Intel celebrates Vulkan’s birthday by actually supporting Vulkan on some GPUs

After months in beta, Intel's latest driver for its integrated GPUs (version 15.45.14.4590) adds support for the low-overhead Vulkan API for recent GPUs running in Windows 10. The driver supports HD and Iris 500- and 600-series GPUs, the ones that ship with 6th- and 7th-generation Skylake and Kaby Lake processors.

Vulkan, currently just a day away from its first birthday, is the open source version of Microsoft's DirectX 12 or Apple's Metal, a low-overhead counterpart to OpenGL. It hasn't yet picked up much support in actual games, but adoption is slowly growing as driver and operating system support improves. Modern AMD and Nvidia GPUs have had Vulkan driver support for nearly a year now, and Google announced that Android would use Vulkan as its main low-overhead graphics API (support was added in version 7.0, which most Android users will probably eventually use at some point in the next couple of years).

Intel's support of the API in Windows is just a piece of the puzzle, but given that Intel ships more PC GPUs than anyone else, it's still a noteworthy piece. Unfortunately, it looks like owners of 4th- and 5th-generation Haswell and Broadwell CPUs and GPUs won't be getting Vulkan support in Windows, despite the fact that the GPUs seem to be able to use the API.