and decompression into the Vulkan API. This API incorporates industry feedback and exposes core decode Vulkan Video functionality to provide fully accelerated H.264 and H.265 decode. Vulkan Video Blog - Decode Vulkan Video adheres to the Vulkan philosophy of providing applications flexible, fine-grained control over scheduling, synchronization, and memory allocation. By leveraging the existing Vulkan API framework, the Vulkan Video extensions enable efficient, low-latency, low-overhead use of processing resources for accelerated video processing. Vulkan Video Blog - Encode With the release of Vulkan 1.3.274, Khronos has finalized the extensions to enable encoding of H.264 and H.265 video streams. Vulkan Video Blog - AV1 Decode Khronos Releases AV1 Decode in Vulkan Video with SDK Support for H.264/H.265 Encode Synchronization 2 Overview Blog The newly released VK_KHR_synchronization2 extension brings extensive improvements to Vulkan queue submission, events, and pipeline barriers to significantly improve API usability for developers. Technical Blog The goal of this article is to help developers easily understand and not be intimidated or confused by one of the toughest aspects of Vulkan: Synchronization. Synchronization 2 in the Vulkan Guide See this chapter in the Vulkan Guide for an overview of the latest Vulkan synchronization capabilities Specification See the details of VK_KHR_synchronization2 in the Vulkan specification Synchronization 2 code sample Demonstrates the use of the reworked synchronization api introduced with VK_KHR_synchronization2. This sample uses the new extension to streamline memory barriers used for compute and graphics work submissions. Ray Tracing Read the Blog Khronos® has released the final versions of the set of Vulkan®, GLSL and SPIR-V extension specifications that seamlessly integrate ray tracing into the existing Vulkan framework. Ray Tracing in the Vulkan Guide For an overview of Ray Tracing in Vulkan, check out this chapter in the Vulkan Guide Specification Start with the Ray Traversal and Ray Tracing sections of the Vulkan Spec for more details Ray Tracing code sample Render a basic scene using the official cross-vendor ray tracing extension. Shows how to setup all data structures required for ray tracing Timeline Semaphores Read the Blog The new timeline semaphore synchronization API defines a primitive containing a superset of both the original VkSemaphore and VkFence primitives while simultaneously eliminating many of the most painful limitations of the previous APIs Specification See detials for Timeline Semaphore in the Vulkan Specification Timeline Semaphore code sample Demonstrates various use cases which are enabled with timeline semaphores. The sample implements "Game of Life" using out-of-order signal and wait, multiple waits on same semaphore in different queues, waiting and signalling semaphore on host. Fragment Shading Rate Read the blog The VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate extension provides a new, flexible technique to control the fragment shading rate, enabling developers to perform shading at a lower resolution than the render targets. Specification See detials for VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate in the Vulkan Specification Fragment Shading Rate code sample Uses a special framebuffer attachment to control fragment shading rates for different framebuffer regions. This allows explicit control over the number of fragment shader invocations for each pixel covered by a fragment Descriptor Indexing for Mobile Read the blog Android is enabling a host of useful new Vulkan extensions for mobile. These new extensions are set to improve the state of graphics APIs for modern applications, enabling new use cases and changing how developers can design graphics renderers going forward. Specification See details for Descriptor Indexing in the Vulkan Specification Descriptor Indexing code sample Demonstrates how to use descriptor indexing to enable update-after-bind and non-dynamically uniform indexing of descriptors
[H2] New to Graphics Programming?
If you're just starting out in your Graphics Programming journey, we've listed a few recommended resources to help get you spun up on the basics.Learn more Marek Okon - Unsplash Community
[H2] Join Our Community
There are several ways to follow the latest Vulkan developments, get questions answered and make suggestions for improvement.You'll find thriving Vulkan community discussions on several forums and social media platforms below. It's a great way to get involved!Latest project
[H2] Vulkan Portability
Vulkan® Portability™ aims to counter platform fragmentation by encouraging layered implementations of Vulkan functionality over Metal, DX12 and other APIs. Vulkan Portability enables Vulkan applications to be reliably deployed across diverse platforms
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Learn more Latest project
[H2] Vulkan SC
The release of the Vulkan SC 1.0 specification on March 1, 2022 marked an important milestone in delivering a new generation of safety-critical APIs. Based on the Vulkan 1.2 API, Vulkan SC meets the needs of safety-critical systems to leverage the performance of modern GPUs to satisfy their graphics and compute requirements.
