Vulkan 1.2.199 Released With New Extension To Help VKD3D-Proton

Vulkan 1.2.199 is out with another new extension driven as part of Valve's work around Steam Play (Proton) and the Direct3D over Vulkan efforts.

Vulkan 1.2.199 has fixes for a number of documentation issues raised both internally and via the community. For the most part it's just another routine Vulkan spec update without any really exciting changes.

But new to Vulkan 1.2.199 is VK_EXT_image_view_min_lod for use-cases such as restricting a VkImageView to only mips that have been uploaded and using minLod for smoothly introducing new mip levels when using linear mipmap filtering.

The VK_EXT_image_view_min_lod extension was written by Valve's Joshua Ashton who is known for his work on DXVK/VKD3D-Proton. VKD3D-Proton developer Hans-Kristian Arntzen was also involved with this extension along with developers from Igalia, Intel, and AMD.

With Vulkan 1.2.199 now public there is already this pull request to VKD3D-Proton for implementing D3D12's MinLODClamp using this new extension. Ashton also opened up this MR for Mesa that wires up the new VK_EXT_image_view_min_lod Vulkan extension for the RADV driver.