Vulkan News

The new VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer extension will change how engines approach descriptors going forward. Descriptor sets are now backed by VkBuffer objects where you memcpy in descriptors. In the following blog, Hans-Kristian Arntzen, gives us an overview of the new extension including the history, reasoning, and how to implement.

Join us today at 9am PT to learn about cross-vendor mesh shading and source-level shader debugging with RenderDoc. The webinar will provide instructions, recommendations, and demonstrations. In addition, there will be Q&A sessions. Join us today!

New Features Added to All Vulkan SDKs include: Two new and important features have been added to GFXReconstruct: The “Virtual Swapchain” feature fixes incorrect screen output when swapchain image acquisition order or count is different on the target platform. Virtual Swapchain is enabled by default but can be disabled. See the GFXReconstruct documentation for more information. The new gfxrecon-convert tool (a.k.a. gfxrecon.py convert) produces JSONlines output representing all the Vulkan commands in a GFXReconstruct capture. For more information, see the “JSON Lines Conversion” section of the GFXReconstruct documentation. The Vulkan Configurator (vkconfig) has been updated to improve quality and stability. See the Vulkan Configurator documentation for more information. The HW Capability viewer from GPUInfo.org is included in the SDK (with an option to auto-launch), and much more…

Venus is a virtual Vulkan driver based on the Virtio-GPU protocol. Effectively a protocol on top of another protocol, it defines the serialization of Vulkan commands between guest and host. This blog covers details of the Venus driver, its components, and their relations in the context of extensions.

MoltenVK 1.2 was tagged today and with this version there is now support for Vulkan 1.2. This MoltenVK 1.2 release is built against the Vulkan SDK 1.3.231 and also exposes SPIR-V 1.4 support, KHR_shader_float_controls, improves Vulkan semaphore functionality, memory leaks have been addressed, crash fixes, and a variety of other improvements for mapping Vulkan to Metal.

The NVK driver has been written almost entirely from scratch using the new official headers from NVIDIA. Mesa translates specifications to vendor-specific graphics hardware drivers. The long-term hope is for NVK to be for NVIDIA hardware what RADV is to AMD hardware.

Ahead of the flagship Arc Graphics A770 launching on 12 October, Intel’s Mesa “ANV” open-source Vulkan driver exposes the ray-tracing support for DG2/Alchemist graphics hardware.

Ahead of the flagship Arc Graphics A770 launching on 12 October, Intel’s Mesa “ANV” open-source Vulkan driver exposes the ray-tracing support for DG2/Alchemist graphics hardware.

AMDVLK 2022.Q3.5 adds support for the VK_EXT_depth_clamp_zero_one extension, performance tuning for Doom Eternal and Yquake2 and other games, enables acquire-release barrier support, and enables MSAA anti-aliasing decompression using the compute engine. The driver has also been built against the Vulkan API 1.3.228 headers.

Recently the open-source AMD OpenGL driver “RadeonSI” enabled OpenGL threading by default for the “glthread” option that has long been opt-in on a per-game/app basis. Along with that has been a number of glthread-related improvements to this code that punts executing OpenGL calls to a separate CPU thread. The Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver has now unconditionally enabled OpenGL threading too.