Stefan Mileschin

Along with updates on OpenGL, Khronos is also offering a status update on the development of Vulkan at this year’s SIGGRAPH show. Khronos’s next-generation low-level API was announced last year, with further development taking off this year when it was announced at the API would be absorbing Mantle 1.0 and would operate under its current fiery name. The API is still in development, but Khronos has a few new pieces of information to share on the progress of development.
Vulkan Feature Sets

First and foremost, there has been a bit of speculation over how Vulkan would manage being a low-level API for both mobile and desktops, and Khronos is finally answering those questions. In the OpenGL ecosystem, new features would be exposed as optional extensions, and then standardized through core releases (e.g. OpenGL ES 3.2). Due to the factors that resulted in the creation of OpenGL ES, this was never a huge problem for either branch of OpenGL since each could be scoped as appropriate and integrated separately. However with Vulkan there is now just one API, and such a coarse approach would imply limiting Vulkan to just the features mobile GPUs could support, or making even more extensive use of extensions.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9509/v...pport-incoming