Vulkan 1.1.105 Adds New Extensions For Google Games Platform (Stadia)

While Vulkan 1.1.104 was just released on Sunday with new extensions ahead of this week's Game Developers Conference, today marks the availability of Vulkan 1.1.105 with new extensions for the "Google Games Platform", a.k.a. their just announced Stadia cloud game streaming platform.

Google Games Platform is a new Vulkan platform and dubbed GGP. This Vulkan update comes immediately following Google announcing Stadia as a Linux/Vulkan-powered game streaming platform that sounds quite interesting and will be interesting to learn more over the weeks ahead. Today's Vulkan 1.1.105 update has added the VK_GGP_frame_token and VK_GGP_stream_descriptor_surface extensions.

VK_GGP_frame_token allows associating a Google Games Platform frame token with a present operation. This extension goes in step with VK_GGP_stream_descriptor_surface that allows creating a surface object that refers to a GGP stream descriptor.

So these new extensions added with Vulkan 1.1.105 are there for the benefit of games running on Google's cloud platform but won't be of much use elsewhere. With Google using a semi-custom Radeon GPU to power their gaming cloud, look for these extensions to get picked up by the AMD driver(s) soon -- presumably they are using the binary "PRO" Vulkan Linux driver that is derived from the AMDVLK sources but built against AMD's closed-source shader compiler, but that has yet to be confirmed.