People have been asking me about Vulkan. Maybe you’ve seen it in the gaming news: Vulkan is coming! Vulkan is the next big thing! Developers are excited about Vulkan! Being a naturally curious gamer, you want to know what this new thing is and what it means. So you look it up, and you find something to the effect of:
Vulkan is a graphics and compute API from Kronos Group that provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPU.
It’s a definition that explains one thing you don’t know in terms of half a dozen other words you don’t know. All you know is that it has something to do with graphics, and figuring out what this is and why it’s happening is starting to look like more trouble than it’s worth.
Sorry about that. We programmers are really bad at explaining things. We over-use jargon and are generally bad at adjusting explanations for non-technical people. But you’re in luck. While all the other programmers are min-maxers who dumped their skill points into logic and mathematics or whatever, I actually snuck a few points into communication skills. So I think I can untangle this for you.
But we are going to need just a little bit of jargon. Going back to that original definition of Vulkan, there’s at least one mystery term we need to sort out. That’s this one:
Continue reading 〉〉 “This Dumb Industry: What is Vulkan?”