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Top 23 Vulkan Open-Source Projects
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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)
Project mention: Toyota Fluorite: "console-grade" Flutter game engine | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-02-11It does look like Filament has a web target:
https://github.com/google/filament
but if they're targeting embedded systems, maybe they haven't prioritized a public web demo yet. If the bulk of the project is actually in C++, making a web demo probably involves a whole WASM side-quest. I suspect there's a different amount of friction between "I wanna open source this cool project we're doing" and "I wanna build a rendering target we won't use to make the README look better."
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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: PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-10
> If someone can’t write their own Agent.md for a project how are they going to validate the auto-completed text?
> This strikes me as the ideal LLM first contribution/PR, a file explaining the projects standards and testing and structure.
Why should the project maintainers write such a file, when the info already exists within the README? It is duplicated work at best, and a definitive sign of the incapabilities of the agent to properly parse the project's contribution guidelines.
https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/blob/master/README.md#contrib...
https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/wiki/Coding-Style
https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/wiki/Developer-Information
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Project mention: We Built the First Pure Go DXIL Generator — Because Optimizing the Wrong Path Wasn't Enough | dev.to | 2026-04-05
Rust's naga shader compiler has had an open issue for DXIL backend since 2020. Six years later, it's still marked as future work. The Rust team called it "a lot of work and a long way away."
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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: 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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Project mention: From Windows to Linux Mint in 2025: Testing Black Myth: Wukong with DLSS vs FSR + Frame Generation | dev.to | 2025-07-27
MangoHud: https://github.com/flightlessmango/MangoHud
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Project mention: MonoGame: A .NET framework for making cross-platform games | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-03-07
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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).
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Index
What are some of the best open-source Vulkan projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | shadPS4 | 31,269 |
| 2 | ncnn | 23,329 |
| 3 | video2x | 20,109 |
| 4 | filament | 20,108 |
| 5 | 3d-game-shaders-for-beginners | 19,497 |
| 6 | rpcs3 | 18,894 |
| 7 | wgpu | 17,298 |
| 8 | dxvk | 17,252 |
| 9 | bgfx | 17,120 |
| 10 | Waifu2x-Extension-GUI | 16,627 |
| 11 | MNN | 15,411 |
| 12 | burn | 15,338 |
| 13 | GLFW | 15,068 |
| 14 | tvm | 13,412 |
| 15 | Vulkan | 11,989 |
| 16 | GLM | 10,992 |
| 17 | renderdoc | 10,753 |
| 18 | cocos-engine | 9,630 |
| 19 | xenia | 9,443 |
| 20 | MangoHud | 8,674 |
| 21 | Stride Game Engine | 7,631 |
| 22 | WickedEngine | 7,088 |
| 23 | Piccolo | 6,575 |
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