Vulkan 1.2.200 Released With Two New Extensions

Out today is Vulkan 1.2.200 as the newest spec revision to the Vulkan graphics/compute API.

With Vulkan 1.2.200 is the usual assortment of clarifications and corrections to this leading cross-platform graphics API. But besides that usual documentation churn, there are also two new extensions: VK_ARM_rasterization_order_attachment_access and VK_EXT_depth_clip_control.

The VK_ARM_rasterization_order_attachment_access vendor extension from Arm also received input from one of AMD's Vulkan developers in the process. The VK_ARM_rasterization_order_attachment_access extension extends input attachments to help in moving from OpenGL ES. "This extension extends the mechanism of input attachments to allow access to framebuffer attachments when used as both input and color, or depth/stencil, attachments from one fragment to the next, in rasterization order, without explicit synchronization."

VK_EXT_depth_clip_control is the new extension to allow applications to use the OpenGL depth range in NDC rather than Vulkan's default range. This extension is to help in allowing OpenGL implementations over Vulkan. Utilizing VK_EXT_depth_clip_control allows for greater efficiency by avoiding costly emulation in the pre-rasterization shader stages around altering the depth range. This extension for improving OpenGL over Vulkan is just the latest in many aimed at helping GL and other graphics APIs run atop Vulkan. This extension was worked on by Samsung and Google.

The latest Vulkan specification is available from Vulkan.org.