Vulkan 1.0.53 Released With New Extensions

As expected given NVIDIA's Vulkan beta driver update earlier today, Vulkan 1.0.53 is now available.

Vulkan 1.0.53 does have a number of document clarifications and fixes, but most exciting is a handful of new extensions. The new ones to Vulkan 1.0.53 are VK_AMD_gpu_shader_int16, VK_EXT_blend_operation_advanced, VK_EXT_sampler_filter_minmax, and VK_NV_framebuffer_mixed_samples.

VK_AMD_gpu_shader_int16 adds support for the SPV_AMD_gpU-shader_iut16 extension to Vulkan. This is about exposing an int16 data type for Vulkan.

VK_EXT_blend_operation_advanced adds new "advanced" blending operations for color blending.

VK_EXT_sampler_filter_minmax adds a new sampler parameter to let applications produce a filtered texel value using a component-wise min/max of the texels that would be averaged.

VK_NV_framebuffer_mixed_samples allows multi-sample rendering with a raster and depth/stencil count greater than the color sample count.

Aside from the INT16 work, the other new Vulkan extensions were fostered by NVIDIA developers.

The Vulkan 1.0.53 documentation is available via Vulkan-Docs.

It will be interesting to see if there is a big Vulkan update for SIGGRAPH at the end of July... Perhaps finally solidifying some of the recent extensions currently marked as experimental? Vulkan-Next material? We'll have to wait and see, just one more month.