The Khronos Group, an open consortium of hardware and software companies, today announced expanded scope and momentum for its family of open standard 3D graphics APIs. Vulkan, the new generation API for high-efficiency access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs, is on track for implementation and specifications later this year. It has received support from Android, SteamOS, Tizen, and multiple Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Red Hat. The new OpenGL ES 3.2 specification absorbs AEP (Android Extension Pack) functionality to enhance pervasive graphics capabilities across mobile, consumer, and automotive devices. A set of OpenGL extensions will also expose the very latest capabilities of desktop hardware.

Vulkan gives applications direct control over GPU acceleration for maximized performance and predictability, and uses Khronos? new SPIR-V intermediate language specification for shading language flexibility. Vulkan minimizes driver overhead and enables multi-threaded performance on mobile, desktop, console, and embedded platforms.