Vulkan tagged news

In this white paper, LunarG demonstrates how to debug GLSL/HLSL shaders using a recent Vulkan feature, Debug PrintF.

Based on Basemark’s performance benchmarking, Vulkan enables consistently more than 50% faster graphics performance compared to OpenGL ES on automotive graphics rendering use cases.

As Godot 4.0 with Vulkan gets closer, the developers have posted an update to clarify the direction that Godot 4 is taking for OpenGL ES. The renderer design and all resulting code has been re-implemented entirely from scratch in order to support Vulkan and modern rendering techniques. This will have taken close to three at the time of release. As such, OpenGL ES will not be supported in Godot 4. The goal is to support OpenGL ES 3 starting in Godot 4.1. There is more information which you can learn about from the Godot Engine team here.

At Game Developers Conference today, NVIDIA demonstrated GeForce RTX technologies on the Arm platform using Vulkan to show how advanced graphics can be extended to a broader, more power-efficient set of devices. The demos included Wolfenstein: Youngblood from Bethesda Softworks and MachineGames, as well as The Bistro from the Open Research Content Archive running in real time on a MediaTek Arm platform with ray-traced graphics. The demos are made possible by NVIDIA extending support for its software development kits for implementing five key NVIDIA RTX technologies to Arm and Linux using the Vulkan API.

In this blog from Collabora, Erik Faye-Lund brings us up to date on upstream development, OpenGL 4.6 support, OpenGL compatibility profile, OpenGL ES 3.1 support, Lavapipe and continuous integration, Windows support, macOS support and more…

In this blog from Igalia, Victor Jaquez reports on his work-in-progress effort to integrate video decoding using the new Vulkan Video API in the GStreamer multimedia framework.

With the release of this new version, nine new extensions have been added along with fixes to a long-standing issue with queue family present support info on Linux.

LunarG has released new Windows, Linux, and macOS SDKs for Vulkan header 1.2.182. These SDKs include support for many new extensions as well as updates to devsim.

New extensions include:

Note that extensions are optional and may not be implemented by the underlying driver/ICD. Applications can now query for the presence of these new features:

• VK_EXT_acquire_drm_display
• VK_EXT_multi_draw
• VK_EXT_physical_device_drm
• VK_HUAWEI_subpass_shading (broken, disabled from the Loader and Validation Layers)
• VK_NV_ray_tracing_motion_blur (The SPIR-V capability RayTracingMotionBlurNV has been disabled from the validation layers until this capability is defined in SPIR-V)
• VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_uniform_control_flow
• VK_EXT_global_priority_query
• VK_NVX_binary_import
• VK_EXT_provoking_vertex

The much-anticipated ray-tracing patch for Doom Eternal has arrived, and it’s a doozy. At the top of the bill is support for ray-traced lighting effects in the FPS game using Khronos’ cross-platform Vulkan API, enabling advanced effects on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs.

Adobe has released Substance 3D Stager, a new application for laying out, lighting and rendering 3D scenes aimed at the emerging ‘virtual photography’ market previously staked out by Adobe Dimension. It includes a number of interesting features, including physics-based layout tools, readymade studio lighting rigs, and a Vulkan-based renderer capable of hardware-accelerated ray tracing. The software is available as part of Adobe’s new Substance 3D Collection, alongside Substance 3D Painter, Substance 3D Designer and Substance 3D Sampler: the new name for Substance Alchemist.

NVIDIA DLSS support for Vulkan games is now available on Proton, enabling Linux gamers to use the dedicated AI Tensor Cores of their GeForce RTX GPUs to accelerate frame rates in DOOM Eternal, No Man’s Sky, and Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Support for DLSS-enhanced DirectX titles running via Proton layered over Vulkan will arrive this Fall.

In this blog from Arm, Hans-Kristian Arntzen looks at how to implement deferred shading, a style of rendering which is still quite common. The deferred techniques have evolved over time, but the fundamental remains where a G-buffer is rendered, and lighting is computed based on that G-buffer data. This decouples geometry information from shading. Most of the innovation in the last years in the deferred space has revolved around reformulating the lighting pass, but the fundamentals remain the same.

Asynchronous compute is a trend that has proven itself to be an effective optimization technique, but it is somewhat difficult pinning down how to apply it. This idea started its life on last generation console hardware but has since been made available on modern graphics APIs like Vulkan and D3D12. It is now part of a graphics programmer’s toolbox.

In this blog, Arm highlights a new Vulkan Sample that was added to Khronos’ sample repository which demonstrates how to use async compute.

In their recently released update, Valve’s Left 4 Dead 2 is getting Vulkan rendering support by leveraging DXVK to convert Direct3D calls to Vulkan. This update also brings many bug fixes, controller handling enhancements and more.

Diligent Engine is a modern, cross-platform, low-level graphics library and rendering framework that supports Vulkan, OpenGL/GLES, D3D11, D3D12, and Metal. The latest release 2.5 adds a number of major improvements:

• Pipeline resource signatures, an abstraction over descriptor set layouts, enable applications to define explicit shader resource layouts that allow sharing shader resources between different pipeline states without the need to rebind them.

• Multiple immediate contexts enable async compute and parallel rendering.

• Ray queries is a powerful extension to ray tracing that allows casting rays from regular shaders (pixel, compute, etc.).

• Wave operations enable sharing data between threads in one shader thread group.

• Memoryless framebuffer attachments enable memory savings on mobile platforms.

• A new tutorial demonstrates how to implement a simple hybrid renderer that combines rasterization with ray tracing.

Starting with this release, the API will be much more stable with very few breaking changes expected in the future.