Khronos Group has released the specifications for Vulkan 1.0, paving the way for games utilizing this next-generation successor to OpenGL. An update on the GeForce website explains what this means for NVIDIA owners, and an AMD update has similar details for Radeon owners. The techies at AnandTech have all the details on this and how the project benefited from AMD's donation of their Mantle code, and how this is the first "hard" API launch in their history, saying: "Along with the release of the specification itself, today will also mark the launch of document, drivers, SDKs, conformance tests, and even beta software support." Here's word on why OpenGL needed replacing:

As for the API itself, Khronos’s goals are unchanged. Vulkan will be the low-level, low overhead successor to OpenGL, as low-level APIs have become increasingly important over the past few years. By implementing such a model, Vulkan gains abilities that OpenGL never could, not the least of which is the ability for multiple threads/cores to dispatch graphics work, a scenario that maps far better to modern multi-core CPUs. This also gives Khronos’s now flagship graphics API the chance to promote compute to a first class citizen within the graphics API, introducing support for separated graphics and compute queues (think: async shading). And though we’re still some time off from widescale adoption, Khronos will also be setting up Vulkan as their preferred API for virtual reality, as the lower overhead from the API (and lack of mandatory state validation and error handling) will cut down on API latency as compared to OpenGL.