Although it looks like it's mostly out of stock everywhere now. sigh
You can have a look at www.imgtec.com/vulkan for some example code. You can also download the latest Vulkan driver for the Nexus Player.
Anyone aware of Vulcan support for desktop gpus from nvidia or amd?
NVIDIA recently updated their mainline driver to support it on Windows and Linux. AMD's support is in beta driver and only for Windows.
I don't know how NVIDIA's linux driver is structured but I'm curious if they use a separate Vulkan .so file like NVIDIA's OpenGL library which one has to make sure is used instead of Mesa.
The good news is that Vulkan was designed with a multi-GPU (vendor) use case in mind so there is a generic "loader" that you use to load vendor-specific Vulkan implementations for each GPU your application renders with.
So the loader knows what hardware is going to process it and therefore uses the right driver. Is that correct? Trying to imagine how it might work.
When you create a Vulkan context you first need to enumerate the rendering devices on the system and select the one you want to use. You can actually explicitly use multiple contexts for different devices in your application, e.g. using the IGP for compute tasks while doing the main rendering on a dedicated GPU.
Please also note that AMD's Vulkan beta driver is not packaged with DirectX, so you should give it a pass unless you are a dev or you have a game that supports it.
What's the role of DirectX in that context?
Nothing. You can go and get beta driver from AMD page. I works, i managed to run some demos.