vulkan api

[idle]

looks interesting but not sure if it'll be a revelation like opengl was when it first came out
https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/

[DontTalkToMe]

It is interesting, but for the majority of programmers OpenGL still will be the best choice imho.
After all the only sizable limit of current modern OpenGL is some overhead mainly due to context switches, and modern API versions introduced many ways to reduce most of them (ARB_direct_state_access() for example or ARB_bindless_texture() to bypass texture's context switching).

http://gdcvault.com/play/1020791/

Vulkan gives you more control on the GPU and is better at scaling on the CPU side on multiple cores, putting the two things together the gain may be substantial.
For engine developers will probably be very useful, for normal programmers probably not unless they want to spend a lot of time fine tuning. After all it's a low level API.

http://www.toptal.com/api-developers/a- ... ulkan-api/

But it's up to them, it's nice to have the option (an open standard option, unlike DX12 etc.)

[Lunasole]

It should kill DirectX at last and thus resolving my problems with DirectX interfaces (jk) Or at least, partially disarming MS in their commercial madness.

Anyway, there is no reason since 2010 (or even few years before) to start learning DX or doing something with it, unless you have a big company doing AAA-games and having lot of coders to command them do anything. I realized it only few months ago, though lot of indie-games already released for those years with OpenGL only, and it is smart choice as it is better to ignore XBox completely than to waste lot of efforts both for OpenGL and DX. For PB which target platforms are Win/Linux/MacOS it is even more wise.

Also SDK looks nice, having small enough runtime and should be fine usable with procedural language. But It doesn't seems that it can give something better for middle indie game than pure OpenGL, except to be much more clear.
For now I think for it is perfect to use built-in PB drawing with OpenGL subsystem + additionally call some OpenGL functions directly to implement custom things you need.

[Samuel]

I'm really excited to work with Vulkan. OpenGL is nice, but there is just too much legacy mixed in with the modern.
After doing some tests and experiments with Vulkan I'll probably rewrite my 3D engine in order to support it properly.