▷ How to install vulkan on your pc

Vulkan is the fashion API together with DirectX 12, in this articles we talk about all its advantages, and we explain how to install Vulkan in a very simple way so that you can take advantage of all its potential on your PC.

What is Vulkan and what are its advantages?

Vulkan is a low overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics and computing API. Vulkan targets high-performance, real-time 3D graphics applications such as video games and interactive media on all platforms. Compared to OpenGL and Direct3D 11, and like Direct3D 12 and Metal, Vulkan is intended to offer higher performance and more balanced CPU / GPU usage. Other important differences between Direct3D 11 and earlier and OpenGL are that Vulkan is a considerably lower level API and offers parallel tasks. Vulkan also has the ability to render 2D graphics applications however it is generally more suitable for 3D. In addition to its lower CPU usage, Vulkan can also better distribute work across multiple CPU cores. In general, Vulkan is said to induce anywhere from marginal to polynomial acceleration at runtime relative to other APIs if implemented correctly on the same hardware.

Vulkan was first announced by the non-profit organization Khronos Group at GDC 2015. Khronos initially referred to the Vulkan API as the "Next Generation OpenGL Initiative", or "OpenGL next", but the use of those names was discontinued once the Vulkan name was announced. Vulkan is derived and based on components of AMD's Mantle API, which was donated by AMD to Khronos with the intention of giving Khronos a foundation on which to start developing a low-level API that they could standardize across the industry., like OpenGL.

Vulkan is intended to provide a variety of advantages over other APIs, as well as its predecessor, OpenGL. Vulkan offers lower overhead, more direct control over the GPU, and less CPU usage. Vulkan's overall concept and feature set are similar to Direct3D 12, Metal, and Mantle.

Vulkan's anticipated benefits over previous generation APIs include:

• Vulkan API is well suited for high-end graphics cards as well as graphics hardware on mobile devices. Unlike Direct3D 12, Vulkan is available on multiple modern operating systems; Like OpenGL, the Vulkan API is not locked to a single operating system or device form factor. Starting at launch, Vulkan runs on Android, Linux, Tizen, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10. Reduced driver overhead, which reduces CPU workload. Reduced CPU load through the use of batch processing, leaving the CPU free to perform more calculations or renderings than otherwise. Better scaling on multi-core CPUs. Direct3D 11 and OpenGL 4 were initially designed for use with single-core CPUs, and only received a boost to run on multiple cores. Even when app developers use augmentations, the API regularly doesn't adapt well across multiple cores. OpenGL uses the high-level GLSL language to write shaders, forcing each OpenGL driver to implement its own compiler for GLSL that runs at application runtime to translate program shaders into GPU machine code.. Instead , Vulkan drivers are supposed to ingest already translated shaders into an intermediate binary format called SPIR-V (Standard Portable Intermediate Representation), analogous to the binary format in which HLSL shaders are compiled in Direct3D. By allowing shader precompilation, the application initialization speed is improved and a wider variety of shaders can be used per scene. A Vulkan driver only needs to perform GPU-specific optimization and code generation, resulting in easier driver maintenance and ultimately smaller driver packages. Unified management of compute cores and graphical shaders, eliminating the need to use a separate computation API in conjunction with a graph API.

How to install Vulkan on your PC

Installing Vulkan on your PC is as simple as installing the graphics card drivers, since both Nvidia and AMD include Vulkan in them. The first step is to find the driver for your graphics card and for your operating system on the Nvidia or AMD website.

Once the driver is selected, we download it to our PC and we can install it, for that we just have to run the file and follow the steps of the wizard.

The installation program will give us the option to also install the GeForce Experience software.

We recommend doing the express installation, in this way we will avoid possible problems. After that we will only have to wait for the installation to finish.

We recommend reading our guide to the best graphics cards and how to clean the graphics card step by step

This ends our article on how to install Vulkan on your PC, remember that you can leave a comment if you have any questions or want to make a suggestion.