NVIDIA Ships Vulkan Driver Beta With Fragment Shading Rate Control

This week's Vulkan 1.2.158 spec release brought the fragment shading rate extension to control the rate at which fragments are shaded on a per-draw, per-primitive, or per-region basis. This can be useful similar to OpenGL and Direct3D support for helping to allow different, less important areas of the screen be shaded less than areas requiring greater detail/focus.

NVIDIA on Tuesday released the 455.26.02 Linux driver (and 457.00 version for Windows) that adds this fragment shading rate extension. Additionally, VK_KHR_shader_terminate_invocation was also added as the other new extension of Vulkan 1.2.158. This second extension allows terminating a shader invocation immediately and setting the coverage of shaded examples to zero.

The updated NVIDIA Vulkan beta drivers for Windows and Linux with this support can be found via developer.nvidia.com.