NVIDIA Quietly Updates Vulkan Driver Beta, New Vulkan Extensions
The updated Vulkan Linux beta driver remains in the 375 series, so there isn't much to get excited about outside of Vulkan in terms of other changes to find with this being the current stable driver series on Linux/BSD/Solaris.
NVIDIA says these updated Vulkan beta drivers provide "experimental API interop features." Though they didn't list in the release notes which of the experimental Vulkan API interoperability features they are referring to, but I dug deeper. This is the first time they issued a Vulkan beta driver update since last June.
I fired up the NVIDIA 375.27.03 beta driver just now on my GeForce GTX TITAN X (Maxwell) box comparing it to the NVIDIA 375.26 extensions... The new Vulkan device extensions supported are VK_KHR_display_swapchain, VK_KHX_external_memory_fd, VK_KHX_external_memory_semaphore, VK_KHX_external_semaphore_fd, and VK_EXT_display_control.
Interestingly, only the VK_KHR_display_swapchain have any references in Google. The other new Vulkan extensions show zero results currently in Google. Perhaps the Khronos Group might be preparing a Vulkan 1.1 release in short order? Note that next month is one year since the Vulkan 1.0 debut. It's also been one month now since the last Vulkan-Docs update. Previously, Vulkan 1.0.x point releases were coming out every week or two... Vulkan 1.0.38 came out on 16 December and nothing since. Though note the "KHX" extensions are usually marked as for experimental extensions, so we'll see what's up soon enough.
This new driver also supports some new formats include now supporting R32G32B32_UINT / R32G32B32_SINT / R32G32B32_SFLOAT linear tiling with VK_FORMAT_FEATURE_SAMPLED_IMAGE_BIT and VK_FORMAT_FEATURE_BLIT_SRC_BIT. The buffer features on those formats also now add VK_FORMAT_FEATURE_UNIFORM_TEXEL_BUFFER_BIT.
I also checked to see if there were any OpenGL extension differences but there were not. This Vulkan beta driver can be downloaded from NVIDIA.
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