Vulkan 1.3.279 Brings New NVIDIA Extension Co-Engineered By Valve

Vulkan 1.3.279 debuted on Friday with many fixes/clarifications to the specifications plus one new extension.

The lone new extension in Vulkan 1.3.279 is a vendor-prefixed extension, VK_NV_raw_access_chains. While pushed along by NVIDIA, the VK_NV_raw_access_chains extension was co-authored by Valve's Hans-Kristian Arntzen. Arntzen is known for his work on VKD3D-Proton as part of Steam Play and indeed this extension should help out there.

The VK_NV_raw_access_chains extemsion should allow for more efficient shaders compiled from HLSL sources. The VK_NV_raw_access_chains extension documentation explains:

"This extension allows the use of the `SPV_NV_raw_access_chains` extension in SPIR-V shader modules. This enables SPIR-V producers to efficiently implement interfaces similar to Direct3D structured buffers and byte address buffers, allowing shaders compiled from an HLSL source to generate more efficient code."

Yesterday the Vulkan driver beta page was updated to 550.40.53 for Linux and 551.70 for Windows. With those new NVIDIA Vulkan betas is support for the NV_raw_access_chains extension as well as NV_low_latency2 and EXT_surface_maintenance1.

More details on the fixes found in the new Vulkan 1.3.279 spec update can be found via this Git commit.