vkQuake is a port of id Software’s Quake that uses Vulkan instead of OpenGL for rendering. It is based on the popular QuakeSpasm and QuakeSpasm-Spiked port, and runs all mods compatible with QuakeSpasm, such as Arcane Dimensions.

Improvements to QuakeSpasm include:

• Multi-threaded rendering and loading performance is better
• Games can run at frame rates higher than 72Hz without breaking physics
• Underwater effects software similar to Quake
• Better color accuracy reduces banding in dark areas
• Proper mip mapping of water surfaces to reduce aliasing
• Native support for anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering
• 8-bit color simulation
• Scaled pixelated look
• Mod menu for easy mod loading
• A more modern protocol to avoid some movement issues (from QSS)
• Support for custom mod HUD (from QSS)
• Support for scriptable particles (from QSS)

vkQuake demonstrates basic usage of the API. For example, it demonstrates render passes & sub passes, pipeline barriers and synchronization, compute shaders, push and specialization constants, CPU/GPU parallelism and memory pools.