NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Adds Group Handles Extension To Help VKD3D-Proton DXR

NVIDIA on Friday released the v525.47.07 Linux driver beta with their latest Vulkan driver enhancements along with the NVIDIA 528.50 driver on the Windows side.

New to yesterday's NVIDIA Windows/Linux Vulkan beta driver release is now supporting the VK_EXT_pipeline_library_group_handles extension. This is the extension introduced last week as part of Vulkan 1.3.240 and will further help with implementing DirectX ray-tracing (DXR) over Vulkan as part of VKD3D-Proton. Valve's Hans-Kristian Arntzen of VKD3D-Proton fame worked on this pipeline library group handles extension that is intended to improve compatibility with DXR 1.1's AddToStateObject().

It's great seeing NVIDIA quickly supporting this new extension that will be useful for Linux gaming. Over in the Mesa world there is this open MR for implementing the GPL group handles extension for the Intel ANV Vulkan driver. As of writing I haven't seen any pending code yet for implementing this extension with the AMD RADV or AMDVLK drivers.

As of earlier this week, VKD3D-Proton did merge support for using the VK_EXT_pipeline_library_group_handles extension.

Over on the Vulkan Video side, yesterday's NVIDIA beta driver update also mentions:

"Internally synchronize the picture VkVideoSessionParametersKHR while during parameter updates with vkUpdateVideoSessionParametersKHR. Allow for Picture Parameters like StdVideoH264PictureParameterSet, StdVideoH264SequenceParameterSet, StdVideoH265SequenceParameterSet, StdVideoH265PictureParameterSet and StdVideoH265VideoParameterSet to be optionally passed within vkCmdBeginVideoCodingKHR() and/or vkCmdDecodeVideoKHR() within VkVideoSessionParametersUpdateInfoKHR as an inlined extension structure."

Rounding out the NVIDIA 525.47.07 beta driver are also a few bug fixes. This Vulkan beta driver for Windows and Linux systems can be downloaded via developer.nvidia.com.