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what_vulkan_can_do.md

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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.

Note: 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.

Note: 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.

Note: 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.

Note: 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

Vulkan Video has release a provisional specification as of the 1.2.175 spec release.

Vulkan Video adheres to the Vulkan philosophy of providing flexible, fine-grained control over video processing scheduling, synchronization, and memory utilization to the application.

feedback for the provisional specification is welcomed

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.

Note: As of now, there exists no public Vulkan API for machine learning.

Safety Critical

Currently, the Vulkan Working Group is looking into how to make Vulkan usable for safety critical systems.

Note: As of now, there exists no public Vulkan API for safety critical systems.