Vulkan 1.1.72 Released With Three New Extensions

Vulkan 1.1.72 is now available, which for simple terms is really "Vulkan 1.1.2" except for the patch number having not been reset when Vulkan 1.1 was launched last month.

Vulkan 1.1.72 has several documentation fixes and other corrections/clarifications. But of course what has most of our interest are three new extensions. The new extensions are VK_AMD_shader_core_properties, VK_NV_shader_subgroup_partitioned, and VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing.

VK_AMD_shader_core_properties - This allows exposing properties of a target physical device pertaining to the shader core. This can reveal information like the number of shader engines, compute units per shader array, SIMDs per compute unit, threads per wavefront, available SGPRs, and other properties.

VK_NV_shader_subgroup_partitioned - A new class of sub-group operations via the GLSL and SPIR-V extensions.

VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing - The VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing extension allows software to create large descriptor sets comprised of all their resources and select those resources via dynamic indexes in a shader.

The latest Vulkan specification as always is available from Khronos.org.