Vulkan vs. DirectX 12: Which Should You Choose?

howtogeek.com:

More PC games than ever allow players to choose between DirectX 12 and Vulkan. But it isn’t always obvious what the difference is, nor which one will provide the best gaming experience. The answers aren’t completely straightforward, but we’ll tell you what you need to know.

Vulkan and DirectX are APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and offer two different solutions to the same problem: ensuring software, such as a videogame, can communicate with your PC hardware, and vice versa, in the most efficient way.

Vulkan is a dedicated graphics API, whereas DirectX is a collection of APIs that includes a graphics API (Direct3D.) They both feature standardized tools, making it much easier to develop software that will work with the wide variety of graphics cards and other hardware inside our computers. Without standardization of this type, software developers would be required to provide individual drivers for every possible GPU and hardware configuration.

DirectX was developed by Microsoft and was originally called the Windows Games SDK (Software Development Kit) when released in 1995. It has been included in the OS since that time. The first game to use DirectX was iD Software’s Doom 95, published in 1996.

Vulkan was developed by the Khronos Group, a consortium of more than 150 companies responsible for OpenGL, WebGL, Anari, and several other APIs. It was originally based on an API called Mantle, developed and then abandoned by AMD. Vulkan is considered to be the successor to OpenGL, a graphics API that has been around since 1992.

Vulkan is a low-overhead API and can require fewer system resources, such as CPU computation, memory, and bandwidth, than DirectX. This makes it a potentially better option than DirectX 12 on