Vulkan 1.3.233 Released With Three New NVIDIA Extensions

Vulkan 1.3.233 is out as the latest weekly spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API. With Vulkan 1.3.233 comes three new NVIDIA-developed vendor extensions.

The new Vulkan extensions from NVIDIA are VK_NV_memory_decompression, VK_NV_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder, and VK_NV_copy_memory_indirect. Aside from these new extensions there is also the routine documentation corrections/clarifications.

VK_NV_memory_decompression is a new extension that as implied by the name is for performing memory-to-memory decompression. That's it and is just publicly documented as a one-line spec.

VK_NV_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder allows for having more control over the Vulkan ray-tracing pipeline for reordering for locality. The new NVIDIA interface provides a hit object that can provide result information from the hit and can be used as part of the explicit sorting plus other enhancements to enhance the ray-tracing invocation reordering.

Lastly the third NVIDIA extension with today's update is VK_NV_copy_memory_indirect. The VK_NV_copy_memory_indirect extension is used for performing copies between memory and image regions using indirect parameters. The indirect parameters are read by the device from a buffer during execution.The VK_NV_copy_memory_indirect can be useful for performing copies where the copy parameters aren't known during command buffer creation time.

The updated Vulkan spec with these documentation fixes and three new NVIDIA extensions can be found at Vulkan.org.

NVIDIA is expected to release a new Vulkan Beta Driver today for Windows and Linux that implement their new extensions.