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.

D9VK 0.40 is out today as the latest feature update to this Direct3D 9 over Vulkan translation layer based on DXVK.

While we are approaching 2020 and the four year anniversary since the Vulkan 1.0 launch, one aspect that has been a bit disappointing has been the lack of not seeing quicker uptake by various Linux window managers / compositors in at least offering a Vulkan code path. One of the best examples of a Vulkan-powered compositor with that has been the independent ChamferWM.

Vulkan 1.1.130 is out today as the newest update to this graphics API that fixes a wide variety of documentation issues and areas in need of clarifications while also introducing a new extension.

Vulkan 1.1.129 is out this morning as another weekly update to this graphics API specification and in tow comes one new extension.

The open-source vkBasalt project was started as a layer implementing Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (akin to Radeon Image Sharpening) for any Vulkan-using GPU/driver/software. The vkBasalt project then picked up FXAA support for this Vulkan post-processing layer while now a new release is out with more functionality added.

Vulkan 1.1.128 is out with various corrections and clarifications to this graphics/compute API specification but it also comes with one exciting new extension.

The DXVK Direct3D 10/11 over Vulkan implementation to date has been built as a Windows library run under Wine along with the game/software being rendered for converting the calls to Vulkan for execution by the host drivers. There is now experimental work for building DXVK as a native Linux library for converting D3D10/D3D11 calls to Vulkan outside of Wine.

The OGRE open-source 3D graphics engine that is used by many games as well as different simulation / educational / interactive / visualization software is working on enabling Vulkan API support.

Vulkan 1.1.127 is out this morning as the latest routine update to the specification for this high-performance graphics API.

The open-source vkBasalt project is the independent effort implementing AMD Radeon Image Sharpening / Contrast Adaptive Sharpening technique as a Vulkan post-processing layer that can be used regardless of the (Vulkan-powered) game. With vkBasalt 0.1 also now comes the ability to apply FXAA.

The Khronos Group has launched the Vulkan Unified Samples Repository, a Git repository on GitHub for Khronos-reviewed, high-quality Vulkan code samples.

The open-source MoltenVK is out with another new update based against the Vulkan 1.1.126 specification and allowing the Vulkan API to be used on Apple's macOS and iOS by mapping those calls to the underlying Metal graphics drivers.