Kestrel Project
Kestrel is a modern GPGPU & Rendering API in similar vein to Vulkan, however simlifying the API though focusing on modern hardware. It is designed for performance and developer flexibility. Instead of piling on feature flags, many of which are present on >99% of GPUs, we determine a minimal spec required. The API is built around device addressing.
We believe a big hardware paradigm-shift has been going on, while the traditional graphics APIs have been stuck in legacy-support mode; both harming driver performance and development speed. Integrated GPUs have UMA, and modern discrete GPUs support Resizable BAR. Buffers don’t have types, and you usually prefer to share them. Vulkan for example usually forces the developer to write barriers between different resources. This is not how modern GPUs work, and leads to the driver inneficiencies.
This project has taken the good parts from Mesa3D, modernized them into a sleek User-Mode Driver (UMD), and develops a new API.
Minimal spec hardware:
Nvidia Turing (RTX 2000 series, 2018)
AMD RDNA2 (RX 6000 series, 2020)
Intel Alchemist / Xe1 (2022)
Apple M1 / A14 (MacBook M1, iPhone 12, 2020)
ARM Mali-G710 (2021)
Qualcomm Adreno 650 (2019)
PowerVR DXT (Pixel 10, 2025)