Vulkan 1.3.211 Brings Another Extension To Help Zink OpenGL Implementation
Vulkan 1.3.211 arrives just one week after Vulkan 1.3.210 with its notable graphics pipeline library and primitives generated query extensions. Vulkan 1.3.211 has a handful of documentation clarifications/corrections but nothing too particularly notable there.
Most notable with today's Vulkan 1.3.211 update is the introduction of a new extension, VK_EXT_image_2d_view_of_3d. The VK_EXT_image_2d_view_of_3d extension was devised by Valve's Mike Blumenkrantz known for his work on Mesa's Zink as well as contributions from NVIDIA, Samsung, Igalia, Broadcom, AMD, Google, and Imagination.
VK_EXT_image_2d_view_of_3d is for letting a single slice of a 3D image be used as a 2D view in image descriptors for better matching the behavior of OpenGL to help implementations like Zink working to expose GL APIs over Vulkan.
This extension allows a single slice of a 3D image to be used as a 2D view in image descriptors, matching both the functionality of glBindImageTexture in OpenGL with the `layer` parameter set to true and 2D view binding provided by the extension EGL_KHR_gl_texture_3D_image. It is primarily intended to support GL emulation.
VK_EXT_image_2d_view_of_3d usage by Zink and support by Mesa's Vulkan drivers will presumably be pushed soon for Mesa 22.1. This is just the latest of a number of Vulkan extensions that have come about for helping implement OpenGL and other 3D APIs atop Vulkan.
This latest Vulkan spec can be viewed at Vulkan.org.
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