NVIDIA Introduces New Low-Latency Vulkan Extension For Gaming

Vulkan 1.3.266 was published a few days ago with a handful of fixes and two new extensions. One of those extensions, VK_NV_low_latency2 is quite interesting.

Earlier this year with Vulkan 1.3.242 NVIDIA introduced a low-latency extension, VK_NV_low_latency, for integrating Vulkan with the NVIDIA Reflex SDK. The new VK_NV_low_latency2 is further optimizing game engines for low-latency handling.

VK_NV_low_latency2 is described by the new extension specification as:

This extension gives applications timing suggestions on when to start the recording of new frames to reduce the latency between input sampling and frame presentation.

Applications can accomplish this through the extension by calling vkSetLatencySleepModeNV to allow the driver to pace a given swapchain, then calling vkLatencySleepNV before input sampling to delay the start of the CPU side work.

Additional methods and structures are provided to give insight into the
latency pipeline of an application through the latency markers. VK_NV_low_latency provides legacy support for applications that make use of the NVIDIA Reflex SDK whereas new implementations should use the VK_NV_low_latency2 extension.

The other new extension is by Google for Android with VK_ANDROID_external_format_resolve. The VK_ANDROID_external_format_resolve extension allows rendering to Android Hardware Buffers with external formats that cannot be directly represented in Vulkan, such as YC-B-C-R- formats.

More details on these new extensions with Vulkan 1.3.266 via Vulkan-Docs.