Datoviz is a cross-platform, open-source, high-performance GPU scientific data visualization library designed for interactive exploration of large datasets. Written in C/C++, it leverages the Khronos Vulkan® graphics API and integrates with the glfw window library. Datoviz aims to provide a unified, language-agnostic platform for interactive visualization in both 2D and 3D, with support for GUIs and general-purpose GPU compute.
Today, with the release of Vulkan 1.3.302, Khronos is proud to announce two new 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!
Bringing Explicit Pipeline Caching Control to Vulkan
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.
Vulkan SC 1.0.15 Released: SPIR-V Validation and New NVIDIA Drivers for Desktop Systems Available
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.
Vulkan Support Added to OpenUSD and Pixar’s Hydra Storm Renderer
Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) is a high-performance, extensible software platform for collaboratively creating, editing, and simulating complex 3D scenes. OpenUSD is more than a file format and scene representation—it's an extensible framework of libraries, tools, and plugins. This includes the Hydra rendering framework, an open source OpenUSD framework that decouples scene descriptions from renderers, and the Storm renderer, a rasterizer aimed at performance and scalability.
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.
Khronos Releases AV1 Decode in Vulkan Video with SDK Support for H.264/H.265 Encode
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.
Khronos Releases Maximal Reconvergence and Quad Control Extensions for Vulkan and SPIR-V
The SPIR™ Working Group has developed two new SPIR-V extensions (and corresponding Vulkan® extensions) to provide shader authors with more guarantees about the execution model of shaders. These extensions formalize behavior many authors have previously taken for granted, so that they can now be relied upon across the ecosystem.
Today we’re happy to announce the release of VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering_local_read, which adds support for local dependencies to dynamic rendering; enabling developers to fully move over to dynamic rendering as support is rolled out.
Khronos Finalizes Vulkan Video Extensions for Accelerated H.264 and H.265 Encode
In April 2021, the Vulkan® Working Group at Khronos® released a set of provisional extensions, collectively referred to as ‘Vulkan Video’ which provide seamless encoding and decoding of video streams using a variety of video coding standards. The December 2022 release of Vulkan 1.3.238 saw the finalization of the extensions to decode H.264 and H.265, and today, with the release of Vulkan 1.3.274, Khronos has finalized their counterpart: the extensions to enable encoding of H.264 and H.265 video streams. Leveraging the Vulkan framework, they provide a standardized, seamless, low-overhead, and highly controllable way to produce H.264 and H.265 video via hardware accelerators, with applications ranging from real-time, low-latency streaming to offline server-scale transcoding.
One of the most common requests that the Vulkan Working Group gets from the developer community is to improve Vulkan documentation, which would make it quicker and easier to find the information needed to learn Vulkan, and to navigate through the various kinds of information needed for application development. Over the past few months, the Vulkan Working Group has been working hard to improve the developer experience by streamlining access to our key documentation. We have gathered all the key documents including the specifications, guides, tutorials and samples into a single website to allow developers to easily find the right documents and navigate quickly to the information they need.
Vulkan SC: Significant Ecosystem and Tooling Updates
Vulkan® SC is a streamlined API based on the Khronos® Vulkan API that enables state-of-the-art GPU-accelerated graphics and computation to be deployed in safety-critical systems. On September 27, 2023, the Vulkan SC Working Group at Khronos released the latest Vulkan SC 1.0.13 maintenance update. Alongside the new specification there are significant Vulkan SC tooling updates and streamlined ecosystem synergy with mainstream Vulkan. R
The Vulkan Working Group has released the VK_EXT_host_image_copy extension, allowing copies to and from images to be done on the host rather than the device.
Vulkan already provides functions to copy between buffers and images through vkCmdCopyBufferToImage, vkCmdCopyImageToBuffer, and vkCmdCopyImage (later made extensible in VK_KHR_copy_commands2 and Vulkan 1.3). These functions are essential as the physical layout of an image (otherwise known as memory swizzling) created with VK_IMAGE_TILING_OPTIMAL is opaque to the application, so it cannot meaningfully copy to and from such an image by mapping its device memory on the host. What’s more, its device memory may not be host-mappable to begin with. However, the Vulkan implementation is capable of copying to and from these types of images with hardware-accelerated swizzling.
Introducing Vulkan Ray Tracing Position Fetch Extension
On April 27, 2023 the Vulkan® Ray Tracing TSG released the VK_KHR_ray_tracing_position_fetch extension, which exposes the ability to fetch vertex positions from an acceleration structure hit when tracing rays. The SPIR-V SPV_KHR_ray_tracing_position_fetch and GLSL GL_EXT_ray_tracing_position_fetch extensions have also been released to provide SPIR-V and GLSL support for this functionality.
Background to Compute in Vulkan
Graphics processors have come a long way from simple framebuffer-based 2D display cards to fully programmable high performance devices. One of the most groundbreaking changes in this evolution was the addition of freely programmable compute units, paving the way for general-purpose computations on the GPU (aka “GPGPU”) and leveraging graphics processors for a host of use cases that have traditionally be
