
Vulkan 1.3.211 arrives just one week after Vulkan 1.3.210 with its notable graphics pipeline library and primitives generated query extensions. Vulkan 1.3.211 has a handful of documentation clarifications/corrections but nothing too particularly notable there.
Most notable with today's Vulkan 1.3.211 update is the introduction of a new extension, VK_EXT_image_2d_view_of_3d. The VK_EXT_image_2d_view_of_3d extension was devised by Valve's Mike Blumenkrantz known for his work on Mesa's Zink as well as contributions from NVIDIA, Samsung, Igalia, Broadcom, AMD, Google, and Imagination.
VK_EXT_image_2d_view_of_3d is for letting a single slice of a 3D image be used as a 2D view in image descriptors for better matching the behavior of OpenGL to help implementations like Zink working to expose GL APIs over Vulkan.
This extension allows a single slice of a 3D image to be used as a 2D view in image descriptors, matching both the functionality of glBindImageTexture in OpenGL with the `layer` parameter set to true and 2D view binding provided by the extension EGL_KHR_gl_texture_3D_image. It is primarily intended to support GL emulation.
VK_EXT_image_2d_view_of_3d usage by Zink and support by Mesa's Vulkan drivers will presumably be pushed soon for Mesa 22.1. This is just the latest of a number of Vulkan extensions that have come about for helping implement OpenGL and other 3D APIs atop Vulkan.
This latest Vulkan spec can be viewed at Vulkan.org.
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