Vulkan 1.3.294 Introduces New Pipeline Binary Extension

Vulkan 1.3.294 is out today with a handful of fixes and clarifications to this high performance graphics and compute API. In addition to the maintenance work, Vulkan 1.3.294 introduces a new pipeline binary extension: VK_KHR_pipeline_binary.

VK_KHR_pipeline_binary is a means of being able to retrieve binary data associated with individual pipelines. The focus of this is to bypass the Vulkan pipeline caching mechanism and so applications can manage caches themselves.

The VK_KHR_pipeline_binary extension was worked on by engineers from AMD, Valve, Google, Arm, and other firms. Among the Valve engineers involved are from their Linux graphics driver team and VKD3D-Proton developers such as Samuel Pitoiset and Hans-Kristian Arntzen. From that new extension I also see open-source developer Tatsuyuki Ishi is now working for Valve. Tatsuyuki Ishi is the developer behind LatencyFleX as a vendor-agnostic latency reduction alternative to NVIDIA Reflex.

Anyhow, with Vulkan 1.3.294 is now the VK_KHR_pipeline_binary extension for applications wanting to manage caching Vulkan pipeline binary data themselves rather than VkPipelineCache objects for more efficient cache handling.

Already for Mesa is this merge request from Samuel Pitoiset that was opened this morning for implementing VK_KHR_pipeline_binary within the RADV driver.

See this commit for more details on all of the Vulkan 1.3.294 changes.