Vulkan 1.2.185 Introduces Several New Extensions - Includes Presentation Work Led By Valve

Vulkan 1.2.185 was christened this morning with several new extensions being introduced.

Vulkan 1.2.185 has the large assortment of different documentation fixes and clarifications plus this time around has a few new extensions. The four new Vulkan extensions are:

VK_EXT_shader_atomic_float2 - This updated shader atomic float extension allows a shader to perform 16-bit floating-point atomic operations on buffer and workgroup memory as well as floating-point atomic minimum/maximum operations on buffer/workgroup/image memory. VK_EXT_shader_atomic_float2 was drafted by Intel's Linux Vulkan driver developer lead Jason Ekstrand.

VK_HUAWEI_persistent_thread - Documentation is currently lacking around this Huawei vendor extension for persistent thread support.

VK_KHR_present_id - Based on work Keith Packard did for Valve back in 2019, VK_KHR_present_id allows an application to provide an identifier for present operations on a swapchain in conjunction with KHR_swapchain.

VK_KHR_present_wait - VK_KHR_present_wait is another extension drafted back in 2019 as part of Keith's work for Valve at the time. This extension allows an application to wait for present operations to complete in conjunction with KHR_swapchain. VK_KHR_present_wait can be used for monitoring and controlling the pacing of the application via the number of outstanding images not yet presented.

The VK_KHR_present_id and VK_KHR_present_wait originate from that work by Keith as part of improving the Linux infrastructure for VR headsets on Linux and trying to ensure timely and expected rendering to head-mounted displays. It's taken a long time though to go through the Vulkan working group processes and become part of the spec.

This latest Vulkan 1.2.185 specification is available from Vulkan.org.