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Learn more Events
[H2] Upcoming Events
See more events May 20, 2026 Read More February 13, 2026 - May 20, 2026 Vulkanised is the largest event dedicated to developers using the Vulkan API and is a unique technical event that brings the Vulkan developer community together to exchange ideas, solve problems and help steer the future development of the Vulkan API and ecosystem. Read More News
[H2] The Latest on Vulkan
Find out more The Vulkan SDK 1.4.350.0 is now available for download simultaneously for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Highlights of this release include major updates for KosmicKrisp, support for 16 new extensions, and ARM64X support for the GFXReconstruct capture layer. Overall, this maintenance-focused update brings tooling and platform-specific improvements while continuing Vulkan’s steady evolution. May 12th at 4:30pm Read More LunarG has shared the results of their 2026 LunarG Vulkan Ecosystem Survey— the annual check-in with the Vulkan developer community. With 360 respondents (a nearly 30% increase from 279 in 2025), the survey captured valuable insights from both commercial developers (49%) and those self-studying or working in academic settings (51%).The feedback comes from an experienced group: 71% of respondents identified as regular, advanced, or expert Vulkan developers (similar to the 72% in 2025), with commercial users skewing even more toward advanced/expert levels. This experienced perspective helps guide priorities for the Vulkan SDK, validation layers, tools, and broader ecosystem improvements. March 27th at 5:27pm Read More LunarG's white paper, Configuring Vulkan Layers, has been updated for Vulkan SDK 1.4.335 and newer. This comprehensive guide serves as the go-to reference for configuring Vulkan layers. The new update brings greater consistency, easier discovery of layer features, and smoother workflows for developers working with validation, profiles, extensions, and utility layers in the Vulkan ecosystem. March 20th at 1:07pm Read More In this contributed blog, we explore how FFmpeg uses Vulkan Compute to seamlessly accelerate encoding and decoding of even professional-grade video on consumer GPUs — unlocking GPU compute parallelism at scale, without specialized hardware. This approach complements Vulkan Video's fixed-function codec support, extending acceleration to formats and workflows it doesn't cover. March 16th at 5:10pm Read More Join the conversation:

Drivers, SDKs and More
[H2] Vulkan GPU Resources
Behind every great API is the supporting software that bring it life on your GPU. Check out the available resources by company below.Please note, Khronos does not directly supply or support GPU drivers. To find drivers for your GPU, please follow the links below to see what's available from each GPU vendor.
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Vulkan GPU Database (gpuinfo.org) SDK
[H2] Download these essential development tools
Essentials tools, documentation and libraries for every Vulkan developer
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Detroit Become Human - Quantic Dream SDK
[H2] Download these essential development tools
Essentials tools, documentation and libraries for every Vulkan developer Vulkan SDK for Windows, Linux, and macOS LunarG has developed the quintessential developer SDK including build tools, documentation, libraries and more. Find Out More Android NDK Google gives you everything you need to incorporate Vulkan into your Android games and other apps where graphics performance is key. Visit the Android developer website to download the API, samples, and documentation: resources to help you hit the ground running. Find Out More Arm GPU SDK Arm donated all their Vulkan Sample code repository and tutorials to Khronos. These samples are now mainly under the “performance samples” in the Khronos repository. Each sample tests a specific Vulkan feature and gives the developer on-screen controls of the multiple ways of doing something, showing the real-time performance impact with hardware counters on the display. Each sample is accompanied with an in-depth tutorial explaining in detail what is happening under the hood. Find Out More PowerVR SDK The PowerVR SDK is an open source codebase to help with the development of graphics applications for PowerVR and other platforms. It consists of two main parts: the Framework and a set of examples. Find Out More Deep Dive
[H2] Profilers and debuggers
Tools to take a low level look at your application, debug and achieve the absolute best performance
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Deep Dive
[H2] Profilers and debuggers
Tools to take a low level look at your application, debug and achieve the absolute best performance AMD Radeon GPU Profiler The AMD Radeon™ GPU Profiler is a ground-breaking low-level optimization tool that provides detailed information on Radeon™ GPUs. Find Out More Android GPU Inspector (AGI) AGI is a cross-vendor open source tool with system and frame profiling support for Vulkan applications on the Android platform. Find Out More Arm Performance Studio Arm Mobile Studio offers free mobile app development tools for manual analysis of app performance across mobile devices and a Professional Edition for importing that data directly into a continuous integration workflow. Find Out More Arm PerfDoc A cross-platform Vulkan layer which checks Vulkan applications for recommended API usage on Arm GPU devices Find Out More Samsung Sokatoa GPU profiler for Android While Sokatoa was optimized specifically for Android game developers, it can be used by any developer working on graphics-intensive mobile applications built on the Android platform. Sokatoa supports Samsung’s Xclipse GPU and other industry leading GPUs on Android devices. Find Out More NVIDIA Nsight Tools NVIDIA Nsight™ allows you to build and debug integrated GPU kernels and native CPU code as well as inspect the state of the GPU and memory Find Out More Qualcomm Snapdragon Profiler The Snapdragon Profiler provides Vulkan developers with low level counters and metrics that help them get accurate timing and insight on what happens on the Adreno GPU. Find Out More RenderDoc RenderDoc is a frame-capture based graphics debugger, currently available for Vulkan, D3D11, D3D12, OpenGL, and OpenGL ES development on Windows 7 - 10, Linux, Android, Stadia, and Nintendo Switch™. It is completely open-source under the MIT license Find Out More Tracy Profiler - Cross-vendor CPU/GPU Profiler Tracy is a real time, nanosecond resolution, remote telemetry, hybrid frame and sampling profiler. Tracy supports profiling CPU , GPU (including Khronos APIs: Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenCL), memory allocations, locks, context switches and more. Find Out More GPU PROGRAMMING
[H2] Shader Tools
Here you’ll find info (spec, documentation) and development tools for developing shaders for Vulkan. Vulkan has support for shaders written in HLSL, GLSL and Slang - and if you want to go deeper, SPIRV intermediate representation is is the target IR for all Vulkan shaders.
