Qualcomm Working On Vulkan Image Processing With New v1.3.222 Extensions

Released today was Vulkan 1.3.222 as the newest Vulkan spec with various clarifications/corrections plus two new extensions coming out of Qualcomm.

Qualcomm is working to make Vulkan more suitable for traditional image processing and has introduced the VK_QCOM_image_processing extension. VK_QCOM_image_processing introduces new SPIR-V built-in functions for dealing with high quality, advanced image processing.

The Qualcomm image processing spec argues, "GPUs are commonly used to process images for various applications from 3D
graphics to UI and from composition to compute applications. Simple scaling and filtering can be done with bilinear filtering, which comes for free during texture sampling. However, as screen sizes get larger and more use-cases rely on GPU such as camera and video post-processing needs, there is increasing demand for GPU to support higher order filtering and other advanced image processing."

The SPIR-V functions map nicely to at least Qualcomm graphics hardware and aim to make for faster GPU-based, high quality image processing.

Also introduced in today's Vulkan 1.3.222 update is VK_QCOM_tile_properties as an extension for applications to query the tile properties for both render passes and dynamic rendering.

The full list of Vulkan 1.3.222 changes via GitHub.