The Khronos Group's Vulkan working group is kicking off the start of a new week with a new specification update. The Vulkan 1.1.95 release brings with it two new floating point extensions.

LunarG has shipped the latest version of the Vulkan SDK that pulls in support for the many recently introduced extensions from VK_NV_ray_tracing to VK_EXT_pci_bus_info and VK_EXT_transform_feedback, among other recent vendor extensions. There is also bug fixes and improved validation coverage for this Vulkan SDK.

Vulkan 1.1.94 is out today as the latest update to this graphics and compute API. This latest refinement to Vulkan introduces two new extensions.

One of the most passionate topics by readers in the Phoronix Forums is the Rust programming language. For about one year now "RLSL" has been in the works as a Rust-based shading language that can compile into SPIR-V. While initially I held off on writing about it to see if it would be just another small toy project, RLSL has continued maturing and seeing new functionality added in.

Continuing to make Sunday mornings more entertaining are new Vulkan documentation updates on their weekly-ish update cycle.

Vulkan 1.1.92 is out today to mark the newest specification update to this high-performance graphics/compute API.

Last month Vulkan picked up an unofficial Vulkan transform feedback extension solely to help out efforts like DXVK that map Direct3D or other graphics APIs on top of Vulkan. Separately, another Vulkan extension is in the works to also help out DXVK and D3D-over-Vulkan-like use-cases and can assist in better performance.

Another Sunday update to the Vulkan API is now available with the stabilized NVIDIA ray-tracing extension and a new AMD vendor-specific extension.

It was just in mid-September that NVIDIA introduced its ray-tracing extension for Vulkan as VK_NVX_raytracing with it debuting as an "experimental" feature along with OpenGL/GLSL functionality. Already they seem happy with the design that it's being promoted to stable.

In addition to Zink taking shape for OpenGL over Vulkan, the separate and independent effort of CLVK continues marching along for OpenCL over Vulkan. I was experimenting with CLVK today and did some initial benchmarks.

Halcyon is a research and development engine being built by Electronic Arts' SEED group (Search for Extraordinary Experiences Division). While previously they talked up Microsoft DirectX ray-tracing and have been experimenting with it, they have also begun work on a Vulkan back-end for Halcyon that also includes Linux support.

After the big Vulkan 1.1.88 update earlier this month that brought transform feedback and other new extensions, Vulkan 1.1.89 is now available.

This week the Kazan project (formerly known as "Vulkan-CPU") celebrated a small but important milestone in its trek to having a CPU-based Vulkan software implementation.

Well, the virtual reality (VR) demo scene is now complete with having glxgears-inspired gears and Utah teapot rendering on VR head mounted displays with the new XRGEARS.

After cracking 2,000 projects referencing Vulkan on GitHub earlier this year, this week it passed the milestone of having more than 2,500 projects.

Today is certainly a very exciting day in the Vulkan space.

With the newly-announced Vulkan 1.1.88 that brings VK_EXT_transform_feedback, the DXVK Direct3D-on-Vulkan layer has already implemented the transform feedback support.

Vulkan 1.1.88 is out this morning and it's an exciting Vulkan update. Say hello to Vulkan transform feedback!

Even if you don't have a new NVIDIA RTX graphics card, the open-source vRt project aims to offer Vulkan-based ray-tracing for modern graphics cards.

An independent open-source developer has started the VUDA project as an effort to provide a CUDA Runtime API interface based on Vulkan.

Vulkan 1.1.87 is another Sunday morning update to the Vulkan graphics/compute specification.

DXVK lead developer and Valve contractor Philip Rebohle just announced the release of DXVK 0.81 for providing this latest Direct3D-over-Vulkan library (D3D10/D3D11) in time for weekend Linux gamers.

Remember Kazan, the project originally known as Vulkan-CPU? That was the Google Summer of Code 2017 project to implement a CPU/software-based Vulkan driver. It had been dormant since GSoC 2017 ended, but now work on it has been restarted.

The Khronos working group responsible for Vulkan is working to drop Mir support, a.k.a. VK_KHR_mir_surface.

While DXVK captures much of the limelight these days when it comes to accelerating Windows gaming on Linux by mapping Direct3D 11 (and D3D10) over Vulkan, the VK9 project and its main developer continue advancing D3D9-over-Vulkan for those preferring to relive over Direct3D Windows games.

The Khronos Working Group maintaining Vulkan have released their 1.1.86 specification update to end out September. This is one of the more interesting Vulkan updates in recent times.

Not to be confused with the also new Zinc crypto code working its way to the mainline kernel as part of WireGuard, Zink is a new effort led by a developer at Collabora for implementing OpenGL on top of Vulkan drivers via Gallium3D.

For developers interested in delivering cross-platform Vulkan games/applications and using MoltenVK for delivering macOS/iOS support, a new release is available that has a number of feature additions.

You may have remembered when the XDC2018 agenda was published there was "Untitled Vulkan break-out kick-off. Topic still under NDA." We now know what that was about.

The latest open-source project now officially adopting a Code of Conduct is Vulkan.