Dozens of top graphics developers descended on our Silicon Valley headquarters Tuesday for our first ever Vulkan Developers Day.

Attendees were eager to get a head start on porting their applications to Vulkan, the new cross-platform, open-standard graphics and compute application programming interface from the Khronos Group.

It’s a topic near and dear to me because, in addition to my duties at NVIDIA, I serve as the president of Khronos, an industry consortium dedicated to creating open-standard APIs for graphics, compute and vision acceleration on a wide variety of platforms and devices.

More Control, Fewer Hiccups

Vulkan is the new generation, open-standard API for high-efficiency access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs. This ground-up design, previously referred to as the Next Generation OpenGL Initiative, gives applications explicit control over GPU acceleration for maximized performance and predictability. Vulkan eliminates expensive driver operations, which means less CPU overhead and no more unexpected frame rate hiccups.

A key advantage of Vulkan over OpenGL is the ability to generate work for the GPU across many CPU threads, making Vulkan particularly useful for developers who find themselves CPU-bound, which can occur in diverse application domains, including games, computer-aided design and mobile apps.

Vulkan expands the family of Khronos 3D APIs by complementing OpenGL and OpenGL ES, two standards that between them provide access to billions of GPUs today. Going forward, NVIDIA will be working hard within Khronos to ensure Vulkan evolves to meet industry needs.

The developers day brought key engineers from NVIDIA’s development partners together with NVIDIA driver experts.

In the morning, NVIDIA engineers gave a series of lectures about the best ways to use Vulkan with NVIDIA hardware. Valve’s John McDonald also spoke about High Performance Vulkan Programming.

In the afternoon, developers participated in workshop sessions, and NVIDIA developer technology engineers were on hand to give individual advice to developers.

We’ve recorded the developers day sessions and will make them available through our NVIDIA developer portal when Vulkan is publicly released.