What is "vulkan"

Vulkan may refer to:

• Vulkán, the Hungarian name for the city of Vulcan, Hunedoara, Romania
• SMS Vulkan, a German U-boat salvage tug
• R-25 Vulkan, a Yugoslav surface-to-air missile project
• Bremer Vulkan, a former German shipbuilding company located at the Weser river in Bremen-Vegesack
• AG Vulcan Stettin and Vulcan-Werke Hamburg und Stettin Actiengesellschaft, a former German shipbuilding and locomotive building company (also spelled Vulkan)
• Vulkan (API), an open standard API for explicitly accessing GPU graphics and compute acceleration

Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API first announced at GDC 2015 by the Khronos Group. The Vulkan API was initially referred to as the "next generation OpenGL initiative" by Khronos, but use of those names were discontinued once the Vulkan name was announced. Vulkan is derived from and built upon components of AMD's Mantle API, which was donated by AMD to Khronos with the intent of giving Khronos a foundation on which to begin developing a low-level API that they could standardize across the industry, much like OpenGL.

Like OpenGL, Vulkan targets high-performance realtime 3D graphics applications such as videogames and interactive media across all platforms, and offers higher performance and lower CPU usage, much like Direct3D 12 and Mantle. In addition to its lower CPU usage, Vulkan is also able to better distribute work amongst multiple CPU cores.