There are reasons why they named it Vulkan rather than OpenGL 5. Though, as far as I can tell, the reasons were mostly political. It reminds me of Nintendo rel

There are reasons why they named it Vulkan rather than OpenGL 5. Though, as far as I can tell, the reasons were mostly political. It reminds me of Nintendo releasing the Nintendo DS and calling it their 'third pillar', standing alongside their home console and Gameboy lines. They made it quite clear that despite its similar market position, the Nintendo DS was not the next Gameboy and it was not replacing the Gameboy line. Of course, the DS was incredibly successful and they never made any new Gameboy-branded handhelds ever again. (Though they did do a few updates to the existing model.) The Nintendo DS was a Gameboy that they didn't want to call a Gameboy, and so when it succeeded the brand simply changed and things continued on as usual. I suspect that we may see the same with Vulkan. When anyone can design an OpenGL-like abstraction as a library on top of Vulkan, the desire to make big updates to OpenGL will fade.