OpenGL is probably the most commonly used API in PC games to date, together with Direct3D. It’s a cross-language, multi-platform application programming interface that has rendered 2D games and 3D games since 1992, and it has been used to interact with GPUs for hardware-accelerated rendering ever since.

Developed by Khronos Group, OpenGL was designed to work best with pre-multicore CPUs and GPUs, offering a limited single-thread workload for the processing units since the original code was designed way back in the ‘90s, when such processors didn’t exist yet.

When multicore processors came along, gamers and enthusiasts were excited to use the extra processing power offered by the new CPUs, only to be disappointed when graphical interfaces like Direct3D from Microsoft and OpenGL weren’t ready to tap into that extra core processing power. Almost every game on the market gets bottlenecked by an API that was programmed to use only one core when rendering texture, tessellation, and shaders.

The new Vulkan API is a serious contender to Microsoft's DirectX 12

This situation is bound to change, however, since the most widely used APIs on the PC market, the Direct3D and OpenGL, will get an inevitable upgrade in order to give free reign to game developers in accessing all the processing power a multicore processor has to offer.

Considered a successor to OpenGL, the Vulkan API is developed by the same Khronos Group that supports OpenGL. Targeting high-performance real-time 3D graphics applications such as games and interactive media across all platforms, and offering the same lower CPU usage via full multicore processing, it also aims to diminish the CPUs power consumption when processing multi-threaded applications.

In this video, Intel demonstrates Vulkan’s improved power/performance characteristics and how it handles multi-threaded rendering via Stardust benchmark, the gfxBench 5.0 and finally DOTA 2 that will be ported to Vulkan API.

Right now, Vulkan is in prototype stage and is to be implemented by different system manufacturers and game developers like Valve and Intel, with the latter planning to use it as a Linux driver for its HD integrated graphics.