It's Been Over One Month Since The Last Vulkan 1.0 Update

Vulkan 1.0.38 was released on 16 December and there has yet to be any other Vulkan-Docs update since then, which is strange when considering there were 38 point releases to Vulkan 1.0 in less than one year that the API specification has been public. There generally has been point releases every week or two for advancing this high-performance graphics API.

Originally one would have thought it was just a slowdown for Christmas / New Year's, but there still isn't any Vulkan 1.0.39 release as we get closer to the end of January.

It's also not as if there isn't anymore work to do on Vulkan 1.0, there are still ~81 open issues via their GitHub tracker and surely more on the internal Khronos tracker. When looking at the closed issues, nothing has been updated since the middle of December.

So what's going on? Your guess is pretty much as good as mine right now, while waiting to hear any updates from Khronos contacts. One real possibility though is they are busy doubling down on Vulkan 1.1 / Vulkan-Next.

For that theory, NVIDIA quietly released a new Vulkan beta driver earlier this month that contains previously unpublished Vulkan extensions. The Vulkan 1.0 specification will turn one year old in February. As well, GDC17 is happening in just over one month as a possible event for The Khronos Group to release an updated version of the spec, or at least announce it in provisional form. We should have an answer soon enough.

Those wanting to look through the existing Vulkan 1.0 doc updates can find them via GitHub.

What do you hope will be in Vulkan-Next? Share your thoughts with us this weekend in the forums.