Quake 1 has been ported to Vulkan

Developer Axel Gneiting has ported Quake 1 to the Vulkan api. He did this in his spare time in addition to his work as a programmer for id Software porting the 2016 version of Doom to Vulkan.

VkQuake uses the well-known open source Quake project QuakeSpasm. The vkQuake code can be found on GitHub. Gneiting shows an image of his Vulkan Quake 1 port running ‘In the Shadows’ on Twitter. There is still something missing in the code, he writes.

Vulkan is a low level API for controlling the GPU. The api is largely derived from AMD’s Mantle. and provides direct access to deeper layers of graphics hardware for lower overhead. Vulkan is being developed by the Khronos Group, which also manages OpenGL, among others. It is supported by many platforms, currently Windows, Linux and Android. Apple has had its own Metal API since 2014 and seems to no longer support Vulkan in iOS and OS X.