Vulkan 1.1.86 Released With Driver Properties & Atomic INT64 Extensions

The Khronos Working Group maintaining Vulkan have released their 1.1.86 specification update to end out September. This is one of the more interesting Vulkan updates in recent times.

Vulkan 1.1.86 brings its usual share of documentation corrections and clarifications, but also three notable extensions:

VK_KHR_driver_properties: This is one of the extensions we knew has been in the works and quite looking forward to this addition that has been a joint effort by AMD, NVIDIA, Google, ARM,, and others. This extension provides a standardized means of querying driver implementation details from physical device/GPU information to conformance test suite information to other capabilities.

VK_KHR_shader_atomic_int64: This extension adds the SPIR-V Int64Atomics capability to Vulkan. This is about allowing 64-bit atomic operations on signed/unsigned integers.

VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier: This long in development extension is included in Vulkan 1.1.86 but disabled by default / unofficial due to some last minute snags... This allows the use of Linux DRM format modifiers with images, which allows for Vulkan to better integrate with the graphics/video/display APIs. This is similar to EGL's DMA-BUF import/modifiers extensions and in the end should allow for some cool stuff to happen now in the Vulkan Linux space.

The updated spec as always is at Khronos.org.