Vulkan 1.2.168 Released With Two New Extensions

Today's Vulkan 1.2.168 specification update brings the usual specification corrections/clarifications while also introducing two new KHR extensions.

The new extensions of Vulkan 1.2.168 include:

VK_KHR_workgroup_memory_explicit_layout - An extension worked on by Intel, NVIDIA, and Broadcom engineers. This extension allows shaders to explicitly define the workgroup storage class memory and to create aliases between variables from that storage class in a compute shader. This explicit layout extension is important as part of the efforts layering OpenCL on top of Vulkan.

VK_KHR_zero_initialize_workgroup_memory - NVIDIA, Intel, and Google engineers worked out this KHR extension. VK_KHR_zero_initialize_workgroup_memory allow using a null constant initializer on shader workgroup memory variables. This zero initialization is useful for web browsers and other environments often running untrusted content.

The full list of changes with today's Vulkan spec update via GitHub.