NVIDIA Extends Fragment Shading Rate Extension In Vulkan 1.2.160
Besides the usual assortment of fixes/clarifications to the specification, Vulkan 1.2.160 brings one new extension. That new extension this week is NVIDIA's VK_NV_fragment_shading_rate_enums.
Last month saw the release of Vulkan 1.2.158 with the fragment shading rate extension added. That extension is for altering the rate at whcih fragments are shaded on a per-draw, per-primitive, or per-region basis. It's part of the recent cross-vendor trend of allowing games to be shaded at different rates depending upon the level of detail needed in particular scenes or spending less resources rendering areas that aren't of much importance to the gameplay.
Less than one month after VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate was introduced, NVIDIA engineers are extending it with VK_NV_fragment_shading_rate_enums. This new extension allows the fragment shading rate extension to use a "supersample" rate to trigger multiple fragment shader invocations per pixel. There is also a "no invocations" rate to discard any portions of a primitive that would use that shading rate. At this stage the only new enums for the fragment shading rate are indeed the supersample and no invocations.
The full list of Vulkan 1.2.160 changes can be found via this Git commit.
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