This week marked the release of Vulkan 1.2.162 with the ray-tracing extensions now finalized. As such Intel's stellar open-source team has begun landing their work around Vulkan ray-tracing ahead of the Xe HPG hardware availability that will support this functionality.

There are two interesting bits of news today pertaining to open-source Vulkan drivers being officially conformant with the Vulkan 1.0 specification in passing the necessary Vulkan CTS tests.

Earlier this year Vulkan ray-tracing arrived in provisional form while with today's Vulkan 1.2.162 specification update this functionality has been promoted to stable and ready for broad industry support.

Vulkan 1.2.160 is out this morning as the newest revision to the Vulkan graphics/compute API.

VKD3D-Proton as the Valve-backed fork of Wine's VKD3D for mapping the Direct3D 12 API atop Vulkan is now supporting more features with today's v2.0 release and thus handling more Windows games running on Linux with Steam Play.

The V3DV Vulkan driver that provides support for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer can now run the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan translation layer.

The Zink Gallium3D driver that implements OpenGL on top of Vulkan has been on quite a roll recently... Beyond reaching OpenGL 4.6 support in yet-to-be-merged patches and passing ~97% of the Piglit OpenGL tests and increasingly good performance compared to Intel's OpenGL driver, the latest interesting milestone is seeing initial work on bringing Zink to macOS.

Vulkan 1.2.158 was released this morning with two notable extensions introduced.

DXVK 1.7.2 was just released as this popular library for mapping Direct3D 9/10/11 atop the Vulkan API primarily for accelerating Windows games on Linux via the likes of Steam Play (Proton) and Wine.

Vulkan 1.2.156 was released this morning and while it's a small revision to the API documentation it does come with a new extension.

Mesa's Vulkan software implementation built atop LLVMpipe was developed as Vallium (Vulkan + Gallium3D) but has been renamed to Lavapipe within Mesa 20.3.

MoltenVK 1.1 is out as a big update for this graphics translation layer for getting the Vulkan API running on macOS and iOS devices by translating calls to Apple's Metal API.

Vulkan 1.2.155 is out this morning as a small weekly update over last week's spec revision that brought the Vulkan Portability Extension 1.0 for easing software-based Vulkan implementations running atop other graphics APIs.

Given the interest from the RealSR-NCNN Vulkan benchmarks on various NVIDIA and AMD Radeon graphics cards looking at this neural network inference framework with the task of upscaling an image by 4x the resolution using RealSR, here are some more benchmarks of the NCNN framework accelerated by Vulkan on different GPUs under Ubuntu Linux.

Following word last week that the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan layer was seeing 50~100% performance gains, more details are now available.

Patches pending for VKD3D take this Direct3D 12 to Vulkan translation library up to version 1.2. This library continues advancing in pushing along the D3D12-over-Vulkan performance primarily for Windows games on Linux just as DXVK has done for D3D9 through D3D11.

The Vulkan Portability Extension (VK_KHR_portability_subset) has been released as part of the effort by The Khronos Group in getting Vulkan running on as many platforms as possible, including the likes of Apple macOS/iOS.

The V3DV driver for providing Vulkan support on the Raspberry Pi 4 is very close to Vulkan 1.0 conformance and once squaring that away along with other lingering bits they will be pursuing the upstreaming of this driver within Mesa.

The Vulkan System Integration working group has decided to publish their work-in-progress extension on VK_EXT_present_timing as their effort to expose the presentation engine's display details and better allow scheduling a present to happen at a specific time.

X-Plane has long been Linux-friendly and one of the most realistic flight simulators available while today it's taking a big step forward with its 11.50 release and the much anticipated introduction of its new rendering engine with Vulkan support.

While there aren't too many Windows games out there still popular and supporting AMD's Mantle graphics API that was the precursor to Vulkan, open-source developer Clément Guérin continues work on his "GRVK" initiative for mapping Mantle on top of Vulkan as a learning exercise and for allowing those still relevant Mantle-supported games to in turn run on Vulkan.

When looking at the performance of Zink's OpenGL over Vulkan implementation just about one year ago the performance had a lot to be desired. But since then they have patches bringing it all the way to OpenGL 4.6 compared to the OpenGL 2.1 days and there has also been a lot of work on the performance. The performance at least for select operations is now turning out better than even the developers were expecting.

The V3DV open-source Vulkan driver being developed by consulting firm Igalia for the Raspberry Pi Foundation is nearing official support for Vulkan 1.0.

Vulkan 1.2.153 doesn't come with any new extensions or major changes aside from an important fundamental change if you are interacting with their Git repository.

The friends at LunarG who maintain the Vulkan SDK today announced their new Vulkan Configurator tool, accessible via the vkconfig command and installed as part of the SDK.

When the Zink Gallium3D driver running OpenGL over Vulkan was first introduced in 2018 and since one of the main blockers besides the performance overhead has been the limited OpenGL 2/3 support. The GL3/GL4 support has been improving with time for Zink and when making use of the latest out-of-tree patches is even possible to get OpenGL 4.6 running over Vulkan with Zink!

Merged into Mesa 20.3 earlier this week was VALLIUM as a Vulkan front-end to Gallium3D with an explicit focus to serve as a CPU/software-based Vulkan implementation and relying upon the Gallium/LLVMpipe infrastructure. But with VALLIUM being a Gallium3D front-end, some have wondered whether this could allow Vulkan to magically work with existing Gallium3D hardware drivers or even to run Vulkan on GPUs not natively supported by Vulkan.

There are just a handful of games like Battlefield 4, Thief, and others that can make use of AMD's long-deprecated Mantle graphics API as the predecessor to modern graphics APIs like Vulkan and Direct3D 12. Mantle never was brought to Linux given the emphasis quickly turned to Vulkan within The Khronos Group, but now with the open-source "GRVK" project it's being mapped on top of Vulkan.

It's been nearly three months without a new DXVK release for mapping Direct3D 9/10/11 atop the Vulkan API while finally today there is a big feature release out.

Vulkan 1.2.149 is out today and its lone new extension is yet another addition to the Vulkan API for helping translation layers like DXVK map other graphics APIs on top.