Vulkan from ZERO to HERO : 1.1. The History of GPU APIs
Welcome to first video of Vulkan from ZERO to HERO. This video is about introducing the history of GPU APIs, specially Vulkan API which was presented by Khronos Group.
In 1992 silicon graphics released OpenGL as a standard GPU API with fixed functions pipeline and just three years later DirectX was released by Microsoft on windows 95.
Until 2000, both directX and openGL used fixed function pipelines but with the rise of directX 8 the new ability for programming shaders for GPU has been added, so with directX 8 you can write shaders via high level shading language which is known as HLSL. In 2002 directX 9 was released with major updates such as floating point texture mapping, multiple render targets, multiple textures, texture look up in vertex shader stage and stencil buffer techniques.
Two years later openGL released the next major update and by releasing version two, they proposed GLSL as a new shader programming language. In 2006, directX 10 was released with major update namely geometry shader.
Three years later directX released two breaking changes namely tessellation and compute shaders. Both pipeline solved lots of problems in real time rendering.
In 2013, AMD originally developed Mantle in cooperation with DICE. DICE is the company behind Frostbit engine, the one which is used in developing games likes Battlefield series and Fifa. Mantle was designed as an alternative to DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4, the Mantle reduced CPU usage and let developers to control GPUs directly without any overhead, this resulted in higher frame per second for real time applications.
At first AMD wanted to release Mantle as a public SDK for all developers but in 2015 they suspended the idea and decided to release DirectX 12 and Vulkan based on the architecture of Mantle.
Stay tuned