Vulkan 1.1.93 Released With Two New Extensions, Adds ID For Google "Pastel"

Continuing to make Sunday mornings more entertaining are new Vulkan documentation updates on their weekly-ish update cycle.

Vulkan 1.1.93 brings a lot of the usual fixes/clarifications to the growing documentation. There are though some interesting bits: two new extensions and the driver ID being added for "Pastel".

This update does add a driver ID for Pastel. This Pastel driver ID is for Google and appears to be part of their SwiftShader effort. SwiftShader is the CPU-based OpenGL ES and Direct3D 9 implementation for "hardware independence for advanced 3D graphics." SwiftShader has prototyped Vulkan support for a while now and it appears "Pastel" is for that effort.

The VK_EXT_scalar_block_layout extension is new to Vulkan 1.1.93 and allows for uniform buffers, storage buffers, and push constants to be aligned based on the size of their components. This is for C-like structure layouts for these buffers.

The other new extension is the AMD-developed VK_EXT_separate_stencil_usage and allows specifying separate usage flags for the stencil aspect of images with a depth-stencil format at image-creation time.

More details on the Vulkan 1.1.93 changes via this commit.