[dman]

The lack of information about Vulkan is a bit concerning. For something that is about to be announced anyday now there is very little concrete information available about basic details like - what hardware that is currently shipping will support vulkan and how long after announcement will vendors have drivers out (weeks/months/years?).

[SXX]

    > what hardware that is currently shipping will support vulkan

AMD will support it for all GCN GPUs (7000 series).

Nvidia will support Vulkan for Fermi (GeForce 400) and newer. I don't really believe them here, but they even talked about Windows XP support. Announced on SIGGRAPH 2015.

Intel is Haswell and newer. It's possible that Ivy Bridge may get it on Linux, but Windows driver looks unlikely as they don't even support OpenGL 4.3 in Windows.

    > how long after announcement will vendors have drivers out

Valve demonstrated Vulkan driver developed by LunarG for Intel hardware back in March of 2015. It's will be released with source code once specification released.

Nvidia driver with Vulkan (358.66) leaked in November.

AMD employees confirmed they already have Vulkan working on top of new Linux AMDGPU driver.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xBuAdnIrJQ

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hth4u65zfc

[Mikeb85]

> what hardware that is currently shipping will support vulkan

Any hardware that supports OpenGLES 3.1. The Khronos guys have said this in various interviews, it's easy enough to google.

[microcolonel]

>what hardware that is currently shipping will support vulkan

Khronos has committed to publishing an API which can be implemented on all OpenGL ES 3.1 capable hardware.

>how long after announcement will vendors have drivers out (weeks/months/years?).

AMD, NVIDIA, and intel have all committed to timelines, or do not need to.

AMD developed Mantle, and has been developing their Vulkan stack since the beginning. They haven't set a date, but I doubt it'll be more than a month past public API release.

NVIDIA has committed to same-day delivery of a compliant driver. The day that the spec comes out, NVIDIA says they will have a driver.

For intel, I'm not certain about their proprietary drivers. I do know, however, that Valve and LunarG have developed an intel Vulkan driver. They are committed to a same-day release with source code.

So no: not years, probably not months, maybe not even weeks.

[anon4]

Drivers will be available on release day and all currently sold hardware will support it.

[dman]

Thanks - is reading the Mantle docs a good way to hit the ground running with Vulkan or have things diverged significantly?