Vulkan 1.3.214 Released With New AMD Vendor Extension

Just one week after Vulkan 1.3.213 released with its four new extensions, which included an update to the ray-tracing support, Vulkan 1.3.214 is out today with various fixes while introducing just one new extension.

Vulkan 1.3.214 isn't as significant as last week's update with the changes today just being mostly a collection of maintenance corrections to the specification. There is just one new extension this week and it's an AMD vendor extension: VK_AMD_shader_early_and_late_fragment_tests.

VK_AMD_shader_early_and_late_fragment_tests is a Vulkan extension for adding the SPIR-V SPV_AMD_shader_early_and_late_fragment_tests extension to allow shaders to explicitly opt-in to allowing early and late fragment tests.

The SPV_AMD_shader_early_and_late_fragment_tests extension is still pending for the SPIR-V Registry but it's an extension by AMD's Tobias Hector for allowing both early and late fragment tests in some circumstances. This SPIR-V extension also adds execution modes to describe how the shader stencil value is written.

Vulkan 1.3.214 is now the latest revision to this high performance graphics API spec for the next week or two.

It's just a minor Vulkan update this week but those interested in the changes in more detail can see this commit.