Vulkan News Archives

Vulkan 1.3.251 is out today as a rare Sunday morning spec update for this Khronos graphics/compute API.

Vulkan 1.3.250 is out today as the latest routine spec update and brings a handful of spec fixes plus one new extension.

Vulkan 1.3.249 is out today as the latest spec update for this industry-standard high performance graphics and compute API. Notable with Vulkan 1.3.249 is the introduction of VK_KHR_ray_tracing_position_fetch.

Vulkan 1.3.246 has been published with one prominent new extension introduced that was started by Nintendo and worked on by several other hardware/software vendors.

The Vulkan 1.3.245 extension is a small update to this industry-standard graphics/compute API with just a handful of issues resolved but it does introduce one new extension, which is a NVIDIA vendor extension aiming to further enhance Vulkan ray-tracing.

A new version of MoltenVK has been released, the open-source library that maps the Vulkan API atop Apple's Metal API for making use of this industry standard graphics/compute API on modern iOS and macOS devices.

Introduced last week with the Vulkan 1.3.244 spec update was a new extension, VK_KHR_map_memory2, which is seeing fast support from the open-source Intel "ANV" and Mesa Radeon "RADV" drivers as well as NVIDIA's newest Vulkan driver beta.

Taking place last month in the most wonderful city of Munich, The Khronos Group hosted Vulkanised 2023 as their Vulkan Developers' Conference and Meetup. The slides and videos from the event are now available, including talks on Valve's RADV effort and more.

The Vulkan 1.3.242 spec is now available with a handful of clarifications and fixes to the existing text as well as introducing the new VK_NV_low_latency extension.

Vulkan 1.3.241 was published today with a range of fixes and clarifications, cleaning up of the XML schema, and also introducing three new Vulkan extensions.

The Khronos Group with LunarG has now published the Vulkan SDK 1.3.239 release that is the first version of the software development kit with the Vulkan Video extensions now present.

Following the month-long Christmas break, the Vulkan API working group is back to carrying out weekly(-ish) updates to the Vulkan specification. Out this morning is Vulkan 1.3.240 that brings one new extension in addition to a number of clarifications and corrections to the document.

DXVK 2.1 has just been released as this Direct3D 9/10/11 to Vulkan API translation layer that is most notably used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for helping to run Windows games with great speed on Linux.

MoltenVK is out with a new release for implementing the Vulkan API atop Apple's Metal API for enjoying this industry-standard graphics/compute API on macOS and iOS.

While there tend to be new Vulkan API specification updates weekly or bi-weekly for most of the year, there was a one month hiatus due to Christmas and other end of year holidays with many of the corporate developers taking time off work. But that is now over and out today is Vulkan 1.3.239 as the first update in exactly one month.

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of notoriety for being with Valve's Linux team and leading the work on VKD3D-Proton has been experimenting with the Vulkan Video API initially for his personal Vulkan renderer, Granite.

While this week saw the ratification of the Vulkan Video 1.0 extensions in stable form after being out as provisional extensions since early 2021, one of the sad aspects of it is still lacking support for the popular royalty-free VP9 and AV1 codecs. Fortunately, at least, it's been re-affirmed for VP9/AV1 support in 2023.

In early 2021 the Vulkan Video extensions were published in beta/provisional form as a new industry-standard video encode/decode API with the context of Vulkan. As a nice Christmas gift this week from The Khronos Group, the extensions have been finalized as Vulkan Video 1.0 and are now deemed ready for production use.

Ahead of the holidays there is a new Vulkan API spec update from The Khronos Group.

The Khronos Group announced the release of Vulkan 1.3.235 as the latest routine spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API.

There has long been plans for supporting the Vulkan API with the Blender 3D modelling open-source software but there has been a lack of developers working on it. Fortunately, things are starting to (slowly) come together on Vulkan enablement for Blender.

Vulkan 1.3.233 is out as the latest weekly spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API. With Vulkan 1.3.233 comes three new NVIDIA-developed vendor extensions.

VKD3D-Proton 2.7 has finally been released as the first tagged release of this Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan API implementation used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying an increasing number of D3D12 Windows games on Linux.

