The Khronos Group is celebrating the US Independence Day with the release of a new Vulkan spec.

Mesa's TURNIP Vulkan driver for open-source Qualcomm Adreno support took another big step forward this week with the mainlining of tessellation shader support.

There have been a few Vulkan spec updates without any new extensions introduced but this weekend's Vulkan 1.2.145 revision does bring new functionality.

The Raspberry Pi 1 through Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and even the Raspberry Pi Zero can now see Vulkan support via a new unofficial "RPi-VK-Driver" that is offering even better performance than the Broadcom OpenGL driver.

The DirectFB library once popular with embedded systems and other environments needing formerly a full X11 stack (or now, Wayland) remains in an abandoned state with no real upstream development any longer and the project site long dead, but with a newly proposed Vulkan extension could allow this modern graphics API to run on top of it.

Consulting firm Igalia that has been working under contract with the Raspberry Pi Foundation on developing a Raspberry Pi Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 and future SBCs has provided a status update on their development efforts.

LunarG in cooperation with The Khronos Group has released Vulkan SDK 1.2.141.

The folks at Laminar Research published a new blog post this week detailing their latest development work on their Vulkan (and Apple Metal) renderers for the realistic X-Plane flight simulator.

DXVK 1.7 is out this weekend as the important library translating Direct3D 9/10/11 usage into Vulkan API and is leveraged by the likes of Steam Play for running modern Windows games on Linux.

Vulkan 1.2.140 is out as the latest version of the Vulkan API for high performance graphics and compute. Besides the usual assortment of documentation clarifications/fixes, this round does bring two new extensions.

The routine Vulkan 1.2.139 maintenance update brings with it two new extensions.

While there has been the CPU-based "Kazan" Vulkan driver (formerly Vulkan-CPU as a Google Summer of Code project) and Google's SwiftShader has been implementing CPU-based Vulkan support, it turns out Red Hat's David Airlie has been working on a Mesa/Gallium3D-inspired Vulkan software renderer.

Less than one month ago came the big Vulkan 1.2.135 update with official ray-tracing capabilities and other extension promotions. Out today is Vulkan 1.2.137 with a whole lot of clarifications and fixes.

For years we have been looking forward to X-Plane with a new Vulkan renderer to replace its aging OpenGL renderer. Finally today the X-Plane 11.50 Beta has been made public for this realistic flight simulator that supports Metal on Apple platforms and Vulkan everywhere else.

While the most prominent addition to today's Vulkan 1.2.135 update is the provisional ray-tracing support, there are also other new extensions with this update.

2020 could be the year we see the Vulkan API seeing more adoption on the desktop outside of games. We are already looking forward to LibreOffice 7.0 with Vulkan rendering support coming out later this summer while the next FFmpeg release also has Vulkan support lined up.

The Khronos Group has released Vulkan 1.2.134 as their newest revision to this high-performance graphics/compute API.

Added to the Vulkan API last summer was VK_EXT_line_rasterization for line rasterization like employed by CAD applications. The open-source Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver is now supporting this extension.

It's been nearly one month since the release of Vulkan 1.2.132 and that came shortly after the big Vulkan 1.2 milestone, but out today is now Vulkan 1.2.133.

Longtime X11 developer Keith Packard who has been working on various infrastructure improvements to the Linux desktop in recent years under contract for Valve has been eyeing the creation of a new Vulkan extension for dealing with frame timing behavior for Vulkan apps/games.

The vkBasalt open-source project began as just providing Contrast Adaptive Sharpening support for Linux/Vulkan games similar to Radeon Image Sharpening. This Vulkan post-processing layer then added an option for applying FXAA anti-aliasing and then SMAA and other effects. Now vkBasalt 0.3 is out today with even more post-processing features.

We remain quite excited to see Godot 4.0 this year that most notably is working on Vulkan API support.

While Apple still isn't officially supporting the Vulkan graphics/compute API in remaining focused on their Metal drivers, MoltenVK at least has been updated for Vulkan 1.2 in allowing developers to target this Vulkan-to-Metal abstraction layer for macOS and iOS.

Following last week's release of Vulkan 1.2, Vulkan 1.2.132 was released on Tuesday as the first maintenance/point release to this major Vulkan API revision.

One of several projects implementing the OpenGL graphics API over Vulkan has been Think Silicon's GLOVE library. GLOVE currently is focuses on OpenGL ES 2.0 + EGL 1.4 support and is a standalone project unlike Mesa's Zink Gallium3D driver working on OpenGL / GLES over Vulkan too. GLOVE 0.4 is out today as a big feature update.

This morning's release of Vulkan 1.2 is off to a great start.

Vulkan could soon be used indirectly on safety critical military and aerospace displays thanks to CoreAVI's VkCoreGL SC1.

LunarG on Friday released the Vulkan SDK 1.1.130 version with an updated license, better validation layer coverage, and support for newer extensions.

MoltenVK has now caught up against the latest Vulkan upstream specification for the time being in supporting Vulkan translated to Apple's Metal API on macOS and iOS.

D9VK, the frog-themed Direct3D 9 over Vulkan translation layer originally based on DXVK, has now been merged into the upstream DXVK Direct3D 10/11 over Vulkan layer. In other words, a single project is now providing support from Direct3D 9 through Direct3D 11 for Vulkan acceleration in speeding up the Windows gaming on Linux experience.