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GPU PROGRAMMING
[H2] Shader Tools
Here you’ll find info (spec, documentation) and development tools for developing shaders for Vulkan. Vulkan has support for shaders written in HLSL, GLSL and Slang - and if you want to go deeper, SPIRV intermediate representation is is the target IR for all Vulkan shaders. HLSL HLSL Documentation HLSL is the C-like high-level shader language that you use with programmable shaders in DirectX. DXC Github Repository The DirectX Shader Compiler project includes a compiler and related tools used to compile High-Level Shader Language (HLSL) programs into Intermediate Language (DXIL, SPIRV) representation. HLSL to SPIR-V mapping This document describes the mappings from HLSL features to SPIR-V for Vulkan adopted by the SPIR-V codegen. Try it online with Compiler Explorer GLSL GLSL wiki The OpenGL Shading Language is a C-style language and covers most of the features you would expect with such a language. GLSL Spec (PDF) This document specifies version 4.60 of the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) GLSL Github Repository GLSL and ESSL are Khronos high-level shading languages. Vulkan makes use of GLSL and ESSL, via SPIR-V. glslang reference compiler front end glslang is the official reference compiler front end for the OpenGL and OpenGL ES shading languages. If you wish to assure that SPIR-V generated from HLSL is legal for Vulkan, also install spirv-tools. Try it online with Compiler Explorer Slang Slang Website Slang empowers real-time graphics developers with innovative features that complement existing shading languages, including modular code development, portable deployment to multiple target APIs, and neural computation in graphics shaders. Hosting under multi-company governance at Khronos will enable and foster industry-wide collaboration to drive Slang’s continued evolution. Slang GitHub Repository The fastest way to get started using Slang in your own development is to use a pre-built binary package, available through GitHub releases. Slang binaries are also included in the Vulkan SDK since version 1.3.296.0. Slang Documentaton Press Release The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry leaders in interoperability standards, has announced the launch of the new Slang™ Initiative. This initiative will oversee and advance the open-source Slang shading language and compiler Try it online with Compiler Explorer SPIR-V SPIR-V Overview SPIR-V is catalyzing a revolution in the ecosystem for shader and kernel language compilers used for expressing parallel computation and GPU-based graphics. SPIR-V Spec Registry SPIR-V is a binary intermediate language for representing graphical-shader stages and compute kernels for multiple Khronos APIs, including OpenCL, OpenGL, and Vulkan. SPIR-V Guide The SPIR-V Guide is designed to help developers get up and going with the world of SPIR-V. This guide is targeted at developers needing to use compilers SPIR-V in their tool chains and for developers wishing to develop custom tooling or compilers that outputs SPIR-V. SPIR-V Tools The SPIR-V Tools project provides an API and commands for processing SPIR-V modules. The project includes an assembler, binary module parser, disassembler, validator, and optimizer for SPIR-V. Try it online with Compiler Explorer
[H2] Engines
Looking to take your project to the next level? Look no further: Here are several engines that currently support Vulkan.
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Acid is an open-source, cross-platform game engine written in modern C++17 with a focus on modularity and simplicityFind out more
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CRYENGINE, Crytek's proprietary game engine is available for creators all across the globe to harness the power behind IPs like Crysis, Ryse: Son of Rome, The Climb and Hunt: Showdown. Start achieving; dare to create world-class gaming experiences, no matter the budget or team size.Find out more
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Flax is a fully-featured multi-platform 3D game engine. It brings awesome experience to the game development that scales from small to large teams.Flax Engine
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Godot is completely free and open-source under the very permissive MIT license.Find out more
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NAP framework is an open source, data-driven platform that merges game technology with the flexibility of a creative coding environment. NAP allows you to create fast, modular, stable applications.Find out more
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Open 3D Engine (O3DE) is an Apache 2.0-licensed multi-platform 3D engine that enables developers and content creators to build AAA games, cinema-quality 3D worlds, and high-fidelity simulations without any fees or commercial obligations.Open 3D Engine
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The Source Engine is a 3D game engine developed by Valve Corporation. Its unique features include a large degree of modularity and flexibility, an artist-driven, shader-based renderer, accurate lip sync and facial expression technology, and a powerful, efficient and completely network-enabled physics system.Find out more
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The-Forge is an open-source cross-platform rendering framework that is used to provide the rendering layer for custom next-gen game engines. It is also meant to provide building blocks to write your own game engine. It's used by many different games and studios including but not limited to: Supergiant's Hades, Bethesda's Creation Engine, StarVR One SDK and others. The Forge Interactive offers game engine consulting and programming services around it.The Forge
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Open-source C# cross-platform game engine currently offering Vulkan support in BetaFind out more
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Unity is the world’s leading platform for creating and operating real-time 3D (RT3D) content. Creators, ranging from game developers to artists, architects, automotive designers, filmmakers, and others, use Unity to make their imaginations come to life.Find out more
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Unreal Engine is the world’s most open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool. Continuously evolving to serve not only its original purpose as a state-of-the-art game engine, today it gives creators across industries the freedom and control to deliver cutting-edge content, interactive experiences, and immersive virtual worldsFind out more
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Cross-platform multi-threaded 3D rendering engine optimized for non-gaming industryFind out more
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Superb open source game and app development tool with bespoke content creation features. 2D and 3D game development has never been this easy.Find out more Vulkan Supported
[H2] Engines
Looking to take your project to the next level? Look no further: Here are several engines that currently support Vulkan.
