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Top 23 Vulkan Open-Source Projects
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AppSignal
Monitoring that respects your time & budget. APM, error tracking, and dashboards for modern web apps. Ten-minute setup, transparent flat pricing, and support from engineers who actually use the product.
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ncnn
ncnn is a high-performance neural network inference framework optimized for the mobile platform
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video2x
A machine learning-based video super resolution and frame interpolation framework. Est. Hack the Valley II, 2018.
Project mention: 10 Powerful Open Source AI Tools You Won’t Believe Are Still Free in 2026 | dev.to | 2025-11-03GitHub Repository: https://github.com/k4yt3x/video2x
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filament
Filament is a real-time physically based rendering engine for Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, macOS, and WebGL2 (by google)
While this one seems like an official Google project, some other projects are not, even if it is on github.com/google
A random example E.g https://github.com/google/filament#disclaimer
This is not an officially supported Google product.
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Project mention: You can now play your PS3 games on PC directly from the disc drive | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-09-08
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3d-game-shaders-for-beginners
🎮 A step-by-step guide to implementing SSAO, depth of field, lighting, normal mapping, and more for your 3D game.
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Project mention: Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-13
I think the actual answer you are looking for is this paragraph:
> These old workarounds got subtle edge cases wrong in ways that produced occasional hitches, deadlocks, or weird behavior in specific games, which are bugs that don't show up on benchmark charts but can absolutely ruin individual experiences. NTSYNC fixes those at the source by matching Windows behavior exactly, and that means as soon as your favorite distro moves to the new kernel version, whether it be Bazzite, CachyOS, Fedora, or a flavor of Ubuntu, they all get this much-needed fix.
That's the crux of the article. NTSYNC isn't faster, it's more "correct". Most games are around the same level of performance, with certain outliers both ways. Right now there isn't anything performance wise that Linux has to do that would impact all games. Just tweaks and additions to the different layers [1][2][3] in the same way driver vendors do. Much of the poor performance is for API violations and other shenanigans.
1: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/uti...
2: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/blob/master/src/util/confi...
3: https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/blob/maste...
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bgfx
Cross-platform, graphics API agnostic, "Bring Your Own Engine/Framework" style rendering library.
Project mention: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-02-18 -
Waifu2x-Extension-GUI
Video, Image and GIF upscale/enlarge(Super-Resolution) and Video frame interpolation. Achieved with Waifu2x, Real-ESRGAN, Real-CUGAN, RTX Video Super Resolution VSR, SRMD, RealSR, Anime4K, RIFE, IFRNet, CAIN, DAIN, and ACNet.
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MNN
MNN: A blazing-fast, lightweight inference engine battle-tested by Alibaba, powering high-performance on-device LLMs and Edge AI.
Project mention: MNN – fast, lightweight deep learning framework | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-01-21 -
burn
Burn is a next generation tensor library and Deep Learning Framework that doesn't compromise on flexibility, efficiency and portability.
Project mention: Show HN: Demucs music stem separator rewritten in Rust – runs in the browser | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-03-03- *DAW plugin* — VST3/CLAP plugin for macOS with a native SwiftUI UI. Load a track, separate it, drag stems directly into your DAW timeline, or play as a MIDI instrument with solo / faders.
The core inference library is built on [Burn](https://burn.dev), a Rust deep learning framework. The same `demucs-core` crate compiles to both native and `wasm32-unknown-unknown` — the only thing that changes is the GPU backend.
Model weights are F16 safetensors hosted on Hugging Face and downloaded / cached automatically on first use on all platforms. Three variants: standard 4-stem (84 MB), 6-stem with guitar/piano (84 MB), and a fine-tuned bag-of-4-models for best quality (333 MB).
The existing implementations I found online were mostly wrappers around the original Python implementation, and not very portable -- the model works remarkably well and I wanted to be able to quickly create samples / remixes without leaving the DAW or my browser. Right now the implementation is pretty MacOS heavy, as that's what I'm testing with, but all of the building blocks for other platforms are ready to build on. I want this to grow to be a general utility for music producers, not just "works on my machine."
It was a fun first foray into DSP and the state of the art of ML over WASM, with lots of help from Claude!
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> There are frameworks and libraries that handle 100% of clipboard OS specifics
They're sufficient in many cases, but you'll still sometimes need the control of working with COM/etc. directly, and those libraries don't fully save you from platform-specific bugs (e.g: https://github.com/glfw/glfw/issues/2644).
> the app in question has no use for system clipboard in the first place
What do you expect to happen when you copy some text from an external editor into a text field?
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Project mention: Unlocking Client-Side AI: Running LLMs in the Browser with WebGPU | dev.to | 2026-09-22
Built on top of Apache TVM, WebLLM is currently the gold standard for high-performance chatbot implementations. It compiles model-specific kernels for WebGPU, ensuring that operations are executed with near-native speed. As of late 2026, it offers a familiar, OpenAI-compatible API, allowing developers to switch from cloud to local inference with minimal code changes.
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Project mention: OpenGL is getting mesh shaders as well, via GL_EXT_mesh_shader | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-10-10
So I've been told so I'm trying to take another look at it. At least the examples at https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan, which are probably not 1.3/1.4 yet except for the trianglevulkan13 example, are pure insanity. Coming from CUDA, I can't fathom why what should be simple things like malloc, memcpy and kernel launches, end up needing 300x as many lines.
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cocos-engine
Cocos simplifies game creation and distribution with Cocos Creator, a free, open-source, cross-platform game engine. Empowering millions of developers to create high-performance, engaging 2D/3D games and instant web entertainment.
Project mention: From LayaAir to Cocos Creator: A Solo Dev's Engine Migration After iOS Builds Kept Crashing | dev.to | 2026-04-19Cocos Creator was the natural alternative:
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Project mention: Show HN: Xenia – A monospaced font built with a custom Python engine | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-01-18
There is a name collision with the Xenia emulator for the Xbox 360. https://xenia.jp/
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> That's not to say that you couldn't write a commercial game engine with something like C# that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with unity and unreal, but it doesn't seem like anyone has attempted to do so.
Stride should mostly fit the bill: https://github.com/stride3d/stride
Their homepage: https://www.stride3d.net/
Not very popular, but it's nice to work with!
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NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
Vulkan discussion
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Unlocking Client-Side AI: Running LLMs in the Browser with WebGPU
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You can now play your PS3 games on PC directly from the disc drive
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Vulkan Tutorial
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VkQuake 1.35 Released
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 9 Oct 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source Vulkan projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | shadPS4 | 33,300 |
| 2 | ncnn | 23,917 |
| 3 | video2x | 21,963 |
| 4 | filament | 20,577 |
| 5 | rpcs3 | 19,979 |
| 6 | 3d-game-shaders-for-beginners | 19,921 |
| 7 | dxvk | 18,256 |
| 8 | wgpu | 18,183 |
| 9 | bgfx | 17,536 |
| 10 | Waifu2x-Extension-GUI | 17,088 |
| 11 | MNN | 16,167 |
| 12 | burn | 16,013 |
| 13 | GLFW | 15,377 |
| 14 | tvm | 13,808 |
| 15 | Vulkan | 12,164 |
| 16 | GLM | 11,253 |
| 17 | renderdoc | 11,137 |
| 18 | cocos-engine | 9,849 |
| 19 | xenia | 9,698 |
| 20 | MangoHud | 9,095 |
| 21 | Stride Game Engine | 7,843 |
| 22 | WickedEngine | 7,263 |
| 23 | Piccolo | 6,719 |
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