Vulkan News

Asynchronous compute is a trend that has proven itself to be an effective optimization technique, but it is somewhat difficult pinning down how to apply it. This idea started its life on last generation console hardware but has since been made available on modern graphics APIs like Vulkan and D3D12. It is now part of a graphics programmer’s toolbox. In this blog, Arm highlights a new Vulkan Sample that was added to Khronos’ sample repository which demonstrates how to use async compute.

In their recently released update, Valve’s Left 4 Dead 2 is getting Vulkan rendering support by leveraging DXVK to convert Direct3D calls to Vulkan. This update also brings many bug fixes, controller handling enhancements and more.

Diligent Engine is a modern, cross-platform, low-level graphics library and rendering framework that supports Vulkan, OpenGL/GLES, D3D11, D3D12, and Metal. The latest release 2.5 adds a number of major improvements: Pipeline resource signatures, an abstraction over descriptor set layouts, enable applications to define explicit shader resource layouts that allow sharing shader resources between different pipeline states without the need to rebind them. Multiple immediate contexts enable async compute and parallel rendering. Ray queries is a powerful extension to ray tracing that allows casting rays from regular shaders (pixel, compute, etc.). Wave operations enable sharing data between threads in one shader thread group. Memoryless framebuffer attachments enable memory savings on mobile platforms. A new tutorial demonstrates how to implement a simple hybrid renderer that combines rasterization with ray tracing. Starting with this release, the API will be much more stable with very few breaking changes expected in the future.

In this Collabora blog post, Rohan Garg explores the new, low overhead extension in Mesa allowing OpenGL and Vulkan applications to talk to each other, bringing more flexibility to application developers while easing the transition path between the industry-standard Khronos APIs.

In this featured blog by Autodesk’s Jerran Schmidt, we explore the use of scalable cloud resources to process data from large datasets and why Autodesk chose Vulkan as their API.

Simulating the sensor modalities used in automated driving efficiently and accurately is an immense challenge. The best solutions is to rely on GPU-accelerated raytracing techniques and the efficient distribution of tasks. Today, the Vulkan API is the only tool that can support such a system – that’s why we’ve integrated it into aiSim.

Simulating the sensor modalities used in automated driving efficiently and accurately is an immense challenge. The best solutions is to rely on GPU-accelerated raytracing techniques and the efficient distribution of tasks. Today, the Vulkan API is the only tool that can support such a system – that’s why we’ve integrated it into aiSim.

AMD’s open-source Vulkan driver’s newest release includes a CPU performance optimizations for its Vulkan pipeline binning and faster shader compilation times. The sources to this updated AMDVLK 2021.Q2.3 driver along with RHEL/CentOS and Ubuntu binaries can be found available for download at GitHub.

CoreAVI announced a suite of Vulkan-based, safety-critical graphics and compute libraries supporting Arm’s first GPU designed for safety critical applications, the Mali-G78AE GPU. The Mali-G78AE GPU is designed for the automotive, industrial and avionics markets. CoreAVI’s software suite includes a Vulkan safety driver, GPGPU algorithms, libraries for OpenGL SC1, OpenGL SC2, and TrueCore as well as all safety certification artifacts. This range of next-gen safety-critical software drivers and libraries will be available to support semiconductor designers, OEMs, and Tier 1 system developers.

By Kristofer Rose - Developer Relations, The Khronos Group It has been a while in the making but we are very excited to launch the new Vulkan website to the community. Don’t worry, Vulkan is still maintained and owned by The Khronos Group; we just felt that it had outgrown its old website now that it has been five years since the Vulkan 1.0 launch. The original Vulkan website was designed for the launch of a cutting edge new API that would, initially, have limited official materials and community content. The old website performed that role admirably, but Vulkan has come a long way and we now have a large and increasing amount of tools, libraries, educational material, and news to showcase that a single page website cannot handle. The new website allows us to gather all these currently disparate internal and community resources in a single, easily navigable place. Our primary goal with the new vulkan.org site was to place key resources prominently to allow developers to quickly and easily find what they need. With this in mind, each page has buttons in the banner leading straight to the most essential and popular resources. If you need the Vulkan Specification, SDK or Guide you can just jump straight there, no digging needed. The new site has a whole page dedicated to Vulkan tools and support , giving developers access to SDKs, profilers, debuggers, libraries, language bindings, game engines and frameworks all easy to navigate to through a series of quick buttons. This is a huge improvement and it let’s developers discover new tools or quickly find their go to favorites. Vulkan is enjoying a boom in adoption by world class developers and we want to make sure we are showcasing this exciting content to our visitors. As such you’ll notice much more prominent use of imagery across the site that will be updated as time goes on and new content is available. There is also now a dedicated “Made with Vulkan” showcase which is a living list of Vulkan content and reveals just how powerful and versatile the API is. If you have a Vulkan project that you would like to let us know about, please use the linked form on the Made with Vulkan page above the showcase. We hope this website becomes a new focal point for the Vulkan community and improves the Vulkan development experience for both new and experienced developers.