Intel Exhorts Developers Towards Vulkan Usage as Graphics API of Choice

Intel, via a Game Dev Developer Zone blog post, took it into its hands to urge game developers towards usage of the industry-prevalent Vulkan API. Some unapologetic puns are thrown in, such as "(...) You might say that Vulkan lets apps live long and prosper", but these are only meant to entertain. And it's well known that Intel has supported the Khronos Group and Vulkan's inception from the beginning, alongside Google. The reasons for this blog post to make it into a front page, however, are twofold.

"Vulkan APIs are positioned to become one of the next dominant graphics rendering platforms."

First, Intel commands the biggest graphics card share in the market - remember that most work PCs, tablets or even laptops are powered by Intel's integrated graphics, which means there's a huge slice of the market that developers have to account for while writing/developing their apps. Secondly, this could spell something when it comes to Intel's Visual Computing Group's strategy and development energies - a division that is being helmed by one other than Raja Koduri, himself with AMD's Mantle program - which would be then transmogrified into Vulkan. An interesting point to consider, certainly, as ntel's support behind Vulkan as a prime API could put Microsoft's DirectX - which suffers from not being cross-platform - under duress. And it's high-time that happened, since DX12 seems to be frozen in time for a long, long while now.