Vulkan 1.1.101 Released With Two New Extensions - Including Another To Help DXVK

Coming just one week after the Vulkan 1.1.100 release and just days after the Vulkan API celebrated its third birthday, Vulkan 1.1.101 is now available.

Vulkan 1.1.101 is a bit more eventful than 1.1.100 in that there are two new extensions introduced and then a number of issue corrections/clarifications to the documentation. The issues resolved are mostly mundane, but the new extensions are at least more interesting:

VK_NV_cooperative_matrix - This NVIDIA-developed extension allows for cooperative matrix types in SPIR-V -- a concept for compute shaders where the storage for the matrix is spread across all invocations and those different invocations cooperate to efficiently perform matrix multiplies. There is SPV_NV_cooperative_matrix for adding the cooperative matrix type to the SPIR-V specification.

VK_EXT_depth_clip_enable - This extension was worked on by AMD and NVIDIA but also CodeWeavers and DXVK's Philip Rebohle. This allows for the depth clipping operation to be explicitly controlled rather than the behavior up to now of being implicitly controlled. This is useful for translating of Direct3D to Vulkan where the assumption is that depth clipping is always enabled albeit can be toggled.

This is certainly not the first time we've seen Vulkan extended to help the likes of DXVK for translating from one graphics API to another. The latest changes with Vulkan 1.1.101 are outlined via this Git commit.