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Simplify, Prototype, Support
[H2] Frameworks and Helper Libraries
Want to simplify parts of your code or rapidly prototype an application? These frameworks and libraries can help.
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Hades - Supergiant Games Simplify, Prototype, Support
[H2] Frameworks and Helper Libraries
Want to simplify parts of your code or rapidly prototype an application? These frameworks and libraries can help. SDL Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is a cross-platform library designed to provide a hardware abstraction layer for multimedia hardware components. Vulkan is now supported as a target rendering back-end. Find Out More GLFW GLFW is an Open Source, multi-platform library for OpenGL, OpenGL ES and Vulkan application development providing a simple, platform-independent API for creating windows, contexts and surfaces, reading input, handling events, etc. Find Out More SFML SFML provides a simple interface to the various components of your PC, to ease the development of games and multimedia applications. It is composed of five modules: system, window, graphics, audio and network. Find Out More Vulkan Memory Allocator (VMA) Easy to integrate Vulkan memory allocation library to help developers to manage the complexity of Vulkan memory allocations and resource creation by offering higher-level functions to help allocate correct/optimal memory types. Find Out More Dear ImGui Dear ImGui is a bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++. It outputs optimized vertex buffers that you can render anytime in your 3D-pipeline enabled application. It is fast, portable, renderer agnostic and self-contained (no external dependencies). Find Out More vk-bootstrap A utility library that jump starts initialization of Vulkan. This library simplifies the tedious process of: Instance creation, Physical Device selection, Device creation, Getting queues, Swapchain creation Find Out More bgfx Cross-platform "Bring Your Own Engine/Framework" style rendering library Find Out More Diligent Engine A modern cross-platform low-level graphics library and rendering framework. Diligent Engine targets Vulkan, Direct3D12 and Metal, but also supports OpenGL/GLES and Direct3D11 for backwards compatibility. Find Out More Web-based Vulkan GLSL Ray Tracing Emulator The Vulkan GLSL Ray Tracing Emulator is an online application that aims to simulate the ray tracing shader pipeline from the Vulkan GL EXT ray tracing specification.The web-based emulator is intended for computer graphics education or rapid prototyping of GLSL ray tracing shaders. It does not require a high-end GPU with special ray tracing hardware. Only if you want to run the exported C++ Vulkan stand-alone application, a GPU with ray tracing accelerator hardware is necessary. Find Out More VulkanSceneGraph VulkanSceneGraph (VSG), is a modern, cross platform, high performance scene graph library built upon Vulkan graphics/compute API. The software is written in C++17, and follows the CppCoreGuidlines and FOSS Best Practices. The source code is published under the MIT License. Find Out More ncnn ncnn is a high-performance neural network inference computing framework optimized for mobile platforms. ncnn does not have third party de

The essential resources for Vulkan development
[H2] Key Resources
Thanks to the support of the Khronos membership and our passionate developer community, there is a full set of well-supported developer information and educational resources to help quickly get you up and running with your Vulkan application development.
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SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE - SuperHot The essential resources for Vulkan development
[H2] Key Resources
Thanks to the support of the Khronos membership and our passionate developer community, there is a full set of well-supported developer information and educational resources to help quickly get you up and running with your Vulkan application development. Vulkan Specification in the Vulkan Documentation website (docs.vulkan.org) The docs.vulkan.org website brings together key documents such as the Vulkan specification, Vulkan Guide, tutorials and Vulkan samples providing a consistent navigation and search interface across all of these. Find Out More Code Samples Khronos provides a collection of Vulkan Samples and resources that run in a unified environment to maximise ease of use and testing of certain Vulkan features or extensions. Many of the samples run across all platforms with some showcasing features that are platform specific. Find Out More Khronos Vulkan Guide The Vulkan Guide is designed to help developers get up and going with the world of Vulkan. It is aimed to be a light read that leads to many other useful links depending on what a developer is looking for. All information is intended to help better fill the gaps about the many nuances of Vulkan.We encourage developers to see this as a map of the API that provide a clear breakdown of the structure and interconnectivity of Vulkan. Find Out More Khronos Vulkan Tutorial This tutorial will teach you the basics of using the Vulkan graphics and compute API. The Khronos Vulkan® Tutorial is based on the "Vulkan Tutorial" by Alexander Overvoorde licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Find Out More The most popular tutorials for getting started
[H2] Vulkan Tutorials
Vulkan is by design a low-level API that removes many of the abstractions found in previous generation graphics APIs. This is great for delivering maximum performance, but has the side effect of exposing more complexity to the developer. Fortunately, several excellent tutorials exist to help clear this hurdle and get productive quickly.
