The Mesa developers have announced the release of Mesa 17.0.0 and it's a truly incredible release. You should probably update as soon as possible.
There’s been a fair bit of talk recently about attempting to multi-thread using OpenGL so I thought I’d write a bit more about what “multi-threading” an OpenGL game is, what’s normally done, and how it compares to multi-threading in Vulkan. Here's an attempt to explain it a little.
Continuing my love for Croteam, today it was pointed out on reddit that the Croteam developers have been talking quite a bit more about Vulkan on one of their Steam forums. They also stated that Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter should have the Fusion update with Linux & Vulkan in 'weeks'.
This year's GDC sounds like it might be quite interesting! AMD, NVIDIA, Khronos, Unity, Croteam and more have announced they will be doing a bunch of talks and some of them will be about Vulkan.
Something that sadly got buried in my inbox is this video of David Airlie (Red Hat) talking about the Vulkan Graphics API.
For those of you interested in seeing The Witness on Linux, it seems Jonathan Blow mentioned it again recently in a livestream in response to a viewer question. It's hard to argue with what he's saying.
In addition to Mesa 17 getting a new release candidate, we also today have a Mesa 13.0.4 release candidate which should be released on Friday.
Dave Airlie sent in a massive patch-set of 31 patches for 'radv', the open source AMD Vulkan driver, to support geometry shaders.
Mesa 17, the next stable release of the open source graphics drivers on Linux has been a bit delayed, due to so much last minute work going on. Looks like Intel Ivy Bridge will get OpenGL 4.0.
A commit that just landed in Mesa-git allows for 'radv', the open source Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs to use multiple devices.
Rust, from Facepunch Studios is another game to add to the list that use Vulkan, although it's only on the pre-release version right now.
NVIDIA has put out what they call 'VkHLF', a high level abstraction library on top of Vulkan. Looks like it's under a BSD-style license too.
After another Linux site listed ARK in their top games list, the ARK Twitter account tweeted out publicly to let everyone know that ARK: Survival Evolved will move to Vulkan for Linux.
The news doing the rounds right now is that the Nintendo Switch, the new gaming device from Nintendo will use Vulkan. People are getting rather excited and thinking it will mean more Linux ports, but right now it won't.
EGOSOFT, who became pretty Linux-friendly in recent times are working on two new space simulation games! X Rebirth VR Edition will use Vulkan and they are starting to plan X4.
The developer of VK9, the project that aims to implement d3d9 over Vulkan, emailed in to let me know they have hit another milestone.
Unity 5.6 beta is now available and it brings Vulkan into the main builds of the Unity engine, exciting times!
Croteam have updated The Talos Principle today to move the last beta build over to the stable release.
It seems NVIDIA are preparing a new driver update that will enable the use of Vulkan without needing X11.
Edge Of Eternity is a really fantastic looking indie tribute to the J-RPG classics and the developers have confirmed Linux will not see a release until Vulkan is stable in Unity.