Vulkan 1.3.224 Introduces Another New Extension To Help Valve's Steam Play

Vulkan 1.3.224 was released earlier today and with this spec update comes VK_EXT_attachment_feedback_loop_layout as another extension started by Valve developers and will help their Steam Play (Proton) efforts.

VK_EXT_attachment_feedback_loop_layout was started by well known Valve DXVK/VKD3D-Proton contributor Joshua Ashton before folks from Collabora, Google, Igalia, Samsung, and Arm became involved and hence being promoted to an "EXT" multi-vendor extension.

The VK_EXT_attachment_feedback_loop_layout extension adds a new image layout that lets applications have an image layout in which they are able to both render to and sample/fetch from the same sub-resources of an image in a given render pass. This extension has been in the works going back to the end of last year and presumably will find use within DXVK / VKD3D-Proton for bettering the Direct3D over Vulkan implementations.

Valve continues contributing a lot to upstream Vulkan to enhance the graphics ecosystem for Linux gaming and being able to better enjoy Windows games on Linux.

In addition to VK_EXT_attachment_feedback_loop_layout, today's Vulkan 1.3.224 update also adds VK_SEC_amigo_profiling. The VK_SEC_amigo_profiling extension is an internal extension for use within Google's ANGLE and is not otherwise documented for usage elsewhere.

These new extensions in Vulkan 1.3.224 and the various fixes making up this week's Vulkan spec update can be found via Vulkan-Docs.