Vulkan 1.3.258 Released With New Host Image Copy Extension, NVIDIA DGC Compute

Vulkan 1.3.258 was published today as the newest revision to this high performance graphics and compute API. There's many fixes with the last Vulkan spec update having been in early July but making this release more notable are two new extensions.

Most exciting with today's spec update is VK_EXT_host_image_copy that was worked on by Valve's Hans-Kristian Arntzen, Faith Ekstrand of Collabora, Nintendo's Daniel Story, and other usual names. VK_EXT_host_image_copy is for allowing software to copy data between host memory and images on the host processor without needing to stage the data through a GPU-accessible buffer. In turn using this extension allows bypassing the need to allocate and manage the buffer and its associated memory. For some architectures this can also eliminate an extra copy operation.

With this extension having been worked on by the major vendors, driver support will likely come soon for this functionality to allow software to copy data between images on the host.

Extending NVIDIA DGC for compute with the new VK_NV_device_generated_commands_compute.

The new NVIDIA extension with this release is VK_NV_device_generated_commands_compute, which was also worked on by Valve's Mike Blumenkrantz. VK_NV_device_generated_commands_compute allows for the GPU device to generate commands for binding compute pipelines, setting push constants, and launching compute dispatches. This is basically a compute extension of the existing NVIDIA Device Generated Commands "DGC" functionality. In turn since last year RADV has already supported the NVIDIA DGC extension, so presumably they'll also go forward and implement this VK_NV_device_generated_commands_compute too.

The full list of changes with today's Vulkan 1.3.258 specification update can be found on GitHub.