In addition to having DXVK 1.8 released for Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan, Valve's VKD3D-Proton project also is enjoying a new release in time for weekend gamers wanting to run the latest Direct3D 12 titles via Vulkan on Linux with Steam Play.

Today marks five years since the announcement of Vulkan 1.0. Over the past five years we have seen incredible adoption of this high performance graphics API across multiple platforms, open-source Vulkan drivers that are kept up to date well with the latest spec revisions, exciting new extensions, and the spec continues to receive new extensions and revisions on an almost bi-weekly basis.

Heading out of Valentine's weekend, there is a new Vulkan specification update with a notable new extension.

While so far only the NVIDIA proprietary driver on Linux supports the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions, eventually we will see support for these new Vulkan extensions with the AMD Vulkan drivers for the Radeon RX 6000 series and newer. There has also been work by Intel in preparing for Vulkan ray-tracing with Xe HPG. For when the time comes to test those implementations, there is finally one good, open-source, automated Vulkan RT benchmark so far.

Those working on VKD3D-Proton as the Direct3D 12 implementation atop the Vulkan API are beginning to work on DirectX Ray-Tracing support but it isn't yet ready for gamers.

Today's Vulkan 1.2.168 specification update brings the usual specification corrections/clarifications while also introducing two new KHR extensions.

One of the last pieces of the puzzle for supporting an entirely Vulkan-based Wayland compositor is coming together with a new extension that looks like it will be merged soon and there already being work pending against Sway/WLROOTS to make use of the Vulkan path.

The Khronos Group and LunarG have announced an updated Vulkan SDK that includes now formally providing support for Apple platforms, including Apple Silicon systems via Universal Binaries.

The newest platform working on Vulkan API support is... Blackberry's QNX.

Vulkan 1.2.162 was released at the end of November with the ratified Vulkan ray-tracing extension for multi-vendor use. The Khronos Group today is announcing the updated Vulkan SDK, tooling, code samples, and developer guide today with ray-tracing coverage included.

While Apple continues to drive their own Metal graphics/compute API, Vulkan support built atop Metal continues to mature thanks to the open-source MoltenVK project. With the MoltenVK's latest update is now support for Apple Silicon with the M1's new GPU.

Vulkan 1.2.164 is out today with the usual assortment of documentation fixes/clarifications plus two new extensions.

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.