The Vulkan Working Group has released the VK_EXT_mesh_shader extension that brings cross-vendor mesh shading to Vulkan and improves functional compatibility with DirectX 12. The new mesh shading pipeline with the task and mesh shading stages provides an alternative to the traditional vertex, tessellation, or geometry shader stages that feed into rasterization.

Mesh shaders provide greater flexibility to developers and enable a two-stage approach for efficient culling, level-of-detail management, and procedural generation of geometry. Compared to the traditional pipeline, mesh shaders enable easy access to the topology of generated primitives and developers are free to repurpose shader threads to perform both vertex shading and primitive shading workloads. Khronos will provide a mesh shader open-source sample to support and showcase the new VK_EXT_mesh_shader extension, and an updated shaderc library in the Vulkan SDK is coming soon.

For those that wish to try out the new mesh shader on their own GPU; NVIDIA is shipping the new extension in their beta Vulkan drivers today, and experimental support in the open source RADV and ANV drivers are now available.

For additional information developers are invited to:

• Read the deep-dive blog post Mesh Shading for Vulkan.
• Attend the free Vulkanised Webinar: ‘Cross-Vendor Mesh Shading with Vulkan’ on Wednesday October 27 September 28. Learn More and Register

Check out the new LunarG Windows, Linux, and macOS SDKs for Vulkan header 1.3.224, including the NVIDIA Best Practices, a Vulkan Profiles tool to combine multiple profiles, and the Synchronization Validation inter-buffer-hazards feature (alpha).

For the past couple of years, the Raspberry Pi foundation has been working with Igalia to bring Vulkan to the Raspberry Pi 4 platform. Yesterday, they announced that they have achieved Vulkan 1.2 conformance for the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B along with support for various other extensions, bug fixes and performance improvements.

Khronos has released three new samples for Vulkan. They include:

• Usage of the VK_EXT_conditional_rendering extension for conditionally toggling the visibility of sub-meshes of a complex glTF model. View Sample
  
• A transcoded version of the API sample Terrain Tessellation that illustrates the usage of the C++ bindings of vulkan provided by vulkan.hpp. View Sample
• A transcoded version of the API sample Compute N-Body that illustrates the usage of the C++ bindings of vulkan provided by vulkan.hpp. View Sample

Imagination Technologies and The Khronos Group are holding the Khronos and Imagination Seminar in Shanghai, a developer event highlighting the rapidly evolving software-hardware ecosystem and the opportunities for GPU technology, open-source standards and open API interfaces across mobile gaming, automotive and cloud. Watch the Khronos and Imagination Seminar on-demand sessions and find out more about the PowerVR SDK. Learn more about Imagination Technologies and the Khronos Group.

Khronos Group President, Neil Trevett, shares how open standards have an important role mitigating the complexities of safety-critical certification in a confusing landscape of processors, accelerators, compilers, APIs, and libraries, that drive up integration costs for embedded accelerators, which in turn has constrained innovation and time-to-market efficiencies.

The Vulkan SDK components come from open-source repositories. While it is feasible to develop Vulkan applications without using the Vulkan SDK,
there are many benefits to installing it. Check out LunarG’s white paper that shares the many benefits.

NVIDIA presents Vulkan-specific tips that are not necessarily explicitly covered by the other Advanced API Performance posts. In addition to introducing new Vulkan 1.3 core features, this post shares a set of good practices for clearing and presenting surfaces.

The following graphic cards from the Intel® Arc™ line are now fully conformant: A350M, A370M, A550M, A730M, and A770M.

In this new blog post by Collabora, Manas Chaudhary guides us through the process of adding secondary command buffers to PanVK, the open source Vulkan driver.

The Vulkan Portability Technical Subgroup is seeking to reduce the number of CTS failures in MoltenVK under Vulkan 1.0 with no extensions. MoltenVK provides Vulkan functionality layered on top of the Metal graphics API on Apple devices. All RFP responses are due by 5p.m. PDT on Friday, June 24, 2022.

Three new Vulkan samples have been released in the past month:

• HPP Instancing Sample - NVIDIA provides a transcoded Instancing Sample that illustrates the usage of the C++ bindings.
  
• Portability Sample - Holochip presents a tutorial demonstrating the use of the VK_KHR_portability_subset extension.
  
• Graphics Pipeline Libraries - Sascha Williams brings us this tutorial on the VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library extensions that allows separate compilation of different parts of the graphics pipeline. With this it’s now possible to split up the monolithic pipeline creation into different steps and re-use common parts shared across different pipelines.
  

At the recent GTC 2022 Conference NVIDIA released multiple initiatives to boost the productivity of Vulkan developers. The new NVIDIA Nsight Systems 2022.2 system-wide performance analysis tool supports the new Vulkan graphics pipeline library extension and Vulkan memory operations. NVIDIA’s new Streamline open-source, cross-IHV framework can be used to integrate multiple super-resolution technologies into Vulkan games and applications. And lastly, NVIDIA’s new Cloud Playtest virtual development environment that builds on GeForce NOW infrastructure enables the coordination and observation of playtests for Vulkan games without physical hardware or presence.

GPU Performance API (GPUPerfAPI) is a powerful library providing access to GPU Performance Counters to help analyze the performance and characteristics of applications using a Radeon GPU.

GPUPerfAPI v3.11 adds support for raytracing counters in Vulkan on RDNA2 (Radeon RX 6000 Series) hardware:

• RayTriTests, and RayBoxTests: These counters collect the number of ray intersections for triangles and boxes, respectively.
• TotalRayTests: This counter collects the aggregated number of ray-box and ray-triangle intersection tests.
• RayTestsPerWave: This counter collects ray intersection test count at a more granular level – per wave.