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NAP Framework - Naivi.nl The most popular tutorials for getting started
[H2] Vulkan Tutorials
Vulkan is by design a low-level API that removes many of the abstractions found in previous generation graphics APIs. This is great for delivering maximum performance, but has the side effect of exposing more complexity to the developer. Fortunately, several excellent tutorials exist to help clear this hurdle and get productive quickly. Khronos Vulkan Tutorial New to Vulkan? This Vulkan tutorial will teach you the basics of using the Vulkan graphics and compute API. The ideas behind Vulkan are similar to those of Direct3D 12 and Metal, but Vulkan has the advantage of being fully cross-platform and allows you to develop for Windows, Linux and Android at the same time. Come take the tour to start familiarizing yourself with this powerful graphics API can deliver outstanding performance no matter what you are developing for.The Khronos Vulkan® Tutorial is based on the "Vulkan Tutorial" by Alexander Overvoorde licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Learn More How to Vulkan in 2026 (Sascha Willems) A minimalist tutorial from Sascha Willems on how to use the Vulkan graphics API in 2026. The idea is to get people started with rasterization in Vulkan using commonly supported features to make the API easier to use. This is a single page tutorial that can be done from top to bottom in a single day. Find Out More Sascha Willems Samples & Tutorials Sascha has developed a comprehensive collection of open source C++ examples for Vulkan, the new generation graphics and compute API from Khronos.These are a great way to get familiar with the basics of Vulkan from drawing your first triangle to learning many of the key constructs of the API (pipelines, descriptor sets, render passes, and much more). These samples are an even more effective resource when used alongside the Vulkan Samples. Learn More Vulkan 3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook Master Vulkan 1.3 with practical recipes for building, rendering, and optimizing stunning 3D graphics, guided by AR and rendering experts Sergey Kosarevsky and Alexey Medvedev. Learn More OGLDEV Vulkan Video Tutorials OGLDEV is a YouTube channel focused on 3D rendering, with in-depth tutorials using OpenGL and Vulkan. The Vulkan playlist guides viewers from foundational concepts like instance and surface creation all the way to advanced topics such as dynamic rendering, cubemaps, asset loading with Assimp, and ImGUI integration. All sample code is cross-platform and can be built on both Windows and Linux, making it a versatile resource for developers at any level. Find Out More How to Learn Vulkan For some good perspective on how to think about Vulkan and the steps needed to get proficient, check out this blog by Jeremy Young. Learn More Vulkan in 30 Minutes (Advanced) For those who have a good grounding in existing APIs (e.g. D3D11 and GL) and understand the concepts of multithreading, staging resources and synchronisation but want to know how to implement these with Vulkan. The RenderDoc team provides us with a whirlwind tour of what the main Vulkan concepts look like. Learn More Vulkan Barriers Explained Vulkan’s barrier system is unique as it not only requires you to provide what resources are transitioning, but also specify a source and destination pipeline stage. This allows for more fine-grained control of when a transition is executed. However, you can also leave quite a lot of performance on the table if you just use the simple method. This tutorial will cover how to handle this properly. Learn More GPUOpen Vulkan® tutorials and samples AMD sponsored GPUOpen provides a set of resources to help you learn about Vulkan's low-level graphics APIs for creating games and other graphics applications. It also includes a number of developer case studies on developing with and porting to Vulkan. Learn More VkGuide by Victor Blanco The goal of this guide is to understand Vulkan correctly, and act as a stepping stone for then working in your own projects. With a focus around dynamic rendering, this guide is intended to act as a strong base code for a game engine Learn More Writing an Efficient Vulkan Renderer Arseny Kapoulkine covers a wide range of topics in this break down of Vulkan performance. Originally part of the GPU Zen 2 book this section is now available for free and a must read for developers looking to squeeze the most out of Vulkan. Learn More Brendan Galea's Vulkan Tutorial Videos Brendan Galea has created a nice set of video tutorials that walk developers through a number of Vulkan technical topics including introdcutory topics like opening a window to more advanced topics like Fragment Interpolation, Pipeline Setup, Swap Chains, Push Constants, etc. Find Out More Vulkan Lecture Series - Research Unit of Computer Graphics, TU Wien A Vulkan Lecture Series from Johannes Unterguggenberger explaining some of the basics for Vulkan developers getting started with Vulkan. Find out more Guides to best practice Vulkan development
[H2] Vulkan Best Practice
Here you'll find guidelines and tips for how to get the best performance from your target platform direct from the hardware manufacturer.
