Vulkan Fan? Six Reasons to Run It on NVIDIA

by Ethan Einhorn

Many different platforms, same great performance. That’s why Vulkan is a very big deal.

With the release Tuesday of Vulkan 1.3, NVIDIA continues its unparalleled record of day one driver support for this cross-platform GPU application programming interface for 3D graphics and computing.

Vulkan has been created by experts from across the industry working together at the Khronos Group, an open standards consortium. From the start, NVIDIA has worked to advance this effort. NVIDIA’s Neil Trevett has been Khronos president since its earliest days.

“NVIDIA has consistently been at the forefront of computer graphics with new, enhanced tools, and technologies for developers to create rich game experiences,” said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research.

“Their guidance and support for Vulkan 1.3 development, and release of a new compatible driver on day one across NVIDIA GPUs contributes to the successful cross-platform functionality and performance for games and apps this new API will bring,” he said.

With a simpler, thinner driver and efficient CPU multi-threading capabilities, Vulkan has less latency and overhead than alternatives, such as OpenGL or older versions of Direct3D.

If you use Vulkan, NVIDIA GPUs are a no-brainer. Here’s why:

  1. NVIDIA consistently provides industry leadership to evolve new Vulkan functionality and is often the first to make leading-edge computer graphics techniques available to developers. This ensures cutting-edge titles are supported on Vulkan and, by extension, made available to more gamers.
  2. NVIDIA designs hardware to provide the fastest Vulkan performance for your games and applications. For example, NVIDIA GPUs perform up over 30 percent faster than the nearest competition on games such as Doom Eternal with advanced rendering techniques such as ray tracing.
  3. NVIDIA provides the broadest range of Vulkan functionality to ensure you can run the games and apps that you want and need. NVIDIA’s production drivers support advanced features such as ray-tracing and DLSS AI rendering across multiple platforms, including Windows and popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Kylin and RHEL.
  4. NVIDIA works hard to be the platform of choice for Vulkan development with tools that are often the first to support the latest Vulkan functionality, encouraging apps and games to be optimized first for NVIDIA. NVIDIA Nsight, our suite of development tools, has integrated support for Vulkan, including debugging and optimizing of applications using full ray-tracing functionality. NVIDIA also provides extensive Vulkan code samples, tutorials and best practice guidance so developers can get the very best performance from their code.
  5. NVIDIA makes Vulkan available across a wider range of platforms and hardware than anyone else for easier cross-platform portability. NVIDIA ships Vulkan on PCs, embedded platforms, automotive and the data center. And gamers enjoy ongoing support of the latest Vulkan API changes with older GPUs.
  6. NVIDIA aims to bulletproof your games with highly reliable game-ready drivers. NVIDIA treats Vulkan as a first-class citizen API with focused development and support. In fact, developers can download our zero-day Vulkan 1.3 drivers right now at https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver.

Look for more details about our commitment and leadership in Vulkan on NVIDIA’s Vulkan web page. And if you’re not already a member of NVIDIA’s Developer Program, sign up. Developers can download new tools and drivers from NVIDIA for Vulkan 1.3 today.