Vulkan 1.3.295 Released With Compute Shader Derivatives Extension
New to Vulkan 1.3.295 is the VK_KHR_compute_shader_derivatives extension. This extension was worked on by engineers at a variety of companies like NVIDIA and AMD as well as Valve's Hans-Kristian Arntzen contributing to the spec. This extension adds support for SPIR-V's SPV_KHR_compute_shader_derivatives support.
The new extension text explains of this compute shader derivatives extension:
"This extension adds Vulkan support for the SPV_KHR_compute_shader_derivatives SPIR-V extension.
The SPIR-V extension provides two new execution modes, both of which allow execution models with defined workgroups to use built-ins that evaluate derivatives explicitly or implicitly. Derivatives will be computed via differencing over a 2x2 group of shader invocations. The DerivativeGroupQuadsKHR execution mode assembles shader invocations into 2x2 groups, where each group has x and y coordinates of the local invocation ID of the form (2m+{0,1}, 2n+{0,1}). The DerivativeGroupLinearKHR execution mode assembles shader invocations into 2x2 groups, where each group has local invocation index values of the form 4m+{0,1,2,3}.
The new execution modes are supported in compute shaders and optionally in mesh and task shaders."
NVIDIA going back to 2018 has maintained their own vendor extension that is similar, VK_NV_compute_shader_derivatives.
More details on the new compute shader derivatives extension and other minor alterations in Vulkan 1.3.295 can be found via this commit.
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