Vulkan 1.3.221 Released With VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness

Vulkan 1.3.221 was released this week as the newest spec update for this industry-standard graphics/compute API.

Vulkan 1.3.221 has a handful of specification clarifications/corrections raised within the Vulkan working group and externally from public users via GitHub. There is only one new extension with Vulkan 1.3.221 and that is VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness. The VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness extension was worked on by developers from NVIDIA, Intel, Imagination, Google, and others. The VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness extension is simply about allowing robust buffer access and other Vulkan robustness features to be enabled on a per-pipeline stage basis.

Due to the Vulkan robustness features having possible performance implications from the extra work involved, the VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness allows enabling it just on specific pipeline stages for enabling it only where it may actually be used by the game engine / application. In other words, cutting down on the overhead where it would otherwise be unused.

That's it for the rather small Vulkan 1.3.221 spec update this week. All the changes are outlined over on GitHub.