Vulkan tagged news

SIGGRAPH is one of the world’s most significant and long-standing conferences focused on computer graphics and interactive techniques. For the Khronos Group, SIGGRAPH represents an essential opportunity to connect with the developers, engineers, artists, and technical professionals that make up the primary users of Khronos standards like ANARI, glTF, OpenXR, WebGL, and Vulkan.

Through Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions, presentations, networking events, and face-to-face member meetings at SIGGRAPH, Khronos shares new and forthcoming technical breakthroughs, gathers feedback, learns about user needs and promotes best practices. This year, Khronos hosted nine public-facing events over four days: Presentation materials and video recordings for these events are now available on the Khronos SIGGRAPH 2024 Event Page.

Given that more developers were interested in creating applications for the growing number of Windows 11 ARM-based machines, last month LunarG released a Vulkan SDK for Windows 11 ARM64 architectures as a public Beta.

The Vulkan Working Group has released the VK_KHR_pipeline_binary extension, enabling direct retrieval of binary data associated with individual pipelines, bypassing the VkPipelineCache mechanism, and enabling applications to explicitly manage pipeline caching. Applications that do not need the advanced functionality of the new VK_KHR_pipeline_binary extension can continue to use VkPipelineCache objects for their simplicity and optimized implementation. But developers that are not satisfied with the VkPipelineCache API should read on to learn more about this powerful new approach.

On June 21, 2024 the Vulkan SC working group at the Khronos Group released the Vulkan SC 1.0.15 specification, the latest maintenance update to the “Vulkan Safety Critical” open standard API, which enables GPU-accelerated graphics and computation to be deployed in systems that are certified to meet industry functional safety standards.

This blog post is on the latest Vulkan SC developments, including significant new functionality in the Vulkan SC validation layers and broadened availability of NVIDIA Vulkan SC drivers.

The Broadcom V3DV driver living within the Mesa code-base that provides Vulkan API support most notably for Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers now advertises Vulkan 1.3 and has been successfully tested on both the Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 boards.

The open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa is now more capable for its Vulkan Video support with the H.264 and H.265 encode support now wired up for Mesa 24.3.

In a collaborative effort between Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) members Pixar, Autodesk, and Adobe, we are excited to announce experimental support for the Vulkan API through the HgiVulkan backend, available in OpenUSD 24.08. OpenUSD is a high-performance, extensible software platform for collaboratively creating, editing, and simulating complex 3D scenes.This allows developers to start leveraging Vulkan in Storm or other Hgi-based renderers.

The new “Honeykrisp” driver is the first conformant Vulkan for Apple hardware on any operating system, implementing the full Vulkan 1.3 Specification without “portability” waivers.

Honeykrisp is not yet released for end users. They’re continuing to add features, improve performance, and port to more hardware. However, source code is available for developers.

LunarG has released a new SDK for Windows, Linux, & macOS that supports Vulkan API revision 1.3.283. This new release has improved validation coverage, an improved Vulkan Configurator and a host of Windows and macOS changes that can be viewed in the release notes.

The results of LunarG’s 2024 Vulkan Ecosystem & SDK Survey have been released! LunarG has summarized the results and created a report that shares the key findings and suggested actions. The information you provided will be used to help guide Vulkan Ecosystem investments in 2024 and beyond. The results have also been shared with key partners and contributors in the hope that they will also use the information to guide their investments.

Thanks to those of you who completed the annual survey!

Vulkan Portability is a Khronos initiative to promote the consistent use of Vulkan functionality that is layered over other underlying APIs to enable the portable deployment of Vulkan applications on platforms without Vulkan native drivers, such as Apple’s macOS and iOS. In March 2024, Richard Wright from LunarG updated the State of Vulkan on Apple Devices white paper to reflect the latest availability of the Vulkan SDK on Apple platforms, and its ability to be used to develop applications that are fully compatible with the Apple App Store.

In this tutorial, Khronos member Steve Winston of Holochip uses the latest Khronos Vulkan samples to illustrate how to work with Vulkan on iOS.

At GDC 2024, AMD announced that FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3.1), AMD’s cutting-edge open upscaling technology, will be released later this year with Vulkan support. With Vulkan support, AMD opens up the possibilities for Linux-native games seeing support.

NVK, the open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware in Mesa, is now ready for prime time. The new merge request gets rid of the non-conformant implementation warnings and changes the Meson configuration option for NVK from nouveau-experimental to just nouveau. This will act as a signal to distros that it's now time to start shipping NVK to users. NVK will be part of Mesa 24.1 and you should expect to see it in either the spring or fall release of your favorite Linux distro. NVK is now a conformant Vulkan 1.3 implementation on Turing (RTX 2000 and GTX 1600 series), Ampere (RTX 3000 series), and Ada (RTX 4000 series) GPUs.

The 2024 LunarG Vulkan Ecosystem and SDK Survey is now Open! Please share your feedback by taking the LunarG annual anonymous developer’s survey. Both LunarG and the Khronos Vulkan Working Group collect this data to drive 2024 investments.  Your participation is crucial to this process! The survey results will be tabulated and shared with the Vulkan community.  At the end of 2024, LunarG will report on what actions were taken and what results were achieved.

Thank you from LunarG and the Khronos Vulkan Working Group!

The Vulkan Working Group at Khronos has developed a set of video format decode and encode extensions, collectively referred to as "Vulkan Video." Today, with the release of Vulkan 1.3.277, the Working Group is proud to announce the new Decode AV1 video extension. Similar to the Vulkan project in its goals, AV1 is a royalty-free open standard for video compression developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) delivering industry-leading performance and quality. The result of broad industry collaboration and support, the Decode AV1 extension is a major milestone that builds on the foundation of Vulkan Video to bring cross-platform portable and performant AV1 decode to engines and applications everywhere.