Vulkan 1.3.280 Released With NVIDIA Ray-Tracing Validation Extension

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Vulkan 1.3.280 Released With NVIDIA Ray-Tracing Validation Extension

Vulkan 1.3.280 is out today as the newest spec update for this high performance graphics, compute, and video API...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-1.3.280

[timofonic]

I'm tired of so many vendor extensions cluttering Vulkan...

[mSparks]

I'm tired of so many vendor extensions cluttering Vulkan...

this extension is clearly for nvidia nsight, unless you are an nvidia employee working on that you can safely and quickly go back to never thinking about it.

[Daktyl198]

this extension is clearly for nvidia nsight, unless you are an nvidia employee working on that you can safely and quickly go back to never thinking about it.

Except that it now lives in every single piece of documentation that developers trying to use Vulkan have to look at, along with all of the other 1000 extensions. Good luck finding the one extension that actually does what you want in that.

[mSparks]

Except that it now lives in every single piece of documentation that developers trying to use Vulkan have to look at, along with all of the other 1000 extensions. Good luck finding the one extension that actually does what you want in that.

no, "every vulkan developer" need not and probably never does look at the nvidia specific validation extensions of the vulkan spec, they will be far too busy using it for something productive in a future nsight update, it would be more productive if you got angry at all those cat pictures cluttering your nans cat pictures folder on her desktop, see how she reacts when you insist she deletes them.

Of course, you are free to pay $90,000 a year to get voting rights on such topics if you really think your opinion is worth that much to the graphics industry.

somehow I doubt you have or will.

[Daktyl198]

no, "every vulkan developer" need not and probably never does look at the nvidia specific validation extensions of the vulkan spec, they will be far too busy using it for something productive in a future nsight update, it would be more productive if you got angry at all those cat pictures cluttering your nans cat pictures folder on her desktop, see how she reacts when you insist she deletes them.

Of course, you are free to pay $90,000 a year to get voting rights on such topics if you really think your opinion is worth that much to the graphics industry.

somehow I doubt you have or will.

Really weird metaphor aside, you missed the entire point of my post. Developers don't have to look for this nvidia specific validation extension. They will be searching through a list of hundreds if not soon to be a thousand extensions to the Vulkan API to find the best extensions to do what they want. Every new extension added to the specification makes that just a little bit harder.

APIs cannot be stagnant, but competing APIs are much more picky about what, and how much, they add to their specification each release and don't include hundreds of out-of-tree extensions that are still considered "part of the API" just not "part of a core release" yet.

As for paying $90k/year to get voting rights, I don't have to. All I have to do is wait and watch. Vulkan already is losing any steam it once had because "the graphics industry" fucking hates it. The only applications using Vulkan are those that want to run natively on Linux, exactly like OpenGL. And just like OpenGL, it's only because they have no other choice. If D3D12 was available natively on Linux, nobody would choose to use Vulkan. It's developer experience is already significantly worse than competing APIs, and gets worse every time a new extension is added to the spec.

And this is to say nothing about the driver situation. It's much easier to write stable, performant drivers against smaller and better thought out targets. D3D12 will always have better drivers than Vulkan going forward. Again, just like OpenGL.

History repeats itself. Vulkan is going to be Linux-only once again within 5 years because Khronos didn't learn their lessons.

[luno]

I'm tired of so many vendor extensions cluttering Vulkan...

that is price you have to pay for crossplatform and support most devices in planet. I am wondering it has surpassed OpenGL ES or not which was most widely deployed 3D graphics API in history . good thing is it is pretty easy to ignore most of extensions with good tooling. I still think Playstation API and tooling is best though (second might be Apple Metal)

[mSparks]

They will be searching through a list of hundreds if not soon to be a thousand extensions to the Vulkan API

44, not exactly "hundreds", let alone thousands.

VK_NV_acquire_winrt_display
VK_NV_clip_space_w_scaling
VK_NV_compute_shader_derivatives
VK_NV_cooperative_matrix
VK_NV_copy_memory_indirect
VK_NV_corner_sampled_image
VK_NV_coverage_reduction_mode
VK_NV_dedicated_allocation_image_aliasing
VK_NV_descriptor_pool_overallocation
VK_NV_device_diagnostic_checkpoints
VK_NV_device_diagnostics_config
VK_NV_device_generated_commands
VK_NV_device_generated_commands_compute
VK_NV_extended_sparse_address_space
VK_NV_external_memory_rdma
VK_NV_fill_rectangle
VK_NV_fragment_coverage_to_color
VK_NV_fragment_shading_rate_enums
VK_NV_framebuffer_mixed_samples
VK_NV_geometry_shader_passthrough
VK_NV_inherited_viewport_scissor
VK_NV_linear_color_attachment
VK_NV_low_latency
VK_NV_low_latency2
VK_NV_memory_decompression
VK_NV_mesh_shader
VK_NV_optical_flow
VK_NV_per_stage_descriptor_set
VK_NV_present_barrier
VK_NV_raw_access_chains
VK_NV_ray_tracing
VK_NV_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder
VK_NV_ray_tracing_motion_blur
VK_NV_ray_tracing_validation
VK_NV_representative_fragment_test
VK_NV_sample_mask_override_coverage
VK_NV_scissor_exclusive
VK_NV_shader_atomic_float16_vector
VK_NV_shader_image_footprint
VK_NV_shader_sm_builtins
VK_NV_shader_subgroup_partitioned
VK_NV_shading_rate_image
VK_NV_viewport_array2
VK_NV_viewport_swizzle

[WannaBeOCer]

I'm tired of so many vendor extensions cluttering Vulkan...

I don’t see the issue with vendor specific extensions. GPU architectures are different which spurs innovation. If that wasn’t the case we’d just have similar architectures between all the GPU manufacturers. Some vendor extensions are vendor agnostic like VK_NV_ray_tracing which was then used as the base for VK_KHR_ray_tracing.

[Daktyl198]

44, not exactly "hundreds", let alone thousands.

That's 44 that currently exist from NVidia after the latest release integrated a bunch. Now find and list the ones from every other Khronos partner, and Khronos themselves. Then find and list how many extensions have been added to the spec "officially" since Vulkan's initial 1.0 release. I think you'll find the word "hundreds" fits. "thousand" doesn't fit yet but at the rate it's going... give it a few years.

A much more fun exercise is trying to find how many APIs in Vulkan do basically the exact same thing, just slightly different for performance reasons in one specific instance or another, which is exactly what devs will be doing trying to find the best option to use in their codebase (especially game engine designers). Eventually, they're going to get sick of it, just use one even for circumstances it's not meant for, and we're going to get the same thing that happened to OpenGL where an engine "supports" it, but it's buggier and slower than the D3D option.