Vulkan 1.3.274 Released With Video Encode Extensions Promoted

As what's likely to be the last Vulkan API spec update before Christmas, Vulkan 1.3.274 was released today with the Vulkan Video encode extensions promoted as well as adding some other new extensions as a nice end-of-year gift.

First up, the Vulkan Video Encode extensions of VK_KHR_video_encode_queue, VK_KHR_video_encode_h264, and VK_KHR_video_encode_h265 are now official! They are promoted from their earlier "provisional" status to now firmed up and deemed ready for adoption.

VK_KHR_video_maintenance1 was also published today with this Vulkan spec update as a collection of minor video coding features. VK_KHR_video_maintenance1 allows creating buffers that can be used in video coding operations that are independent of the used video profile, support for creating images that can be used as decode output or encode input pictures independent of the used video profile, and allow specifying queries used by video coding operations as part of the video coding command parameters. Contributions from AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and others went into this maintenance extension.

For those interested in Vulkan Video encode with the open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver, there is a Mesa branch available but hopefully it will get merged soon now that the H.264 / H.265 video encode extensions are no longer provisional.

Vulkan 1.3.274 also introduces the VK_KHR_maintenance6 extension as a set of minor features. Nothing too exciting there but does feature contributions from Valve's Mike Blumenkrantz (Zink), AMD, Nintendo, Khronos, Samsung, Imagination, and NVIDIA.

The other newly-published extension is the NVIDIA vendor extension of VK_NV_per_stage_descriptor_set for adding a new descriptor set layout creation flag that allows bindings in a descriptor set to be scoped to each shader stage.

More details on all of the Vulkan 1.3.274 changes via Vulkan-Docs on GitHub.