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Half-Life: Alyx - Valve Guides to best practice Vulkan development
[H2] Vulkan Best Practice
Here you'll find guidelines and tips for how to get the best performance from your target platform direct from the hardware manufacturer. AMD Our AMD RDNA™ Performance Guide, with updates for RDNA 3, will help guide you through the optimization process with a collection of tidbits, tips, and tricks which aim to support you in your performance quest. AMD RDNA™ Performance Guide Arm Vulkan API Best Practices on Android How to Get the Most Out of the Vulkan API on Android Understanding Render Passes Vulkan Samples: Bandwidth and Throughput Optimizations for Mobile Vulkan Samples: Render Passes and Wait Idle Examples Vulkan Samples Release Summary Blog Blog which Includes links to info on several ARM contributions to Vulkan best practices. Imagination PowerVR Performance Recommendations In depth article which serves as recommendation and advice for developers who wish to get the best graphics performance from a PowerVR SGX or PowerVR Rogue enabled device. Vulkan synchronisation and graphics-compute-graphics hazards - Part 1 Part 1 of a 2-part blog series exploring the complexities of multi-threaded synchronization in Vulkan and some of the tools available on PowerVR platforms to help tune for best performance. Vulkan synchronisation and graphics-compute-graphics hazards - Part 2 Part 2 of a 2-part blog series exploring the complexities of multi-threaded synchronization in Vulkan and some of the tools available on PowerVR platforms to help tune for best performance. Intel Intel's tools, libraries, and plug-ins Intel's tools, libraries, and plug-ins help you build, profile, analyze, and optimize your games. Achieve maximum performance and productivity, improve visuals, and provide the best gaming experiences on Intel® hardware Graphics API Performance Guide for Intel® Processor Graphics Gen9 In depth paper on getting maximum performance including programming tips and an overview of available debug and performance tools. Nvidia Tips and Tricks: Vulkan Dos and Don'ts A compilation of wisdom from some of the Vulkan experts at NVIDIA about how to maximize performance with Vulkan. Advanced API Performance: Vulkan Clearing and Presenting This post covers best practices for Vulkan clearing and presenting on NVIDIA GPUs. Vulkan Ray Tracing Tutorials Github repo with a nice set of Vulkan Ray Tracing tutorials including sample code for each. Qualcomm These documents are intended to help developers in their journey to create best-in-class experiences targeting Qualcomm platforms. Find out more Samsung 2019 Vulkanised - Samsung - Live Long and Optimise Video presentation with tips for getting the most from Vulkan on Mobile. Introduction to GPU Technologies The following introduction covers, at a high level, the differences between the main modern GPU architectures used in both desktop GPUs and mobile GPUs GPU Framebuffer Memory: Understanding Tiling This article discusses tile-based rendering, the approach used by most mobile graphics hardware - and, increasingly, by desktop hardware. Introduction to Vulkan Render Passes Vulkan graphics rendering is organized into render passes and subpasses. This article provides an introduction to these concepts and how to use them in the Vulkan API. Vulkan Usage Recommendations This Vulkan usage guide assumes the reader is already familiar with the API, but wants to know how to use it effectively across a wide range of Galaxy devices. Raspberry Pi This page guides you through the installation of Vulkan on a Raspberry Pi 4. Many platforms are already using Vulkan, and now the Raspberry Pi is on board too. Find Out More Latest Videos on Vulkan
[H2] Videos
From the experts: Hear real-world examples of how developers are getting the most from Vulkan as well as tips and tricks from hardware vendors. Vulkanised 2026: Vulkan Working Group Update Vulkanised 2026: Vulkan Working Group Update Vulkanised 2024: Everything You Need to Know About the Vulkan SDK Vulkanised 2024: Everything You Need to Know About the Vulkan SDK Vulkanised 2024: Common Mistakes When Learning Vulkan Vulkanised 2024: Common Mistakes When Learning Vulkan Vulkanised 2024: Adding Vulkan to Pixar's Hydra Storm Renderer Vulkanised 2024: Adding Vulkan to Pixar's Hydra Storm Renderer Vulkanised 2023: Virtual Reality-Based Visualization of Large Scientific Data Vulkanised 2023: Virtual Reality-Based Visualization of Large Scientific Data Vulkan, Forging Ahead - SIGGRAPH 2023 BOF Session Vulkan, Forging Ahead - SIGGRAPH 2023 BOF Session Khronos Developer Day Japan Khronos Developer Day Japan Vulkanised 2023: A deep dive into Vulkan Video Vulkanised 2023: A deep dive into Vulkan Video Vulkanised 2023: How to create a Vulkan Profile Vulkanised 2023: How to create a Vulkan Profile Vulkanised 2023: VkFFT - a story of Vulkan Compute GPU HPC library development Vulkanised 2023: VkFFT - a story of Vulkan Compute GPU HPC library development Reducing Draw Time Hitching with the Vulkan Graphics Pipeline Library Extension Reducing Draw Time Hitching with the Vulkan Graphics Pipeline Library Extension Accelerating Machine Learning with Vulkan Accelerating Machine Learning with Vulkan Vulkanised 1.3 SDK Webinar Vulkanised 1.3 SDK Webinar Vulkan 1.3 - A Vulkanised Webinar Vulkan 1.3 - A Vulkanised Webinar Ensure Correct Vulkan Synchronization by Using Synchronization Validation Ensure Correct Vulkan Synchronization by Using Synchronization Validation Optimizing Roblox Vulkan Best Practices for Mobile Developers Optimizing Roblox Vulkan Best Practices for Mobile Developers Bringing Ray Tracing to Vulkan Bringing Ray Tracing to Vulkan Mobilizing Call of Duty: Bringing a Blockbuster title to Android Mobilizing Call of Duty: Bringing a Blockbuster title to Android View more View our YouTube channel:The latest educational and case study blogs
[H2] Blogs
Find out more The Vulkan® Working Group has released the VK_KHR_pipeline_binary extension, enabling direct retrieval of binary data associated with individual pipelines, bypassing the VkPipelineCache mechanism, and enabling applications to explicitly manage pipeline caching. August 27th at 8:52am Read More Today, we are excited to announce experimental support for the Khronos® Vulkan® API through the HgiVulkan backend, available in OpenUSD 24.08. This allows developers to start leveraging Vulkan in Storm or other Hgi-based renderers July 25th at 8:56am Read More In March 2024, Richard Wright from LunarG updated the State of Vulkan on Apple Devices white paper to reflect the latest availability of the Vulkan SDK on Apple platforms, and its ability to be used to develop applications that are fully compatible with the Apple App Store. April 3rd at 9:02am Read More The Vulkan® Working Group at Khronos® has developed a set of video format decode and encode extensions, collectively referred to as "Vulkan Video." Today, with the release of Vulkan 1.3.277, the Working Group is proud to announce the new Decode AV1 video extension February 1st at 8:56am Read More Join the conversation:
[H2] New to Graphics Programming?
