One of the most exciting Google Summer of Code 2018 projects is Vulkan-Virgl for supporting this modern graphics/compute API within virtual machines.

A new pull request has been submitted to MoltenVK, the open-source project for mapping the Vulkan graphics/compute API over Apple's Metal to run on iOS/macOS. This pull request is working to address the issue that caused at least one MoltenVK-using iPhone/iPad game to be rejected from the Apple App Store.

Back in February MoltenVK was open-sourced as part of The Khronos Group and Valve working harder to get Vulkan working on macOS/iOS by mapping it through to using Apple's Metal Graphics/Compute API. The most notable user of MoltenVK on macOS to date is the Vulkan Dota 2 on Mac, but for those looking to use this Vulkan-to-Metal framework on iOS, it looks like Apple might be clamping down.

After a number of recent Vulkan 1.1 point releases being rather mundane, Vulkan 1.1.80 is out this morning and on top of documentation updates also brings three notable new Vulkan extensions.

Vulkan 1.1.79 is now the latest revision to this graphics/compute API.

Earlier this month the Laminar Research crew responsible for the realistic, cross-platform X-Plane flight simulator presented at the FlightSimExpo about their work on porting the flight simulator to Vulkan and other ongoing improvements.

DXVK 0.61 is out today as the newest version of this Direct3D 11 over Vulkan translation layer to help with running Windows D3D11 games on Wine.

Vulkan 1.1.78 is now available as the newest version of the Vulkan specification.

Kicking off a new week is the Vulkan 1.1.77 specification update.

DXVK 0.54 is available today as the latest version of this Direct3D-11-over-Vulkan translation layer to benefit Wine gamers looking to enjoy faster D3D11 gaming performance on Linux.

The X-Plane cross-platform flight simulator has been depending upon OpenGL for nearly two decades since the program first came into existence, but a port of its rendering engine to use the Vulkan API has been a work-in-progress.

The PPSSPP emulator project allowing Sony PSP games to be played on multiple platforms has now added Vulkan support on Linux.

Less than one week after releasing DXVK 0.52, the DXVK 0.53 release is now available for running Direct3D 11 games/applications over Vulkan.

Of the hundreds of projects for this year's Google Summer of Code, there are many interesting GSoC 2018 projects but one of those that I am most excited for is Vulkan-Virgl for getting this modern API supported with hardware acceleration by guest virtual machines.

It's been a wild week for the various Direct3D-over-Vulkan projects with VKD3D 1.0 being released for the initial Direct3D 12 over Vulkan bits from the ongoing work in the Wine project to DXVK continuing to get better at its D3D11-over-VLK support. There's also an update on the VK9 front.

Vulkan 1.1.76 has just been released ahead of the US Memorial Day weekend with new extensions to excite Vulkan developers.

The Vulkan's documentation/generator being re-licensed from an MIT-style license to the Apache 2.0 license had caused problems for the Wine project supporting newer than Vulkan 1.0.51, but fortunately that issue has been resolved.

While VKD3D 1.0 is out today for Direct3D 12 mapped over Vulkan, the DXVK project for running Direct3D 11 over Vulkan is also out with a new release today.

The Wine project has announced the release of VKD3D 1.0, the first official release of this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan layer primarily developed at CodeWeavers. VKD3D is the approach Wine is pursuing for getting Direct3D 12 games from Windows working on Wine under Linux or also under macOS when paired with MoltenVK.

Just over one month after there were 2,000 Vulkan-mentioning projects on GitHub, the 2,100 project milestone has been breached.

For those aspiring Vulkan programmers, the Vulkan experts at LunarG have published a tutorial to learn how to make use of the newest debug extension, VK_EXT_debug_utils.

It's been almost one month since the Vulkan 1.1.74 debut but now that's been succeeded by Vulkan 1.1.75.

The AMD developers working on their official Vulkan driver code updated the public source trees yesterday for XGL and PAL that form the AMDVLK open-source Linux driver.

DXVK 0.51 is now available as the latest version of this library for running Direct3D 11 games under Wine via the Vulkan graphics API.

While the rapidly maturing DXVK library has been capturing much of the limelight when it comes to piping Direct3D over Vulkan, the VK9 project targeting Direct3D 9 on top of Vulkan continues making progress.

The RADV Vulkan driver will soon have VK_PIPELINE_CREATE_DISABLE_OPTIMIZATION_BIT to help avoid stuttering with DXVK for running Direct3D 11 games on Wine over Vulkan.

While the current generation Raspberry Pi boards with their VideoCore IV graphics processor only supports OpenGL ES 2.0 and is generally quite slow, there is an experimental/work-in-progress Vulkan driver being worked on.

2018 appears to be the year of ray-tracing with the major hardware vendors, game engines, and others all working on modern ray-tracing efforts with the GPUs becoming powerful enough to handle this alternative to rasterized rendering, etc. While Microsoft has out the DirectX Raytracing API for D3D12, NVIDIA has been working on extending Vulkan to also suit ray-tracing use-cases.

DXVK 0.50 has been released this weekend as the latest version of the open-source project implementing Direct3D 11 over the cross-platform Vulkan graphics API primarily for the benefit of Wine/Linux gamers.

The 2018 Vulkan Developer Day event was held earlier this week at the Ubisoft offices in Montreal, Canada.