Vulkan is the defenitive, high performance graphics API!

Vulkan is intended to provide a variety of advantages over other APIs as well as its predecessor, OpenGL. Vulkan offers lower overhead, more direct control over the GPU, and lower CPU usage.The overall concept and feature set of Vulkan is similar to Direct3D 12, Metal and Mantle.

Intended advantages of Vulkan over previous-generation APIs include:

Vulkan API is well suited for high-end graphics cards as well as for graphics hardware on mobile devices (OpenGL has a specific subset for mobile devices called OpenGL ES; it's still an alternative API in Vulkan supporting devices).

In contrast to Direct3D 12, Vulkan is available on multiple modern operating systems; like OpenGL, the Vulkan API is not locked to a single OS or device form factor. As of release, Vulkan runs on Android, Linux, Tizen, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10 (freely licensed third-party support for iOS and macOS is also available)

Reduced driver overhead, reducing CPU workloads.

Reduced load on CPUs through the use of batching, leaving the CPU free to do more computation or rendering than otherwise.

Better scaling on multi-core CPUs. Direct3D 11 and OpenGL 4 were initially designed for use with single-core CPUs and only received augmentation to be executed on multi-cores. Even when application developers use the augmentations, the API regularly does not scale well on multi-cores.

AMD says that Vulkan supports close-to-metal control, enabling faster performance and better image quality across Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and Linux. No other graphics API offers the same powerful combination of OS compatibility, rendering features, and hardware efficiency.