News Intel launches Vulkan driver support

Sorry to be a noob, I've not read up on this API - What does this mean for Sky/Kaby Lake users with discrete GPU's installed? Is Vulkan already used by Devs for AMD and Nvidia GPU's?

 

It could mean much better performance. Note the word could, though.

It did on AMD GPUs any way.

 

Would any of the games with Vulkan support run reasonably on Intel iGPU?

While this announcement sounds really good in terms of boosting adoption rates of Vulkan could Intel's intention be aimed more at mobile gamers?

 

Aren't Intel going to be releasing some chips with AMD graphics? I would imagine that this is aimed at those potentially.

 

Errr - cannot ever see that happening.....

 

I think that's more a licensing deal than anything, similar to how AMD pays Intel for the rights to make x86 CPUs and Intel pays AMD for the x64 rights, previously it was with Nvidia as it's almost impossible to make a GPU without infringing on AMD or Nvidia patterns so you're almost forced to pay a licensing fee to one of those two if you want to make a GPU.

 

According to Windy Miller that is exactly what is happening.

 

Bingo. Intel licensing from AMD does no more mean AMD designing GPUs for Intel than Intel licensing from Nvidia meant Nvidia designing GPUs for Intel.


If anything, Intel's focus on HPC means I'd bet on seeing some Larrabee-derived (now Xeon Phi) mini cores scattered onto a die before seeing someone else's graphical cores. Less for graphical operation, and more for offloading parallellisable workloads to a very parallel 'coprocessor', leaving die area and power budget for fewer 'big' cores to run much faster for improved SP perf. Phi using x86 means that unlike HSA or GPGPU, you'd get the benefits just from existing threaded workloads, rather than needing to add a while new instruction set to talk to a GPU.