Google Is Working On Vulkan Over CPUs With SwiftShader

The 2018 Vulkan Developer Day event was held earlier this week at the Ubisoft offices in Montreal, Canada.

The slide decks from this Vulkan Developer Day event are

now available

. For the most part it's routine material for those familiar with Vulkan 1.1, sub-groups, HLSL interoperability, and other modern Vulkan features.

In my going through the material thus far, one of the most interesting was the

PDF slide deck

for Google working on Vulkan with SwiftShader.

Not to be confused with Apple's Swift programming language, the SwiftShader effort is what dates back to

TransGaming's SwiftShader work

when they were working on their Wine/CrossOver alternative.

Google in 2016 opened up

their SwiftShader effort

for getting OpenGL and Direct3D 9 piped on CPUs. Google's focus with SwiftShader has been on a high-performance CPU-based implementation of OpenGL ES and Direct3D 9 graphics.

But now thanks to the Montreal summit, it's clear they are working on getting SwiftShader handling Vulkan on CPUs. And in turn they seem to be mapping OpenGL ES over Vulkan.

Google is working on enabling SwiftShader to handle Vulkan on CPUs for Android/Chrome/Chromium instances where no hardware driver might be available. Unfortunately, no video recordings are out yet for clarifying their Vulkan CPU intentions with SwiftShader.

In the past there was the

Vulkan-CPU

effort born out of Google Summer of Code that later renamed to

Kazan

for getting Vulkan running on CPUs, but there hasn't been anything to report on that effort in months. At least now we're looking for a Vulkan CPU-based implementation coming via the open-source SwiftShader, which is

available via GitHub

. While writing this article I also noticed the

vulkan-prototype

branch being available for containing this work.

Read the full article here by Phoronix