NVIDIA Releases New Public Vulkan Beta Driver, Includes 4 New Extensions

[Danny3]

My dude AMD also has their own Vulkan extensions lmfao

AMD created Vulkan, they can have whatever they want in there.
Besides AMD is open source friendly unlike the green assholes.

[starshipeleven]

If the extensions aren't vendor-specific, the why are they called with Nvidia prefix VK_NV_* ?
Doesn't that mean that they are supported / present in their (Nvidia's) drivers only?

The name just means that NVIDIA made that extension. You can look here https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/
and see for example this NVIDIA extension https://www.khronos.org/registry/vul...xternal_memory
IP Status
No known IP claims.

(IP = Intellectual property)

Also there is this extension made by Google https://www.khronos.org/registry/vul...display_timing
that does not have any GPUs of their own.

So these additional extension are free for all to use/implement/support. These are NOT vendor-specific extensions.

But many of these extensions (maybe not the Google one) are hardware-specific so you won't see them supported by other vendors unless they have or add similar hardware. This happens because their hardware is different, so that extension makes no sense on their hardware, not because there are licenses or IP or patents (same as with many OpenGL extensions).

Vulkan is lower level than OpenGL and GPU hardware is wildly different. It's normal to see some hardware-specific extensions that remain confined to a vendor's GPU, as that's the point of Vulkan in the first place.

See this post https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...312#post974312 (or others from him in the thread for a more in-depth explanation.

AMD created Vulkan, they can have whatever they want in there.
Besides AMD is open source friendly unlike the green assholes.

Don't post bullshit, AMD created Mantle which was no less proprietary than Physix.
Vulkan was created by Kronos, a multi-vendor consortium, by taking ideas and maybe some implementations from Mantle, but also DirectX 12 does a similar thing.

Also please explain how a vendor-specific extension is less bad if it is from AMD. Vendor-specific for the sake of being vendor-specific is bad, regardless of company.

[Danny3]

The name just means that NVIDIA made that extension. You can look here https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/
and see for example this NVIDIA extension https://www.khronos.org/registry/vul...xternal_memory
IP Status
No known IP claims.

(IP = Intellectual property)

Also there is this extension made by Google https://www.khronos.org/registry/vul...display_timing
that does not have any GPUs of their own.

So these additional extension are free for all to use/implement/support. These are NOT vendor-specific extensions.

But many of these extensions (maybe not the Google one) are hardware-specific so you won't see them supported by other vendors unless they have or add similar hardware. This happens because their hardware is different, so that extension makes no sense on their hardware, not because there are licenses or IP or patents (same as with many OpenGL extensions).

Vulkan is lower level than OpenGL and GPU hardware is wildly different. It's normal to see some hardware-specific extensions that remain confined to a vendor's GPU, as that's the point of Vulkan in the first place.

See this post https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...312#post974312 (or others from him in the thread for a more in-depth explanation.

Thanks for explanations!

Don't post bullshit, AMD created Mantle which was no less proprietary than Physix.
Vulkan was created by Kronos, a multi-vendor consortium, by taking ideas and maybe some implementations from Mantle, but also DirectX 12 does a similar thing.

Also please explain how a vendor-specific extension is less bad if it is from AMD. Vendor-specific for the sake of being vendor-specific is bad, regardless of company.

AMD created Mantle probably proprietary as you say, but they've donated it to Khronos to have a foundation, so Khronos wouldn't have to start from scratch as you say they did.
From Wikipedia:

Vulkan is derived from and built upon components of AMD's Mantle API, which was donated by AMD to Khronos with the intent of giving Khronos a foundation on which to begin developing a low-level API that they could standardize across the industry, much like OpenGL

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan_(API)
I'm thinking that a vendor-specific extension is less bad if it is from AMD, because AMD in the past 10 years shows a lot of good will (deeds, developing and donating Mantle / Vulkan, releasing documentation, open source drivers, so it's normal for me to trust that their extensions are for the common good, as opposed to Nvidia, which my experience says that whatever they do is only for their selfish interests.