What is Vulkan?

Are these some sort of third party gpu drivers??

Can someone school me on this. Most games seem to run significantly better with it.

As I understand it, it is a graphics API, like OpenGL or DirectX.
It is very new, but likely is included with the latest Nvidia cards, or even driver updates.


https://lunarg.com/vul​kan-sdk/

APIs are an abstraction layer designed to simplify the process of developing graphics engines for GPUs. Rather than worrying about specific features that a GPU may or may not support, you simply program the game the way you want, and the API will handling translating those functions to the GPU, although core GPU functions are still regulated by the driver.

In the early days of accelerated graphics, there were a ton of manufacturers of GPUs, and many of these chips had very differing architectures, so APIs were needed to bring some consolidation, as the first PC games with 3D graphics were actually developed to run on specific GPUs (and even sound cards).

The problem is that a high-level API works in a lowest common denominator fashion, and will sacrifice the peak capabilities of some devices in order to maintain maximum compatibility with everything else. This overhead is why historically PCs needed very powerful and expensive components to run games decently, relative to those devices designed specifically for the task (consoles).

The way that graphics are rendered today has standardized to the point where low-level hardware control can be given back to the developers, bypassing much of the abstraction. So for instance, instead of coding in a few functions to render some polygons automatically, you can now specify how exactly to render them yourself, but in doing so you save on cycles and memory as the computer no longer has to try and figure out what you want to do.

Part of this is also made possible by the fact that games these days are made by teams of up to a hundred individuals or more, and they can afford to have people whose job it is solely to work on the engine, and thus have the time for digging down into the inner workings of specific hardware. And even those teams that don't have this capability still have access to ready-made tools like Unity and Unreal Engine, which allow anyone to make use of these features to some extent.

Driver updates (which are frequent) can be found at https://developer.nvid​ia.com/vulkan-driver. I suggest an occasional update; a few have shown to yield a significant improvement.

not to mention the cards back then were tiny compared to those we have today.
I was shocked by the size of the gtx 970 when I was trying to sqeeze it into my atx case.
Its about twice the size of the ATI 6750 card that it replaced and 3 times the weight.
The Matrox and Voodoo cards i saw when I was still a kid were even smaller and didnt even need fancy pipes and fans

CyberDyneSystems wrote in post #18085387

3DFX, "Glide" and GL-Quake! Hard to imagine at the time that 3DFX would die such a fast death.

I had a pair of Voodoo II's in SLI 2D was handled by the still unequaled Matrox 2D cards.. wish there was something like those now.

Exactly what I was thinking of when I wrote that. Matrox still exists, btw, they've simply moved into the industrial and point-of-service markets, where special needs are ranked above raw performance.
These days it's simpler just to render 2D images in a 3D space and call them "sprites", but considering the resolution of modern displays and the need for scaling, there's no other option.

FuturamaJSP wrote in post #18085400
not to mention the cards back then were tiny compared to those we have today.
I was shocked by the size of the gtx 970 when I was trying to sqeeze it into my atx case.
Its about twice the size of the ATI 6750 card that it replaced and 3 times the weight.
The Matrox cards i saw when I was still a kid were even smaller and didnt even need fancy pipes and fans

Yeah, we went from rather slim cards with no fans to having small fans on the chips, to basic coolers that couldn't even be called single-slot, to the stuff we have now.
In 2003 "high-end" was a 67w TDP single-slot BFG card at $400, now it's a $1,200 Titan X dual-slot card with a 250w TDP.
Of course GPUs have become almost important as the CPU in a modern system in many processing tasks and no longer become obsolete every 6 months, so it's somewhat more tolerable.