Vulkan tagged news

The Khronos Group has announced the release of Vulkan 1.4, the latest version of its cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API. Vulkan 1.4 integrates and mandates support for many proven features into its core specification, expanding the functionality that is consistently available to developers, greatly simplifying application development and deployment across multiple platforms.

The Vulkan 1.4 specification consolidates numerous previously optional extensions, features, and increased minimum hardware limits, many of which were defined in the Vulkan Roadmap 2022 and 2024 milestones and associated profiles, including:

• Streaming Transfers: Vulkan 1.4 imposes new implementation requirements to ensure portable, cross-platform applications can stream large quantities of data to a device while simultaneously rendering at full performance.
• Previously optional extensions and features critical to emerging high-performance applications are now mandatory in Vulkan 1.4, ensuring their reliable availability across multiple platforms. These include push descriptors, dynamic rendering local reads, and scalar block layouts.
• Maintenance extensions up to and including VK_KHR_maintenance6 are now part of the core Vulkan 1.4 specification.
• 8K rendering with up to eight separate render targets is now guaranteed to be supported, along with several other limit increases.

Today, with the release of Vulkan 1.3.302, Khronos is proud to announce two new Vulkan Video encode extensions. First, the highly anticipated Encode AV1 extension enhances Vulkan Video by adding AV1 encode functionality to complement its existing AV1 decode support. This milestone means that Vulkan Video now provides full decode AND encode acceleration for the H.264, H.265 and AV1 codec standards. Additionally, the new Encode Quantization Map extension introduces advanced encoding features for all supported codecs to Vulkan Video developers for the first time. We are confident these extensions provide the necessary building blocks for your advanced Vulkan Video applications!

The Khronos Group has announced the agenda and opened registration for Vulkanised 2025, taking place in Cambridge, UK on February 11-13, 2025. The full program is posted on the Vulkanised website, and registration is now open. Early Bird pricing is available until January 10.

The Khronos Group will have a significant presence at SIGGRAPH Asia 2024. The event will take place from 3 – 6 December 2024 in Tokyo, Japan. Attendees will be able to attend the Khronos Fast Forward and BOFs from glTF, OpenXR, Vulkan and Slang. In addition, there will be a joint BOF between the Khronos Group and W3C on how they are cooperating with synergistic standards such as WebXR, OpenXR, WebGPU, WebGL and glTF.

The Graphics Programming Conference is a new conference taking place November 12-14 in The Netherlands. The conference will bring together graphics programmers, technical directors, graphics researchers, game developers, academia, and students. The conference’s schedule features several Vulkan-related events. Visit our event page to learn more.

The Vulkan Working Group have released the VK_EXT_present_mode_fifo_latest_ready extension that introduces a new present mode in Vulkan that is closer in semantics to what some platforms can offer when wanting to expose a mailbox-like present mode. With VK_PRESENT_MODE_FIFO_LATEST_READY_EXT the presentation engine has a presentation queue similar to the existing VK_PRESENT_MODE_FIFO_KHR. However, it only displays the most recently completed presentation request in that queue and releases the images associated with the older requests when starting a new refresh cycle.  For additional information see the GitHub Extensions Proposal Document.

AMD has added mesh nodes to their Vulkan experimental extension, VK_AMDX_shader_enqueue. With mesh nodes available in a Work Graph, dispatching a single payload can kick off a variety of compute and rendering tasks, completely driven by the GPU. This update also brings support for the Work Graph HLSL syntax. Although Work Graphs are a experimental feature in Vulkan at this time, AMD is committed to its development.

Learn to integrate modern rendering techniques into a 3D real-time rendering engine with the new Vulkan 3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook being released January 9th. Per-order your copy today! (also available for the Kindle)

This week LunarG released a new Vulkan SDK for Windows, Linux, & macOS that supports Vulkan API revision 1.3.296.0. This release contains a beta version of slang.

Blender 4.3 provides initial support for rendering the Blender UI using the Vulkan API on Windows and Linux. It is treated as experimental and initially focused on feature parity and stability. Over time, more performance work is expected on the Blender Vulkan UI.

The new release adds support for new extensions, including device generated commands and pipeline binaries. It also includes some MacOS and iOS fixes.

With the release of Vulkan 1.3.296 (change log), the new Device-Generated Commands extension makes it possible to prepare sequences of commands to run directly from the GPU, and executing those sequences directly without any data going through the CPU. Igalia’s Ricardo Garcia penned a blog detailing this new extension.

The FFmpeg multimedia library continues to enhance its support around the Vulkan Video APIs with the latest commits seeing H.264 and H.265/HEVC Vulkan encode support merged.

Microsoft's Direct3D and HLSL teams shared some insight into the next big step for GPU programmability. Once Shader Model 7 is released, DirectX 12 will accept shaders compiled to SPIR-V. Their HLSL team is committed to open development processes and are collaborating with The Khronos Group and LLVM Project. They’re sharing this information at the beginning of their multi-year development process for transparency about this transition from the start. Microsoft is working with the Khronos SPIR and Vulkan Working Groups to ensure that this transition benefits the whole development ecosystem.