Vulkan (future)

Status: future. A first-class Vulkan target is not yet a validated shipping backend.

Vulkan consumes SPIR-V directly, which is convenient because the faithful pipeline already produces SPIR-V as its intermediate:

HLSL → DXC → SPIR-V   (consumed directly by Vulkan / SM6 paths)

Current state

The CLI and PlatformTarget accept a Vulkan profile, and DXC's ps_6_0/vs_6_0 (SM6) output is what feeds the Vulkan / DX12-KNI path. However, end-to-end Vulkan validation in a real MonoGame/KNI runtime is not part of the proven corpus (which covers OpenGL, DirectX DX11, and KNI WebGL). Treat Vulkan as a forward-looking target rather than a guaranteed-equivalent one.

Additive by policy

Like all new backends, Vulkan support will be additive opt-in and will not change the existing OpenGL/DX11/v10 output.