If you're just starting out in your Graphics Programming journey, we've listed a few recommended resources to help get you spun up on the basics.
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PORTABILITY ON SYSTEMS WITHOUT NATIVE VULKAN DRIVERS AND FOR NON-VULKAN APPS
[H2] Vulkan Porting Layers
Vulkan is the only modern GPU API that is available on multiple operating systems—helping applications reach a cross-platform user base. Layered API implementations leveraging Vulkan go even further in fighting platform fragmentation. Vulkan efficiently supports translation layers from other APIs, such as Metal, to enable non-Vulkan applications on Vulkan-enabled platforms. Vulkan has also been layered over platform-specific APIs, enabling Vulkan applications to run where native Vulkan drivers are not available, such as iOS and macOS.
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Vulkan Porting Layers PORTABILITY ON SYSTEMS WITHOUT NATIVE VULKAN DRIVERS AND FOR NON-VULKAN APPS
[H2] Vulkan Porting Layers
Vulkan is the only modern GPU API that is available on multiple operating systems—helping applications reach a cross-platform user base. Layered API implementations leveraging Vulkan go even further in fighting platform fragmentation. Vulkan efficiently supports translation layers from other APIs, such as Metal, to enable non-Vulkan applications on Vulkan-enabled platforms. Vulkan has also been layered over platform-specific APIs, enabling Vulkan applications to run where native Vulkan drivers are not available, such as iOS and macOS. Layering Vulkan over other APIs Ashes: Vulkan on OpenGL and DX9/DX10/DX11 Ashes is a drop-in replacement or ICD to Vulkan. It allows to write Vulkan code, and to select the rendering API that will be used. It also comes with ashespp, a C++ wrapper for Vulkan. Dozen: Vulkan on DX12 Microsoft engineers have added support for the Agility SDK to their Mesa D3D12 driver. The Agility SDK now has support for Vulkan’s “Dzn” (Dozen) driver on D3D12. MoltenVK: Vulkan on Metal The Vulkan SDK includes a MoltenVK runtime library for macOS. If you are developing a Vulkan application for macOS, it is highly recommended that you use the Vulkan SDK and the MoltenVK library included in it. Layering other APIs over Vulkan Zink: OpenGL on Vulkan (Linux) The Zink driver is a Gallium driver that emits Vulkan API calls instead of targeting a specific GPU architecture. This can be used to get full desktop OpenGL support on devices that only support Vulkan. clvk: OpenCL on Vulkan clvk is a prototype implementation of OpenCL 3.0 on top of Vulkan using clspv as the compiler. GLOVE: OpenGL ES and EGL on Vulkan GLOVE (GL Over Vulkan) is a cross-platform software library that acts as an intermediate layer between an OpenGL ES application and Vulkan. Angle: OpenGL ES on Vulkan ANGLE allows users of multiple operating systems to seamlessly run WebGL and other OpenGL ES content by translating OpenGL ES API calls to one of the hardware-supported APIs available for that platform. vkd3d-proton: DX12 on Vulkan VKD3D-Proton is a fork of VKD3D, which aims to implement the full Direct3D 12 API on top of Vulkan. The project serves as the development effort for Direct3D 12 support in Proton. vkd3d: DX12 on Vulkan Vkd3d is a 3D graphics library built on top of Vulkan. It has an API very similar, but not identical, to Direct3D 12. Wine uses vkd3d libraries for its implementation of Direct3D 12. DXVK: D3D 9/10/11 on Vulkan DXVK is a Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 9/10/11 which allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine. WineD3D: D3D 9/10/11 on Vulkan WineD3D is a translation layer from Direct3D and DirectDraw API calls into OpenGL or Vulkan Running Microsoft Windows apps on Linux/Mac Wine Wine (originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, & BSD. CodeWeavers CrossOver CrossOver uses Wine and VKD3D to let you run many Microsoft applications on your Linux and Mac platforms without the need for Windows emulators. Vulkan Capabilities Viewer Vulkan GPUInfo The Vulkan Capabilities Viewer is a developer tool for probing the hardware capabilities of Vulkan and MoltenVK (Vulkan over Metal). The Vulkan GPU hardware capability viewer is a community-driven Vulkan hardware database, an online tool for developers that want to check out GPU hardware capabilities. Vulkan Capabilities View works across multiple OSes including Windows, Linux, Android, macOS and iOS. This database and the client application are developed and maintained by Sascha Willems in his spare time. Vulkan Capabilities Viewer (iOS) For developers using Vulkan layered over the Metal graphics API, this tool enumerates all the hardware capabilities and limitations of the device it is run on. Learn more about Vulkan porting from these recent videos and presentations Vulkanised 2023: Layering Vulkan Over Metal This talk was presented at Vulkanised 2023 (Feb 7-9, Munich Germany) and discusses application portability with Vulkan on Metal using MoltenVK. Vulkanised 2023: Vulkan Development for Apple Environments This talk was presented at Vulkanised 2023 (Feb 7-9, Munich Germany) and discusses developing for Apple with the Vulkan SDK. Zink Presentation (Khronos) Background presentation on the Zink project and it's how it fits with MesaDEPLOY VULKAN APPLICATIONS ON SYSTEMS WITHOUT NATIVE VULKAN DRIVERS
