Vulkan 1.3.207 Brings Another New Extension From Valve

Vulkan 1.3.207 is out as the latest routine update to this high performance graphics / compute API.

Vulkan 1.3.207 mostly consists of the usual documentation fixes for typos and other clarifications coming both from the public GitHub repository and the internal tracker at Khronos.

Vulkan 1.3.207 introduces one new extension and that is VK_VALVE_descriptor_set_host_mapping. As implied by the vendor prefix, this vendor extension is from Valve. VK_VALVE_descriptor_set_host_mapping is for allowing applications to directly query a host pointer for a Vulkan descriptor set. This allows for copying descriptors between descriptor sets without use of an API command.

VK_VALVE_descriptor_set_host_mapping is only for use within "specific embedded environments" and is thus only lightly documented. Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve who is known for his work on VKD3D-Proton is the lead author of this new extension.

There is already VK_VALVE_descriptor_set_host_mapping support merged into VKD3D-Proton. That usage was merged for the recent VKD3D-Proton 2.6 and is used as a punch-through path for descriptor copies. "Proves out the viability of this style of implementation. Ideally we'd have a more officially sanctioned way of doing similar things later :) Unfortunately, the overhead removal is too great to ignore on target platform."

The list of changes for the otherwise light Vulkan 1.3.207 update can be found on Vulkan-Docs.