Design and Implementation of a Vulkan Engine:Case Study of Capabilities and Performance

Masters Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Engineering - Computer Engineering, grade: 1,3, Hamburg University of Technology, language: English, abstract: The Vulkan API, released in February 2016, is the Khronos Groups answer to Microsofts Direct3D 12 API published in 2015. Due to the revolutionary capabilities provided by the new APIs to the programmer, the releases were accompanied by an enormous hype. Vulkan and Direct3D 12 provides the programmer unprecedented control and empowerment over the GPU and its memory, which might introduce a new era in GPU computing. This elaboration deals with the design and implementation of a graphic engine along with state-of-the-art rendering features using the Vulkan API. The Vulkan engine is built upon the OpenGL engine "Oreon Engine" developed in a previous work and used in the research elaboration "Realtime GPGPU FFT Ocean Water Simulation". Further, an extensive study concering the capabilities of the new Vulkan API and its performance advantage compared to OpenGL is demonstrated.