Vulkan 1.3.227 Adds Legacy Dithering Extension To Help OpenGL On Vulkan

Last week saw the debut of Vulkan 1.3.226 with mesh shader support introduced as a new cross-vendor extension while out this morning is Vulkan 1.3.227 with a new extension for helping the layering of OpenGL atop Vulkan.

Today's Vulkan 1.3.227 spec update has a number of documentation fixes/clarifications for this high performance graphics/compute API. Those changes are mostly routine and stemming from developer feedback/inquiries both internally and via GitHub. Most interesting work in these minor weekly/bi-weekly spec updates tend to come on the new extension front.

New with Vulkan 1.3.227 is VK_EXT_legacy_dithering as an extension worked on by engineers from Google, Arm and Broadcom.

VK_EXT_legacy_dithering is intended to expose the hardware feature used by some vendors for handling dithering with OpenGL. This legacy dithering extension is intended to help OpenGL on Vulkan implementations and match the OpenGL hardware dithering capabilities for relevant GPUs.

The VK_EXT_legacy_dithering support appears to be primarily on the embedded/mobile GPU side and with Google's involvement for their ANGLE layer of having GL over Vulkan, but may as well help Mesa's Zink implementation too.

More details on these Vulkan 1.3.227 changes via this Git commit.