Vulkan 1.3.263 Released With A New NVIDIA Extension

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Vulkan 1.3.263 Released With A New NVIDIA Extension

There wasn't any big Vulkan spec update for SIGGRAPH this year but the frequent point releases continue rolling on for this high performance graphics and compute API...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-1.3.263-Released

[timofonic]

What can this be useful for? Any practical examples at least? What actual software may get a beneficial effect from this?

[kpedersen]

What can this be useful for? Any practical examples at least? What actual software may get a beneficial effect from this?

Just like web browsers, some guy working on a fundamental library, such as a game engine will (likely needlessly) overconsume this feature for trivial benefits and force everyone to remain on the technology treadmill to be able to support it in order for the engine and thus everything else above it on the stack to keep working.

Just like er... NPOT textures

[timofonic]

Just like web browsers, some guy working on a fundamental library, such as a game engine will (likely needlessly) overconsume this feature for trivial benefits and force everyone to remain on the technology treadmill to be able to support it in order for the engine and thus everything else above it on the stack to keep working.

Just like er... NPOT textures

That's good. But what usecases?

[Daktyl198]

That's good. But what usecases?

It allows developers to be slightly lazier. That's pretty much it. Just another extension on the stack of hundreds that developers have to search through whenever they want to try Vulkan, all for a tiny increase in productivity but probably lower performance.

It's no wonder 99% of games go with DX12, AGAIN. Because Khronos is making the same mistakes AGAIN.

[smitty3268]

It allows developers to be slightly lazier. That's pretty much it. Just another extension on the stack of hundreds that developers have to search through whenever they want to try Vulkan, all for a tiny increase in productivity but probably lower performance.

I don't understand how a useless extension nobody needs to use hurts developers. Wouldn't they just stick to the default core set?

It's no wonder 99% of games go with DX12, AGAIN. Because Khronos is making the same mistakes AGAIN.

Like it or not, if Khronos didn't allow vendor extensions Vulkan simply wouldn't exist. Vendors wouldn't support it, they'd just do their own thing. At best, each vendor would support some basic set of common API and then fork to have their own flavors.

That's the difference between owning a platform and controlling what goes on it (MS, Apple) vs an entirely voluntary group effort based largely around vendors that are naturally competitors with one another (Khronos).

[mSparks]

It allows developers to be slightly lazier.

So what you are saying is, the reason you didnt win the lottery this week is because you were lazy, not that you didnt know the numbers ahead of time.

Better work harder on those lottery numbers next week then.

lol.

[0xCC]

A bit of a pointless extension to be honest - running out of descriptors is an incredibly rare thing to happen and when it does, you generally just bump up the number you want in the pool in the first place or allocate a new one. The only reason I can think of for its existence is that Nvidia already supports overallocation regardless of the extension (it's hidden descriptor allocation related bugs from me a couple times) so this is more or less just a formality to get that behaviour in the specification.