Released nearly one year ago was the experimental NVIDIA VkHLF project as a high-level framework for Vulkan. It's been a while since last hearing anything about it, but some new code was just merged.

While Vulkan aims to be a lower-level graphics API in relation to OpenGL, VkHLF aims to take Vulkan to a higher-level. The VkHLF documentation explains, "It adds features like transparent suballocation, resource tracking on the CPU & GPU and simplified resource creation while staying as close as possible to the original Vulkan API. In contrast to Vulkan-Hpp, which was carefully designed to be a zero-overhead C++ abstraction for Vulkan, this library adds significant higher-level functionality. Even so, it has been designed for high-performance, but it can cost performance relative to native Vulkan if not employed with the intended usage patterns."

VkHLF has hardly been touched since it was open-sourced last January with just 19 commits, but two NVIDIA researchers are at least still working on it with a fresh code push. The code where it continues to be developed is nvpro-pipeline/VKHLF. The NVPro Pipeline project itself hasn't been publicly updated since last January as their experimental research into a rendering pipeline with minimal CPU cost. Let's hope for more interesting NVIDIA open-source code contributions in 2018.