Vulkan 1.3.286 Released With One New Extension

Vulkan 1.3.286 was released today with a handful of corrections/clarifications as well as one new extension.

Besides all the routine fixes to the specification, Vulkan 1.3.286 does present one new addition: VK_EXT_shader_replicated_composites. The VK_EXT_shader_replicated_composites extension allows for creating composites from a single value in SPIR-V modules. VK_EXT_shader_replicated_composites was drafted by Arm and NVIDIA engineers.

The SPV_EXT_replicated_composites SPIR-V extension that was introduced this week explains:

"This extension adds instructions to create composite objects whose constituents all have the same value without requiring the value to be provided for each constituent."

Overall the Vulkan 1.3.286 update is rather light, more details on it via GitHub.

Separately, NVIDIA today posted their 550.40.63 Linux Vulkan driver beta that adds EXT_legacy_vertex_attributes and GOOGLE_user_type support along with image load/store support for VK_FORMAT_D16_UNORM and VK_FORMAT_D32_SFLOAT formats. Plus various fixes.