[H2] Vulkan Portability Initiative
Vulkan® Portability™ fights platform fragmentation by enabling the consistent use of layered implementations of Vulkan functionality over Metal and other APIs. The Vulkan Portability extension standardizes queries for available layered API functionality and enables all provided functionality to be conformance tested. MoltenVK is a leading example of a layered Vulkan Portability implementation that runs over Apple’s Metal API.
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Path of Exile - Grinding Gear Games DEPLOY VULKAN APPLICATIONS ON SYSTEMS WITHOUT NATIVE VULKAN DRIVERS
[H2] Vulkan Portability Initiative
Vulkan® Portability™ fights platform fragmentation by enabling the consistent use of layered implementations of Vulkan functionality over Metal and other APIs. The Vulkan Portability extension standardizes queries for available layered API functionality and enables all provided functionality to be conformance tested. MoltenVK is a leading example of a layered Vulkan Portability implementation that runs over Apple’s Metal API. Vulkan Portability Extension A provisional version of Vulkan Portability Extension 1.0 was released in September 2020 and is shipping today in MoltenVK Find Out More Vulkan SDK now supports Vulkan Portability on macOS Read the Blog Get the SDK from LunarG Vulkan Portability GitHub repository This repository provides a focus and tools to help application developers understand and provide input to the Vulkan Portability initiative, including the VK_KHR_portability_subset Vulkan extension. Find Out More MoltenVK - Vulkan on Metal utilizing Vulkan Portability Initiative The Vulkan SDK includes a MoltenVK runtime library for macOS. If you are developing a Vulkan application for macOS, it is highly recommended that you use the Vulkan SDK and the MoltenVK library included in it. Find Out More
[H2] Industry Support for MoltenVK
"All in all, we’re pleased with what we’ve managed to accomplish. A barrier that many, including ourselves, originally thought unbreakable has been cracked wide open, and the best part is: this is just the beginning. With not only our own efforts to improve the core emulation, but upcoming updates to Metal 3 and the constantly improving MoltenVK, the experience is only going to get better.""We will be relying on MoltenVK to be the benchmark that we compare our native Metal backend against going forward. And it should perform that role excellently, as it is bringing our well tested Vulkan backend to macOS through a very well supported translation layer from a team that has earned our trust. So, while our new native Metal backend is faster, MoltenVK is here to stay. Together, they will help us deliver the most consistently reliable and performant experience that we can give to our macOS users""I was initially skeptical about the use of a Vulkan translation layer to Metal, but it turns out MoltenVK enables applications using the real-time NAP Framework to run as well on macOS as they do on Linux and Windows. This is something I would like to highlight and stress the importance of - without the portability of Vulkan we would have been forced to implement a special Metal rendering backend just for macOS users, something not doable for a relatively small company such as ours. Plus switching to Vulkan dramatically improved render-times for Mac users.""Valve extended Dota 2 to use Vulkan and ported that version to macOS using MoltenVK. This port achieved significantly higher performance than the native Apple OpenGL® drivers. Valve has now shipped multiple games titles on macoS and iOS using MoltenVK and we believe that Vulkan Portability can significantly reduce development and porting costs for any developer supporting multiple platforms."“With MoltenVK, we've worked hard to bring a consistent Vulkan-based API to macOS and iOS while maintaining the performance improvements required by modern game developers.”"MoltenVK has been hugely valuable to us by providing the ability to execute our Vulkan code on Apple platforms without any discernable performance penalty versus writing a native Metal implementation but more importantly without requiring any modification of the code itself."