Vulkan 1.3.241 Released With Another Extension To Help VKD3D / Direct3D 12 Emulation

Vulkan 1.3.241 was published today with a range of fixes and clarifications, cleaning up of the XML schema, and also introducing three new Vulkan extensions.

Vulkan 1.3.241 makes public the VK_EXT_image_sliced_view_of_3d, VK_ARM_shader_core_properties, and VK_QCOM_multiview_per_view_render_areas. Most interesting is VK_EXT_image_sliced_view_of_3d as it's to help Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan emulation such as with the VKD3D / VKD3D-Proton projects.

VK_EXT_image_sliced_view_of_3d was worked on by well known Valve Linux developers Mike Blumenkrantz and Hans-Kristian Arntzen along with engineers from Igalia, Google, and NVIDIA. The VK_EXT_image_sliced_view_of_3d extension is to allow creating 3D views of 3D images such that the views contain a subset of the slices in the image for using the views as storage image descriptors. This extension's behavior is to match the functionality of Microsoft Direct3D 12 and to help in emulating D3D12 atop Vulkan. Work on this Valve-led Vulkan extension goes back to late 2022 and is one of several extensions in recent times by them to help in emulating Direct3D as well as OpenGL atop the Vulkan API.

VK_ARM_shader_core_properties meanwhile is a new Arm vendor extension to be used for determining device-specific performance properties of Arm GPUs. This is intended to expose properties like the number of texel, pixel, and fused multiply-add operations per clock per shader core.

Lastly is the VK_QCOM_multiview_per_view_render_areas Qualcomm vendor extension to enable a multi-view render pass instance to define per-view render areas.

The spec changes with Vulkan 1.3.241 are laid out via GitHub.