Vulkan 1.3.251 Released With One New Extension Worked On By Valve, Nintendo & Others

Vulkan 1.3.251 is out today as a rare Sunday morning spec update for this Khronos graphics/compute API.

In addition to the usual assortment of bug fixes and documentation clarifications, there is one new extension in this version. VK_EXT_dynamic_rendering_unused_attachments is the new extension and was worked on by Nintendo, Valve, Arm, Imagination, Huawei, Igalia, and AMD. Lead VKD3D-Proton developer Hans-Kristian Arntzen was the one at Valve who contributed to this specification.

VK_EXT_dynamic_rendering_unused_attachments is for lifting some restrictions in place on Vulkan's dynamic rendering (VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering). With VK_EXT_dynamic_rendering_unused_attachments it allows for render pass instances and bound pipelines within those render pass instances to have an unused attachment specified in one but not the other. This new extension also allows pipelines to use different formats in a render pass if the attachment is of null type.

The full list of Vulkan 1.3.251 changes can be found via Vulkan-Docs.