Happy to announce that the 2025 LunarG Ecosystem Survey results are in! Just like we’ve done before, LunarG reached out to the Vulkan dev crowd to see what’s cooking in GPU programming. We got a ton of awesome feedback from developers, studios, industry pros, and hobbyists about their Vulkan adventures, LunarG tools, and the whole scene. First up, a huge shoutout to everyone who took the time to fill out the survey—THANK YOU!!!
We run this survey every year to give the GPU dev community a heads-up on the latest trends, sharing the best insights we can. Together with other industry colleagues, we use this feedback to figure out what to tackle in the year ahead. Our goal, as always, is to make Vulkan development easier, faster, and more productive for all Vulkan developers. Just a heads-up, though—this isn’t a fancy professional survey, so the results might not be super scientific. Think of it more like we’re feeling out the vibe, not predicting the weather for every day of the year.
Here’s a quick peek at who chimed in: 72% of the folks who responded are regular, advanced, or expert Vulkan developers, while 28% are beginners or basic users. So, we’re hearing from a pretty experienced bunch, with over a third calling themselves expert or advanced.
You can access the entire survey here. This blog post contains a few of the results we thought were most significant.
Vulkan is used in every industry requiring visualization
Vulkan development is everywhere—any industry using a GPU is in on the action! Gaming takes the top spot since it pushes GPUs to the limit with the toughest workloads, making it the biggest player in Vulkan dev by a long shot. Coming in second is self-learning, showing how students, hobbyists, and up-and-coming pros are using Vulkan to level up their GPU programming skills. Visualization (think scientific and medical stuff) grabs third place, engineering (across all kinds) is fourth, and media and entertainment (like digital content creation) rounds out the top five. There’s also smaller but still key usage in industries like research, automotive, aerospace, manufacturing, and government/defense projects.
Vulkan is used to deliver cross-platform applications
Vulkan apps are running on more than a dozen major OS environments, making the Vulkan API the go-to for native, cross-platform software on modern GPUs. Devs can roll out their apps across ALL the big operating systems with ease! In the survey, Windows 11/x64 took the top spot for Vulkan app deployment targets, followed by Linux/x64 in second, and Windows 10/x64 in third—over half of devs are targeting each of these. macOS came in fourth with about 25% of devs on board, while Android and Steam Deck are also in the mix, each targeted by nearly a quarter of developers. Windows/ARM64, iOS, Nintendo Switch, Steam VR, and Embedded Linux are getting some love too. The huge range of environments devs are hitting with Vulkan just proves it’s the ultimate pick for native cross-platform GPU app development!
Windows ARM and Linux ARM ranked as #1 and #2 “important development environments” in the future
Windows ARM and Linux ARM are seen as the top two future dev environments to watch! Right now, less than 20% of developers think Windows 11 on ARM64 is a big deal for development, but a whopping 90% say it’ll be important down the road—landing it the #1 spot for the future. Same feeling with Linux on ARM: only about 25% see it as key today, but over 80% believe it’ll matter a lot later, putting it at #2 for future dev priorities.
Vulkan API is important now and in the future; WebGPU importance growing
No surprise here—Vulkan is a total rockstar for this crew of devs, with nearly 100% saying it’s a key API for development now and in the future. Meanwhile, OpenGL is on the way down, dropping from 40% (important now) to 20% (important in the future), and most of that shift is heading toward WebGPU, which is gaining big time, jumping from 23% to almost 50%!
Interest in Slang is growing quickly
Though Slang has only been part of the Vulkan SDK since the October 2024 SDK release, it’s already climbed to the #2 spot as the preferred shading language among Vulkan developers. This is a great example of how swiftly LunarG integrates highly anticipated tools into the Vulkan SDK to meet developers’ needs.
The majority of Vulkan developers use vkconfig
Validation layers are a big deal for catching errors, performance hiccups, and API slip-ups while you’re building your app. Vkconfig makes it super easy for devs to debug their Vulkan apps by handling the enabling, disabling, and customizing of layers. Over half of devs are now using vkconfig to mess with layer settings—that’s almost 3x more than any other method! We totally recommend devs jump on vkconfig during development to build apps that are as portable and solid as possible.
Read the whole survey!
If these highlights got you curious, there’s a ton more to check out in the full 2025 LunarG Ecosystem Survey! Grab it here.
