The new NVIDIA Optical Flow SDK 5.0 now enables Vulkan applications to use the NVIDIA Optical Flow engine when running on NVIDIA Ampere architecture and newer generation GPUs to create a smoother gaming and video experience by inserting interpolated frames between original frames using the computed flow between frame pairs.

LunarG has summarized the results of their annual survey and created a report that shares the key findings and suggested actions to improve the Vulkan SDK and Ecosystem in 2023 and beyond.

Today, Khronos® is releasing a new multi-vendor Vulkan® extension that aims to radically simplify how applications specify shaders and shader state while maintaining Vulkan’s ethos of being a highly performant “API without secrets.” This extension is VK_EXT_shader_object. It introduces a new VkShaderEXT object type which represents a single compiled shader stage, along with 4 new functions to manipulate and use VkShaderEXT objects. Learn more in this Khronos Blog.

Godot 4.0 runs on Windows, Linux, and MacOS, and also Android devices. The Goldot team embedded OpenXR in the engine’s core and introduced Godot XR tools, which will help developers of XR projects. With two new Vulkan backends (Clustered and Mobile), Godot rendering has never been so advanced. While Godot is excited to leverage Vulkan for performance optimization going forward, it was very important not to penalize users with less powerful hardware. For that, they’ve integrated an OpenGL-based compatibility renderer aimed at supporting older and lower-end devices. As always, Godot wants to see people create games on the full spectrum of devices for everyone to enjoy. They’re also working on a Direct3D 12 renderer for better Windows and Xbox support. With Je06jm‘s contribution, you can now also take advantage of AMD’s Fidelity FX Super Resolution 1.0 (FSR 1.0) to dynamically and beautifully render at lower resolution while keeping your game running smoothly. Spoiler: Support for FSR 2.1 is planned in future releases.

In this educational paper from TU Wien, they conclude that supporting a Vulkan route was much less bumpy for their students than they initially anticipated, and therefore propose a pragmatic route for transitioning to Vulkan in academia for the purpose of teaching real-time computer graphics. Teaching Vulkan from the start will have a positive effect on students for becoming proficient users of modern graphics APIs and, thereby, in more advanced courses when they encounter Vulkan again. Using a low-level API enables students to learn about the massively parallel operation mode of modern GPUs early in their visual computing education. TU Wien’s evaluation has shown that students appreciate the skills and knowledge they picked up through using the Vulkan API. Teaching Vulkan is both viable and beneficial to students who aim to become competent practitioners of visual computing. While the transition may be challenging, it appears to be a worthwhile investment to provide students with future-proof education.

AMD has released a new version of it’s AMDVLK Vulkan driver. The update brings support for VK_EXT_physical_device_drm extension for querying Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) properties for physical devices, enabling users to match Vulkan physical devices with DRM nodes on Linux. The update also fixes a couple of potential CTS failures.

Nsight Graphics 2022.7 is available now, adding support for the finalized release of Vulkan Video decode. You can frame capture applications that use Vulkan Video to inspect events and resource allocation.

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LunarG, developers of the Vulkan SDK, are asking Vulkan developers to complete a survey to better understand what’s working well and what needs improvement in the Vulkan API ecosystem. This survey is a cooperative effort between LunarG and the Khronos Vulkan Working Group. The survey closes on Monday, February 27th, 2023.

Vulkan was designed with compute support as a mandatory feature. In this blog, Sascha Willems shows how to get started with Vulkan compute acceleration.

Over the course of the last decade, Rust has emerged as a new programming language for writing safe low-level code. In the first of a series, Faith Ekstrand explores using Rust to write Mesa Vulkan drivers

Vulkan Video gives developers the choice of a powerful new API for accessing video processing acceleration. NVIDIA is expanding its commitment to Vulkan Video with tools and samples to help applications efficiently harness this significant new functionality. In this NVIDIA blog post, they will help you discover whether Vulkan Video is right for your application—and if so, how to get started.

The Khronos Group announces that LunarG has released the Vulkan Software Development Kit (SDK) version 1.3.239.0 for Windows and Linux with full support for the four Vulkan Video extensions finalized in December 2022, including header upgrades and Validation Layer integration. Together with drivers shipping from multiple GPU vendors, developers are now equipped with the essential tools to use Vulkan Video-accelerated H.264 and H.265 decode in frameworks and applications.

The open source Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer version 3.28 has been released with added support for new Vulkan extensions, updates to the Vulkan profiles library and bug fixes. Click through for release notes.

Check out the LunarG’s progress report highlighting the Vulkan API ecosystem and SDK enhancements completed in 2022, prioritized from developer feedback from the December 2021 Vulkan SDK and Ecosystem survey.

In April 2021, the Vulkan® Working Group at Khronos® released a set of provisional extensions, collectively called ‘Vulkan Video’, for seamlessly integrating hardware-accelerated video compression and decompression into the Vulkan API. Today, Khronos is releasing finalized extensions that incorporate industry feedback and expose core and decode Vulkan Video functionality to provide fully accelerated H.264 and H.265 decode.

Khronos will release an ongoing series of Vulkan Video extensions to enable additional codecs and accelerated encode as well as decode. This blog is a general overview of the Vulkan Video architecture and also provides details about the finalized extensions and links to important resources to help you create your first Vulkan Video applications.