Vulkan 1.4 Released With More Extensions Mandated, Better 8K Rendering

As a lovely early Christmas present, The Khronos Group used SIGGRAPH Asia today for announcing the Vulkan 1.4 specification release.

Vulkan 1.4 now mandates a number of previously optional extensions and features. The minimum hardware limits have also been increased for Vulkan 1.4.

Today's press release sums up the Vulkan 1.4 highlights as:

- Streaming Transfers: Vulkan 1.4 imposes new implementation requirements to ensure portable, cross-platform applications can stream large quantities of data to a device while simultaneously rendering at full performance.

- Previously optional extensions and features critical to emerging high-performance applications are now mandatory in Vulkan 1.4, ensuring their reliable availability across multiple platforms. These include push descriptors, dynamic rendering local reads, and scalar block layouts.

- Maintenance extensions up to and including VK_KHR_maintenance6 are now part of the core Vulkan 1.4 specification.

- 8K rendering with up to eight separate render targets is now guaranteed to be supported, along with several other limit increases.

More details on today's Vulkan 1.4 specification release via Khronos.org.

Now to see how quickly the Mesa merge requests come for landing Vulkan 1.4 in the likes of Radeon RADV and Intel ANV drivers...