The Vulkan Working Group has just released the VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate extension, which provides a new, flexible technique to control the fragment shading rate, enabling developers to perform shading at a lower resolution than the render targets. This fine level of control allows developers to focus shading resources where they are needed, which ultimately increases rendering performance and quality.
NRD is an open sourced, spatio-temporal ray tracing de-noising library that’s designed to provide high-quality real time imagery with as few as 0.5 or 1 rays per pixel. NRD uses input signals together with environmental conditions to deliver results comparable to ground truth images. NRD supports diffuse lighting, specular lighting or reflections, and infinite light source shadows. The NRD library is fast, robust, and easy to integrate with Vulkan applications using ray tracing.
Intel merged a change to benefit Intel’s Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV Vulkan drivers for making use of the HDC data cache for uniform buffer object (UBO) pulls on Gen12+ hardware, namely Tiger Lake at this point. By making use of the data cache for UBO pulls, there is generally up to another few percent improvements for various OpenGL and Vulkan games running on Linux—either natively or through the likes of the DXVK layer. Some improvements cited in the merge include:
In December of 2019, LunarG conducted a Vulkan ecosystem survey. Many Vulkan developers shared their requests for improvements. LunarG took those suggestions to heart and created projects to address many of the developer suggestions from the survey. To learn more about the results of these projects, check out the LunarG report that itemizes key requests from the survey and reports on the status of those requests.
Andreas Süßenbach, a senior software developer at NVIDIA, has posted a new developer tutorial on compile-time errors vs runtime errors with Vulkan-hpp. If you are using Vulkan, there are a few ways to create runtime errors. Even with the great validation layers available with Vulkan, you must run that part of the code to detect such errors. When you use Vulkan-hpp, a header-only C++ binding for the Vulkan API, some of those runtime errors are turned into compile-time errors. Read this tutorial to learn more.
GPUScore Relic of Life is targeted to benchmark high end graphics cards. It is a completely new benchmark with many new features. The main new feature is real-time ray traced reflections and reflections of reflections. The benchmark will not only support Windows & DirectX 12, but also Linux & Vulkan ray tracing. Read on for more news.
Neil Trevett, President of Khronos Group and VP Developer Ecosystems at NVIDIA, joined Red Gaming Tech for a video interview. In the video, they discuss specific Vulkan features and how it’s improved, as well as touching on topics such as ray tracing and next gen graphics.
LunarG releases new Windows, Linux, and macOS SDKs for Vulkan header 1.2.154.0. The prior SDK supported Vulkan API revision 1.2.148. The Vulkan Configurator (vkconfig) has been updated to improve quality and stability and SPIRV-Reflect has been added to the SDK. Read on for information about the new features.
The MoltenVK development team is pleased to announce that the latest release of MoltenVK supports Vulkan 1.1 functionality.
This release also embraces the Vulkan Portability Initiative, adding support for the new VK_KHR_portability_subset extension, which allows application developers to further embrace platform portability by enumerating the subset of Vulkan functionality available on platforms that don’t natively support Vulkan, such as macOS and iOS.
This release is part of the ongoing evolution of MoltenVK to add additional advanced Vulkan functionality, work towards conformance with the Vulkan standard, and continue to play an important role in a broad and vibrant Vulkan eco-system.
NVIDIA’s Linux Vulkan beta driver build has moved from the 450 series that it’s been on for a while to the current 455 branch. This Vulkan beta driver also adds the new VK_EXT_shader_image_atomic_int64 and VK_KHR_copy_commands2 extensions that were introduced in recent weeks with Vulkan API spec updates. This beta driver also now allows importing external host memory as cached. Learn more about what this new driver has to offer.
AMD just released their latest Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition driver (20.9.2), and it includes three notable extensions: VK_KHR_buffer_device_address, VK_EXT_robustness2 and VK_EXT_shader_image_atomic_int64. Download the 20.9.2 Radeon Software Adrenaline Edition driver from AMD.com.
NVIDIA is presenting the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) October 5-9, 2020 online. For those developers looking to learn more about Ray Tracing with Vulkan, there will be 2 Vulkan sessions on October 6th. This session is a highlight reel of code migration from DirectX to Vulkan ray tracing - including missteps, obstacles and insights encountered along the way. We will also cover recommendations for tooling setup and techniques to get your ray tracing journey smoothly underway. More information is available here.
The final entry in a 3 part series on porting Detroit: Become Human from PS4 to PC. In Part 1, Ronan Marchalot from Quantic Dream explained why they decided to use Vulkan® and talked about shader pipelines and descriptors. In part 2, Lou Kramer from AMD discussed non-uniform resource indexing on PC and on AMD cards specifically. Here in part 3 Ronan Marchalot discusses shader scalarization, multithreaded render list, memory management, and more.
The second part of a three part series on porting Detroit: Become Human from PS4 to PC. In Part 1, Ronan Marchalot from Quantic Dream explained why they decided to use Vulkan® and talked about shader pipelines and descriptors. Here in part 2, Lou Kramer from AMD will discuss non-uniform resource indexing on PC and on AMD cards specifically.