What Vulkan Can Do
Vulkan can be used to develop applications for many use cases. While Vulkan applications can choose to use a subset of the functionality described below, it was designed so a developer could use all of them in a single API.
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It is important to understand Vulkan is a box of tools and there are multiple ways of doing a task. |
Graphics
2D and 3D graphics are primarily what the Vulkan API is designed for. Vulkan is designed to allow developers to create hardware accelerated graphical applications.
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All Vulkan implementations are required to support Graphics, but the WSI system is not required. |
Compute
Due to the parallel nature of GPUs, a new style of programming referred to as GPGPU can be used to exploit a GPU for computational tasks. Vulkan supports compute variations of VkQueues, VkPipelines, and more which allow Vulkan to be used for general computation.
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All Vulkan implementations are required to support Compute. |
Ray Tracing
Ray tracing is an alternative rendering technique, based around the concept of simulating the physical behavior of light.
Cross-vendor API support for ray tracing was added to Vulkan as a set of extensions in the 1.2.162 specification.
These are primarily VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline, VK_KHR_ray_query, and VK_KHR_acceleration_structure.
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There is also an older NVIDIA vendor extension exposing an implementation of ray tracing on Vulkan. This extension preceded the cross-vendor extensions. For new development, applications are recommended to prefer the more recent KHR extensions. |
Video
With the Vulkan Video extensions developers can use hardware accelerated video decoding functionality in realtime. The functionality is exposed through the VK_KHR_video_queue, VK_KHR_video_decode_queue, VK_KHR_video_decode_h264 and VK_KHR_video_decode_h265 extensions.
Vulkan Video adheres to the Vulkan philosophy of providing flexible, fine-grained control over video processing scheduling, synchronization, and memory utilization to the application.
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Provisional extensions for encoding videos are already in the works, feedback is welcome |
Machine Learning
Currently, the Vulkan Working Group is looking into how to make Vulkan a first class API for exposing ML compute capabilities of modern GPUs. More information was announced at Siggraph 2019.
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As of now, there exists no public Vulkan API for machine learning. |
Safety Critical
Vulkan SC ("Safety Critical") aims to bring the graphics and compute capabilities of modern GPUs to safety-critical systems in the automotive, avionics, industrial and medical space. It was publicly launched on March 1st 2022 and the specification is available here.
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Vulkan SC is based on Vulkan 1.2, but removed functionality that is not needed for safety-critical markets, increases the robustness of the specification by eliminating ignored parameters and undefined behaviors, and enables enhanced detection, reporting, and correction of run-time faults. |