Vulkan 1.3.217 Adds Extension To Interact With Apple Metal Objects

Vulkan 1.3.217 is out this morning as the newest version of the Khronos' high performance graphics/compute API specification. With Vulkan 1.3.217 comes two new extensions.

Besides the usual assortment of spec clarifications and fixes, Vulkan 1.3.217 adds two new extensions to the Vulkan ecosystem.

First up is VK_EXT_non_seamless_cube_map. VK_EXT_non_seamless_cube_map allows disabling cube map edge handling on a per-sample level to match the behavior of other graphics APIs. This extension can help in porting other graphics APIs atop Vulkan. This new extension from Georg Lehmann is for helping DXVK in its Direct3D 9 support while also may be useful to Zink / OpenGL too. There are also Radeon RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan driver implementations of this extension.

Apple Metal

The other new extension is VK_EXT_metal_objects and allows for interacting with Apple Metal API objects. This extension was worked on by Mozilla and MoltenVK developers. This VK_EXT_metal_objects implementation is only relevant to Vulkan on Apple platforms supporting the Metal API and doesn't provide any help for seeing Metal on other targets or any other magical additions... Basically it allows for importing or exporting underlying Metal objects associated with specific Vulkan objects, helping efforts like MoltenVK that allow Vulkan to run on macOS/iOS platforms.

It's just those two extensions that are new with today's Vulkan 1.3.217 release. More details on Vulkan 1.3.217 spec changes via this commit.