1989

• SGI began working on a proprietary library called GL

1990

• SGI partnered with Microsoft to collaborate on open sourcing GL

1992

• SGI released OpenGL 1.0
• Architecture Review Board gains control of the OpenGL API

1995

• Microsoft released Direct3D 1.0 to compete with OpenGL

2000

• Khronos Group was formed by Intel, ATI, SGI, and Nvidia
• Non profit association of companies dedicated to maintaining open standards for vector graphics

2003

• Microsoft leaves the ARB, dropping their vote on OpenGL

2004

• OpenGL 2.0 added a programmable pipeline which allows applications to define custom rendering algorithms which execute on the GPU

2006

• SGI filed Chapter 11
• OpenGL transferred ownership to the Khronos Group
• Architecture Review Board dissolved

• AMD buys ATI, developers of the Radeon graphics hardware
• AMD wanted to integrate the GPU and CPU = APU
• Originally AMD was only a CPU vendor competing with Intel

2008

• OpenGL 3.0 released

2009

• OpenGL 3.1 released
  • removed fixed function rendering pipeline
• OpenGL 3.2 released a few months later
  • brought OpenGL back to relevance

2010

• AMD and Nvidia worked closely with Microsoft so DirectX drivers would be compatible with their newer graphics cards

2011

• PC graphics cards had 10 times more processing power than the GPU in a standard game console
• unfortunately the graphics did not look significantly better on the PC and this surprised vendors

• AMD realized the design of DirectX was affecting performance
• OpenGL also had too much bloat and the drivers were slow
• Both of these API’s were single threaded

2014

• January
  • AMD and DICE release Mantle for Radeon graphics cards with improved performance over OpenGL and Direct3D
• June
  • Apple releases Metal for iOS, later released for other Apple platforms

2015

• January
  • DirectX 12 released for Windows 10 only
  • Multi threaded, potentially much better performance than prior versions

2016

• January
  • AMD had given Mantle to the Khronos Group
  • Vulkan evolved from the components of Mantle
• August
  • Android 7 release supports Vulkan natively
• December
  • Unity game engine, announced support for Vulkan

2017

• Three different other game developers committed to Vulkan

2018

• MoltenVK library released to support translating Vulkan API calls to Metal for Apple platforms
• very similar to what Angle did for Direct3D on Windows
• MoltenVK was open sourced based by the encouragement of Valve, a major video game developer and distributor

• August
  • GLOVE is a library which translates OpenGL ES to Vulkan API
  • Using MoltenVK and GLOVE together, an OpenGL ES application can use Metal to run on Apple devices
• June
  • Apple deprecated OpenGL and OpenCL on all platforms
  • Officially supported graphics API on all Apple products is Metal
  • Demand that developers move to Metal seems like an attempt to bind applications to a proprietary technology
  • Application developed using Vulkan and MoltenVK (to access Metal) will be accepted in the the Apple store