Vulkan

Khronos's cross-platform GPU programming API, born in gaming but now the open path for local AI: Ollama and llama.cpp support it natively on Windows, Linux and macOS (via MoltenVK), on NVIDIA, AMD and Intel with no proprietary drivers. Less optimized for inference than CUDA — usually 70-90% of the native path's speed — but it is the only stack that works on practically every card, and it is the maintained path for Intel Arc GPUs since IPEX-LLM was archived.