MoltenVK as the portability layer for Vulkan that exposes this industry standard graphics API on Apple's macOS, iOS, and tvOS platforms is now able to expose Vulkan 1.2 compatibility.

Mesa's Venus driver provides Vulkan support for VirtIO-GPU since it was merged last year as a creation by Google. As of yesterday, the Venus driver has moved on to exposing Vulkan 1.3 capabilities.

The Unigine game and simulation 3D engine has released version 2.16 and with this update finally comes the much anticipated Vulkan and Direct3D 12 graphics API support.

This week's Vulkan spec update is on the larger side with six new extensions being introduced.

VKD3D 1.5 was recently tagged as the newest version of this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan implementation used by Wine and originally an upstream to Valve's VKD3D-Proton. VKD3D 1.5 has been integrated into Wine Git ahead of next week's Wine 7.19 release.

The Khronos Group's Vulkan Working Group today released Vulkan API 1.3.228. Aside from the usual assortment of fixes/clarifications to the Vulkan spec, this spec update promotes one of Valve's existing extensions aimed at enhancing Direct3D 12 emulation with Vulkan into being a formal "EXT" extension.

Last month I wrote about the work being done by Jason Ekstrand for switching RADV completely over to dynamic rendering. That work has now panned out and as of a few minutes ago the transition to "100%" dynamic rendering for RADV has landed in Mesa 22.3.

Last week saw the debut of Vulkan 1.3.226 with mesh shader support introduced as a new cross-vendor extension while out this morning is Vulkan 1.3.227 with a new extension for helping the layering of OpenGL atop Vulkan.

While there has been talk and plans for Vulkan API support within Blender, currently there are no active developers working on it and much work remains before it would be ready for end-users.

GravityMark 1.70 has been released as the multi-API graphics benchmark developed by Tellusim Technologies that was started by former Unigine engine CTO and co-founder Alexander Zapryagaev.

Vulkan 1.3.226 is out this morning and to much excitement adds the VK_EXT_mesh_shader extension as cross-vendor functionality for mesh shaders!

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.

Released today was Vulkan 1.3.222 as the newest Vulkan spec with various clarifications/corrections plus two new extensions coming out of Qualcomm.

Vulkan 1.3.221 was released this week as the newest spec update for this industry-standard graphics/compute API.

DXVK 1.10.2 has been released as the newest version of this Direct3D 9/10/11 implementation atop the Vulkan API that is most notably used with Proton for Steam Play to enjoy Windows games on Linux.

Vulkan 1.3.219 released this week and in addition to a number of documentation clarifications/corrections there are two new extensions.

Mesa's V3DV driver for the Broadcom VideoCore GPU, which is most notably enabling open-source Vulkan API support for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer, is nearly ready with its Vulkan 1.2 support.

Vulkan 1.3.217 is out this morning as the newest version of the Khronos' high performance graphics/compute API specification. With Vulkan 1.3.217 comes two new extensions.

Lavapipe as Mesa's software/CPU-based Vulkan implementation akin to LLVMpipe for OpenGL is now officially Vulkan 1.2 conformant.

Vulkan 1.3.215 is out today with a handful of fixes/clarifications to the Vulkan specification plus one new extension.

Just one week after Vulkan 1.3.213 released with its four new extensions, which included an update to the ray-tracing support, Vulkan 1.3.214 is out today with various fixes while introducing just one new extension.

Vulkan 1.3.213 is out today that on top of the usual specification clarifications/corrections are also four new extensions, including VK_KHR_ray_tracing_maintenance1.

Vulkan 1.3.211 is out today and comes with another new extension for helping implementations like Mesa's Zink for implementing the OpenGL API atop Vulkan.

Vulkan 1.3.210 is out today with various specification corrections/clarifications but also two notable extensions.

AMD today released Vulkan Memory Allocator 3.0 under their GPUOpen umbrella as this library to better manage memory allocation and resources for this graphics API and make it more similar to APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D.

The recent work by Mike Blumenkrantz on getting Lavapipe to advertise Vulkan 1.3 has successfully landed within Mesa 22.1.

Vulkan 1.3.207 is out as the latest routine update to this high performance graphics / compute API.