Vulkan is the new open standard cross platform graphics API from Khronos which is still under development. Android is working towards bringing Vulkan to Android while at the same time continuing to support Open GL ES, giving devs a choice of which rendering engine to use.

Vulcan is the successor to OpenGL and, as we reported when it was announced in March, had been referred to as the "Next Generation OpeGL". The change of name to Vulcan signals the fact that it is not backward compatible with OpenGL and Khronos is continuing with traditional OpenGL. 

Vulcan can be thought of as a  "closer to the metal" graphics systems like AMDs Mantle, Microsoft's DirectX 12 and Apple's Metal. According to Khronos it has the following features: 

According to a post by Technical Program Manager Shannon Woods on the Andriod Developers Blog, Vulcan should help developers of games and 3D graphics applications render complex scenes more efficiently and help avoid bottlenecks: 

Vulkan is being designed from the ground up to minimize CPU overhead in the driver, and allow your application to control GPU operation more directly. Vulkan also enables better parallelization by allowing multiple threads to perform work such as command buffer construction at once.

The Android team will provide tests for identifying problems in drivers for Vulcan in the Android Compatibility Test Suite similar to those already available for OpenGL ES and will also contribute them to Khronos for use in Vulkan’s own open source Conformance Test Suite. This will enable Khronos to test Vulkan drivers across platforms and hardware, and improve the 3D graphics ecosystem as a whole.

More Information

Low-overhead rendering with Vulkan

Vulcan Overview (Khronos)

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The New OpenGL - Vulkan and SPIR-V 

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