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Top 23 Vulkan Open-Source Projects
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InfluxDB
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
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ncnn
ncnn is a high-performance neural network inference framework optimized for the mobile platform
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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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filament
Filament is a real-time physically based rendering engine for Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, macOS, and WebGL2 (by google)
Filament - A modern, efficient graphics engine suitable for real-time rendering, link: http://google.github.io/filament.
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bgfx
Cross-platform, graphics API agnostic, "Bring Your Own Engine/Framework" style rendering library.
Project mention: Layers All the Way Down: The Untold Story of Shader Compilation | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-05-18BGFX (https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx) uses a different approach. You basically write your shader in a GLSL-like language but it's all just (either very clever or very horrible) macro expansions that handles all the platform differences.
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I think this should cover it.
https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk
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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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Project mention: Ask HN: Resources for General Purpose GPU development on Apple's M* chips? | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-12-25
People have already mentioned Metal, but if you want cross platform, https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu has a vulkan-like API and cross compiles to all the various GPU frameworks. I believe it uses https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK to run on Macs. You can also see the metal shader transpilation results for debugging.
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As I discussed in my previous devlog, I decided to go with glfw for handling the window creation for this engine. It is a library I used a ton before. And while I do fancy replacing it later, it will suffice for now.
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video2x
A machine learning-based video super resolution and frame interpolation framework. Est. Hack the Valley II, 2018.
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MNN
MNN is a blazing fast, lightweight deep learning framework, battle-tested by business-critical use cases in Alibaba. Full multimodal LLM Android App:[MNN-LLM-Android](./apps/Android/MnnLlmChat/README.md)
Project mention: Alibaba mnn android app support DeepSeek R1 model | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-02-06 -
As for math, that was the easiest choice as of yet. No doubt, GLM is a "gold standard" at this point. For OpenGL it is, at least. But, like with a lot of the other APIs, I decided to build a wrapper around it rather than directly reference the library in the engine's code. And for physics, well, I had not come upon that answer just yet. I did try to make my own physics logic at some point. And while it was, surprisingly, successful, I wanted more than just a simple physics layer. I wanted something more complex and, more importantly, faster than my implementation. I have not decided upon a physics library yet. But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
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Project mention: Ask HN: What are good high information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites) | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-05-08
Tracy [1] is the first thing that comes to my mind, then RenderDoc [2].
After that Visual Studio while debugging. In general, I think graphical debuggers and profiling tools do a relatively good job of packing lots of information into many, small windows.
[1] https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy
[2] https://github.com/baldurk/renderdoc
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A quick note about Xenia Xenia is a research emulator for the Xbox 360 platform, enabling games originally developed for this console to run on modern PCs. The development community actively contributes to this open-source project. As mentioned above, I analyzed the project using the PVS-Studio static analyzer. The checked code matches the 3d30b2e commit.
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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.
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MangoHud
A Vulkan and OpenGL overlay for monitoring FPS, temperatures, CPU/GPU load and more. Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/Gj5YmBb
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Project mention: Quick Start Guide to Stride Community Toolkit Preview: Code-Only Feature for C#/.NET Developers 🚀 | dev.to | 2024-09-23
The Stride Community Toolkit is a collection of extensions and helpers designed for the Stride C# game engine. This open-source, community-driven project simplifies the process of creating 2D/3D games, especially using its code-only feature, which allows developers to build games without relying on Game Studio.
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Project mention: Wicked Engine replaced Bullet with Jolt physics, immediate performance gains | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-06-24
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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
Vulkan related posts
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Layers All the Way Down: The Untold Story of Shader Compilation
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A Taxonomy for Rendering Engines
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IREE
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Zig and GPUs
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Whisky is no longer actively maintained
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ConfettiFX the Forge 1.63 Released
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VkQuake – Quake Port in Vulcan for Win, Linux and macOS
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 20 May 2025
Index
What are some of the best open-source Vulkan projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | shadPS4 | 22,307 |
| 2 | ncnn | 21,474 |
| 3 | 3d-game-shaders-for-beginners | 18,498 |
| 4 | filament | 18,465 |
| 5 | rpcs3 | 16,874 |
| 6 | bgfx | 15,697 |
| 7 | dxvk | 14,677 |
| 8 | Waifu2x-Extension-GUI | 14,433 |
| 9 | wgpu | 14,156 |
| 10 | GLFW | 13,781 |
| 11 | video2x | 13,351 |
| 12 | tvm | 12,286 |
| 13 | Vulkan | 10,933 |
| 14 | MNN | 10,862 |
| 15 | GLM | 9,884 |
| 16 | renderdoc | 9,609 |
| 17 | xenia | 8,724 |
| 18 | cocos-engine | 8,669 |
| 19 | MangoHud | 7,144 |
| 20 | Stride Game Engine | 6,963 |
| 21 | WickedEngine | 6,238 |
| 22 | Piccolo | 6,215 |
| 23 | gfx | 5,377 |
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