All eyes have been on DirectX 12 in the past year or so but another graphics API that’s caused a stir has been Vulkan. Devised by the Khronos Group and debuting at GDC 2015, Vulkan is built from AMD’s Mantle and has been acclaimed for its lower CPU usage and ability to distribute work among a large number of CPU cores.
However, what potential does Vulkan present when used in conjunction with the cloud for hardware like gaming consoles? GamingBolt spoke to Neil Trevett, Vice President Mobile Ecosystem for Nvidia and President of Khronos Group, about the same.
On cloud gaming being the rage on consoles and PCs and whether Khronos was looking to diversify into that area, Trevett said, “PC instances in the cloud need the same cutting edge APIs to drive the GPU as if the application is running games locally. The performance and efficiency of Vulkan is just as important in the cloud as on your PC or console.”
There’s currently a theory, as revealed by Microsoft in the past for the Xbox One, that consoles could be made more powerful by offloading to the cloud. One such instance is the procedural generation of terrain which is a highly complex rendering process for any developer. Would Vulkan be able to help in such a scenario?
Trevett says, “Yes – that is an interesting area for research and innovation. Vulkan can provide the same API for graphics and compute on the local device and the cloud – simplifying sophisticated load balancing of apps between local and remote resources.”
Thoughts on the potential power of Vulkan when used with the cloud for consoles? Let us know in the comments.